Personality, stress and mental health: evidence of relationships in a sample of Iranian managers

Measures of hardiness and the health typology of Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck (Grossarth-Maticek, R., & Eysenck, H. J. (1990). Personality, stress, and disease: description and validation of a new inventory. Psychological Reports, 66, 355–373) were administered to 94 Iranian managers along with scales recording stress and psychopathology. Hardiness displayed expected and sometimes strong linkages with the health types. Control, for example, correlated −0.62 (p<0.001) with the coronary-prone type. Of the hardiness factors, Commitment served as the most reliable predictor of four stress measures, with relationships ranging from −0.21 (p<0.01) to −0.36 (p<0.001). Commitment and Control also predicted lower depression and anxiety, with linkages of −0.20 (p<0.05) to −0.44 (p<0.001). Among the health types, the coronary-prone scale yielded the strongest pattern of results, displaying hypothesized relationships with three of four stress and four of five psychopathology measures. These correlations ranged from 0.18 (p<0.05) to 0.32 (p<0.01). These data most importantly demonstrated that constructs developed in the West for understanding the role of personality in stress and health apparently have a cross-cultural validity in Iran as well.