The Importance of Personality and Self-efficacy for Stress Management in Higher Education

Héctor Galindo-Domínguez,María-José Bezanilla

doi:10.17583/ijep.7870

Abstract

The psychological implications of stress have become an issue of concern for university students around the world over the past decade. It is thought that the perception of stress varies depending on students' personality traits and their beliefs about being able to manage their academic life. To investigate this further, a study was conducted with a sample of 200 university students. The main findings of this study were: (1) All of the Big Five Model of personality traits significantly contribute to developing positive academic self-efficacy, with some of these being moderated by gender. Self-efficacy is characterised by agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotionally stability and openness to experience. (2) People with high academic self-efficacy are able to take advantage of eustress and manage distress better than people with low academic self-efficacy. (3) There are some personality traits that contribute to distress and eustress. Specifically, people who are introverted and have low emotional stability and low openness to experience tend to suffer from distress more than people who do not have these traits. In contrast, conscientious people tend to experience eustress more than people without these characteristics. All these traits were mediated by self-efficacy, and in some cases were moderated by gender.

Highlights

The psychological implications of stress have become an issue of concern for university students around the world over the past decade
It was seen that, whereas extraversion (r = -.207; p = .003) and neuroticism (r = -.308; p < .000) correlated negatively and significantly with distress; agreeableness (r = .249; p = .003), conscientiousness (r = .497; p < .000), neuroticism (r = .185; p = .009) and openness (r = .155; p = .028) correlated positively and significantly with eustress. These data provided enough information to partially satisfy the first requirement in Baron and Kenny’s method (1986) to run mediation and moderator analyses, since not all independent variables were correlated with the outcome variable
All personality dimensions correlated positively and significantly with academic self-efficacy. These data provided enough information to satisfy the second requirement of Baron and Kenny’s method (1986) to run mediation and moderator analyses, since independent variables were all correlated with the mediation variable

Summary

Introduction

The psychological implications of stress have become an issue of concern for university students around the world over the past decade. Conscientious people tend to experience eustress more than people without these characteristics All these traits were mediated by self-efficacy, and in some cases were moderated by gender. Tres son los principales hallazgos de este estudio: (1) Los rasgos de personalidad de los cinco modelos grandes contribuyen significativamente a desarrollar una autoeficacia académica positiva, algunos de ellos moderados por género. When a situational demand is perceived as outweighing the personal resources available to deal with it, people tend to perceive and experience psychological stress. Appraisal theory explores how emotions are elicited as a result of an individual’s subjective interpretation or assessment of important events or situations (Lazarus, 1999). That is why people who experience a certain level of stress can work more productively and efficiently than if they were without it (Sajjad, 2017). Benson & Allen (1979) turned to the Yerkes-Dodson Law to describe the effect of stress on performance, and argued that a certain, optimal level of stress is considered beneficial to performance

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