Resilience in Young Adulthood: The Moderating Influences of Gender-related Personality Traits and Coping Flexibility

Abstract

The study was designated to explore the resilient (moderating) influences of gender-related personality traits and coping flexibility on the relations between life event stress and psychosocial adjustment in a sample of 291 Chinese young adults. Multiple outcomes (i.e., psychological, physical, and interpersonal aspects of adjustments) were separately examined with regression analysis. The interaction effects explained 5% of the unique variance in the psychological distress model and 4% of the unique variance in the interpersonal functioning model beyond the main effects. Coping flexibility tended to reduce the associations between life event stress and depression. Furthermore, masculinity buffered the link between life event stress and interpersonal functioning. The three-way interaction masculinity × femininity × stress also predicted additional unique variance in interpersonal functioning, which indicates that non-gender-typed respondents showed greater resilience to recent life stress than did their gender-typed counterparts. Implications of these findings are discussed.