Abstract
Stress is becoming an increasingly important public health concern. Assuming that individual levels of trust and coping can buffer psychological stress, we explore validated measures of general trust [General Trust Scale (GTS)], proactive coping [Proactive Coping Inventory (PCI)], jointly with personality [Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience (HEXACO)], and intolerance of uncertainty (IUS), as predictors of perceived stress [Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)]. Data were collected from Qualtrics research panels using quota sampling to obtain two representative American community samples. The assumed alleviating effects of GTS and PCI on PSS remained but were attenuated when modeled jointly with HEXACO, IUS, and socio-economic background variables [socioeconomic status (SES)] in hierarchical regressions. In Study 1 (N = 1,213), SES explained 19% and HEXACO explained 29% of the variance in PSS. Introducing IUS and GTS added significant but small portions of explained variance. In Study 2 (N = 1,090), after controlling for SES which explained 18% of the variance, IUS explained an additional 18% of the variance in PSS. Adding GTS to the model showed modest contributions whereas PCI added 9% of explained variance in the final hierarchical step. The findings highlight that GTS and PCI remain important variables even after controlling well-known factors such as personality and ability to tolerate uncertainty. However, given the weak effects of GTS, to consider trust as a remedy for stress may be of limited use in clinical practice since it could potentially be explained largely as a proxy for a beneficial combination of personality, coping, and socioeconomic background.
Highlights
Psychological stress is an increasingly important issue (APA, 2020) with potentially important implications for people’s health (Schneiderman et al, 2005; Folkman and Nathan, 2011), and cognitive function (Lupien et al, 2009; Pechtel and Pizzagalli, 2011) and may be seen as a risk factor for psychopathology (Charles et al, 2013; Salim, 2014)
Important to consider the possible hierarchical order between the constructs and we have provided a rationale for why higher-order constructs such as personality to some extent could account for the variance in lower-order constructs like intolerance of uncertainty (IU) or trust in predicting perceived stress
Assumed to correlate with lower morbidity and mortality, general trust has increasingly been seen as a quick-fix or buffer to psychological stress
Summary
Psychological stress is an increasingly important issue (APA, 2020) with potentially important implications for people’s health (Schneiderman et al, 2005; Folkman and Nathan, 2011), and cognitive function (Lupien et al, 2009; Pechtel and Pizzagalli, 2011) and may be seen as a risk factor for psychopathology (Charles et al, 2013; Salim, 2014). As health-promoting factors, the efficacy and relevance of related contextual effects and similar constructs to general trust need to be evaluated (Shiell et al, 2020). Measures of trust and coping have rarely been modeled together with more dispositional factors such as personality and intolerance for uncertainty. In line with Shiell et al (2020), we recognize a need to investigate and disentangle the alleged stress-buffering effects of trust. We pursue this by testing how measures of general trust and proactive coping relate to perceived stress over and above what measures of personality and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) explain
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