The impact of anxiety and depression levels on the Big Five personality traits.

Abstract

Background: The prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression and burnout is quite high in medical students, and they differ in terms of personality traits and self-perception. The Big Five Model has embraced the idea of five basic personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and personality perceptions may be affected by stress. We aimed to test whether there are changes in the Five-Factor Model personality traits of medical students in response to anxiety and depression levels.

Methods: We evaluated the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms among medical students. Beck Anxiety Inventory(BAI) and Beck Depression Inventory(BDI) were used respectively. The Five Factor Personality Inventory(FFPI) was used to evaluate the personality traits and to investigate their associations with anxiety and depressive symptoms. A self-administered questionnaire was sent to 900 students via e-mail and 733 data were analyzed.

Results: Anxiety (n=233, 31.8%) and depression (n=184, 25.1%) were found to be high in medical students. History of psychiatric illness and suicide were significantly high in those with high anxiety and depression levels. In the correlation analysis, increasing anxiety and depression levels were positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively correlated with extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. In the linear regression analysis, it was seen that both depression and anxiety positively influenced neuroticism and anxiety negatively influenced openness.

Conclusion: Depression and anxiety symptoms are prevalent among medical students and had an impact on their personality traits. Depression had an impact on neuroticism, and anxiety had an impact on openness. However, these results should be confirmed with prospective cohort studies.