THE IMPACT OF PERSONALITY AND EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT TRAITS ON CAREER STARTERS’ WELLBEING

The impact of personality dimensions on psychophysical wellbeing has been repeatedly shown in the psychological literature. On the other hand, emotion-management traits and strategies have been found to affect wellbeing too. The present study (founded by CARIPARO) aimed to test the differential impact of personality on the ione hand, and emotion-management traits and strategies on the other hand, on career starters’ psychophysical wellbeing. Using an on line survey (TIEIT; Zammuner, 2010), we examined (a) two main dimensions of Personality (Emotional Stability and Agreeableness) and (b) emotion management, indexed by self-reported traits and strategies on emotional competencies, emotion-expression faking, transparency/opaqueness in expressing emotions, and emotional reappraisal and suppression. Participants' psychophysical well-being were assessed with scales measuring subjective perception of health, life satisfaction, positive and negative felt emotions, emotional and social loneliness. Participants were Italian career starters (n = 568; mean age: 25 years, sd 3.3; 79.5% female). A set of hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that both personality and emotion-management help explain wellbeing outcomes, whears gender and age do not. Specifically, whereas personality was always a central wellbeing predictor, especially of negative felt emotions, health, and emotional loneliness (explaining between 10% to 20% of the variance), the emotion-management variables typically explained an additional 10% of the variance (range: 6-12%) and, likewise, had a different weight depending on which wellbeing outcome was considered. To illustrate, emotional competencies (in particular, self-managing of emotions) were important predictors of life satisfaction and felt positive emotions; emotion- expression transparency was an important predictor of both life satisfaction and social loneliness levels; emotion-expression faking was a significant predictor of emotional loneliness and felt negative emotions. In sum, the study showed the need to consider both personality and emotion-management traits in predicting wellbeing, especially in a stressful life phase such as the entrance in the working world. Keywords: Emotional Management, Personality, Wellbeing, Career Starters