LIGHT TRIAD PERSONALITY TRAITS AND COPING STRATEGIES IN TEACHERS

Abstract

Studies show that work-related stress among teachers is high. Job satisfaction and interactions with students are influenced by teachers’ coping skills with stressful situations and differences in response to stressful events can be explained by personality traits. The present study uses the Light Triad model of personality to examine whether prosocial traits such as empathy, compassion and altruism are associated with cognitive-emotional coping strategies in teachers. The prosocial orientation was measured using the Light Triad Scale (Johnson, 2018) and The Cognitive-Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski et al., 2007) was used to identify teachers’ cognitive-emotional coping strategies, in relation to negative events or situations. The participants in this study included 120 Romanian teachers from different levels of preuniversitary education. The results revealed that empathy and altruism have small negative correlations with catastrophizing; all three prosocial traits are associated with the positive reappraisal, empathy positively correlates with accepting negative events and refocusing on planning and altruism positively correlates with accepting negative events and putting into perspective. We also found a positive correlation between empathy and rumination. Our findings extend the current understanding of the relationship between teachers’ prosocial personality traits and the coping strategies they use following negative life events.