A Probe into the Effect of Personality Factors on Maintaining General Mental Health of the University Students

Dibakar Ghosh; Samirranjan Adhikari

Volume : VII, Issue : VII, July - 2018

A Probe into the Effect of Personality Factors on Maintaining General Mental Health of the University Students

Dibakar Ghosh, Samirranjan Adhikari

Abstract :

Objective: According to Josefsson et al. (2011), Cloninger and Zohar (2011) personality traits and characters of an individual affect his/her mental health. But the question is that how these personality traits and characters affect individuals in a way that promote mental health and wholesome behaviours.

Method: This one was study carried out through descriptive survey method within ex–post–facto research design. To collect the data the “Big Five Inventory (BFI)” (John & Srivastava, 1999) and the “General Health Questionnaire–28 (GHQ–28)” (Goldberg & Hillier, 1979) were administered on a random sample of 61 male and 39 female university students.

Results: A “Multiple Regression Analysis” was carried out by considering “General Mental Health” as dependent variable and “Personality Factors” as independent variables. From the result it was found that –

General Mental Health (GHQ) = 73.272 – 0.499 × Extraversion – 0.600 × Agreeableness – 0.158 × Consciousness + 0.942 × Neuroticism + 0.069 × Openness

Conclusions: From the regression equation, it is observed that neuroticism and openness contributed positively to the score on GHQ–28 and whereas all other three factors of personality (extraversion, agreeableness and consciousness) put their negative influence here. It is known that higher the score in GHQ–28 implies the poorer mental health. Emotional imbalance, anxiety proneness, and high aspiration as well as achieve anxiety, fantastic day dreaming may be detrimental to the good mental health. .