Personality and resilience: Domains, facets, and non-linear relationships

Background and aims: Personal resilience is an important construct in regard to understanding an individual’s capacity to sustain psychological wellbeing under conditions of adversity. This study had two major aims: to examine the roles of personality domains and facets in predicting personal resilience; and to examine the possibility of curvilinear relationships between personality and resilience. Method: Employed individuals (n = 467) completed a five-factor personality inventory. A third party for each participant provided an external, objective (rather than self-report) rating of each participant’s resilience. Participants and the third parties completed online questionnaires. Results: The findings revealed that (i) four specific facets of personality, drawn from the domains of extraversion, openness and conscientiousness explain a similar amount of variance in resilience compared with all five broad personality domains and (ii) there is little evidence that curvilinear relationships add unique variance in predicting resilience. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that specific personality facets provide more finely grained information and are more parsimonious than the broad domains in predicting independent assessments of personal resilience.