Personality-Related Risk and Resilience Factors in Coping With Daily Stress Among Adult Cancer Patients

Abstract

This study examined personality-related risk (i.e., self-concept incoherence) and resilience factors (i.e., psychological well-being at baseline and daily beliefs of control) in adult cancer patients coping with daily stress. Reactivity to daily stress was assessed in terms of negative daily mood. Multilevel analyses yielded significant main effects of daily stress, psychological well-being, and daily control. These main effects were qualified by significant two- and three-way interactions. The Stress × Control interaction indicated that individuals reported more negative mood in response to daily stress on low-control days. Similarly, the Self-Concept Incoherence × Control interaction suggested that individuals with a more coherent self-concept benefited more from feeling in control in terms of experiencing less increase in negative mood compared to individuals with a more incoherent self-concept. Significant three-way interactions also indicated that the associations between stress, control and negative daily mood differed by level of self-concept incoherence and level of psychological well-being at the beginning of the study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported by grant CA/AG21147 from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, and National Institutes of Health.

Notes

¹We would like to point out that other studies have used the number of stressors (e.g., Diehl & Hay, 2010)or stress severity as the daily stress measure (e.g., Sliwinski, Almeida, Smyth, & Stawski, 2009). We examined whether our findings would change if we applied these alternative operationalizations of daily stress. This examination revealed that because adults (1) typically reported no stressors or only 1 stressor per day and (2) tended to rate the majority of the stressors as relatively low in terms of their severity, the dichotomous variable captured individuals' daily stress experiences equally well.

²Given the small sample size and because our primary objective was to examine the hypothesized associations for the sample as a whole, we did not include participants' random slopes in the model, but rather focused on the fixed effects (see Singer & Willet, 2003).