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Neuroticism as Stable Vulnerability Factor of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Insight into Wenchuan Earthquake on the 10th Anniversary
26 Pages Posted: 8 Nov 2018
More...Abstract
Objective: After ten years, the traces of mental injuries are still left which were caused in Wenchuan earthquake, occurring on May 12, 2008 and causing huge losses to people's lives and property. On this tenth anniversary, this study investigates the relationship between personalities and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Methods: We collected a sample of 490 people at 1-3 years after the Wenchuan earthquake, using the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaires(EPQ), to find the consequences of Wenchuan earthquake on the survivors and the factors related to the long-term morbidity of PTSD.
Result: The study showed that the prevalence of PTSD was 22.8%. Personality measured by EPQ, traumatic experiences such as having witnessed someone being seriously injured, having your house damaged seriously,and having close relatives injury severely, and education level were associated with developing PTSD. Eysenck Personality Questionnaires-Neuroticism (EPQ-N) was the a stable personal vulnerability factor of PTSD in the long-term perspective among these variables (odds ratio(OR) = 1.105, 95% confidence interval (CI) =1.073-1.138, Wald Value=45.396, P<0.001).
Conclusion: We found that there were closely relationship between the personality and PTSD under the background of earthquake, particularly the neuroticism, which might be a stable predictor of the PTSD in a long term, accompanied with the traumatic experiences of bereavement or deprivation. To commemorate the unfortunate victims and help the injured survivors’ mental full-recovery, our study try to find the long-term consequences of Wenchuan earthquake on the survivors and the factors related to the long term morbidity of PTSD.
Funding Statement: This research was supported in part by a grant from Shanghai Pujiang Program (13PJC003) and Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (14ZS084).
Declaration of Interests: No conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript, and manuscript is approved by all authors for publication.
Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the ethics committees of the Second Military Medical University. A complete survey description was first presented to the participants. Informed written consent, together with oral approvals, was obtained before the testing session according to the Declaration of Helsinki.
Keywords: posttraumatic stress disorder; personality; neurotism; Wenchuan earthquake
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