When Traits Turn Risky: Emotion Regulation in the Pathway from Personality to Depressive Symptoms

Big Five personality traits, emotion regulation strategies, and depression are directly interrelated. First, highly neurotic, lower conscientious, and lower extraverted individuals have a higher chance of concurrent depressive symptoms (Hakulinen et al., 2015; Kotov et al., 2010). For Openness to experience and Agreeableness, either non-significant or negative relations with concurrent depressive symptoms are found (e.g., Chavoshi, 2022). Second, people relying more on adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) show a decreased risk of experiencing depression, while people relying more on maladaptive strategies (e.g., avoidance) show an increased risk of depression (e.g., Aldao et al., 2010; Kraft et al., 2023). Third, people scoring higher on certain personality traits are more likely to use certain emotion regulation strategies. For instance, those scoring higher on Neuroticism more often use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and less often use adaptive strategies, while people scoring higher on Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to experience more often use adaptive strategies and less often use maladaptive strategies (Barańczuk, 2019). While relations between any two of the three constructs are well demonstrated, only few studies have assessed and connected all three constructs in a single study (e.g., Aguirre et al., 2024; Tao et al., 2022). Moreover, these studies adopted a narrow conceptualization of emotion regulation by only assessing two strategies – expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal – and provide limited temporality information. Indeed, most past studies simultaneously assessing any two or three constructs are cross-sectional and therefore cannot make strong inferences about their temporal sequence. To support stronger temporality claims, our current study will longitudinally investigate the role of adolescent (T1, 2009, ages 14-17) personality in predicting depressive symptoms during adulthood (T3, 2024, ages 29-32), and address whether the use of emotion-general and emotion-specific (mal)adaptive regulation strategies during early adulthood (T2, 2022, ages 27-30) mediates the expected relations between personality traits and depression.