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. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.