A Chain Mediation Model of Perceived Stress, Neuroticism, and Psychological Inflexibility on Depressive Symptoms of Chinese New Fathers

The chain mediating role of psychological resilience and neuroticism between intolerance of uncertainty and perceived stress among medical university students in Southwest China

BACKGROUND

Medical university students are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and stress compared with their peers. Research has explored the effect of intolerance of uncertainty on perceived stress, but little attention was paid to investigate the mediating mechanisms behind this relationship, especially among medical university students. The aim of this study was to examine whether psychological resilience and neuroticism played a mediating role between medical university students' intolerance of uncertainty and perceived stress.

METHODS

A total of 717 medical university students from Chongqing in Southwest China were recruited to participate in our study and completed demographic information, Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale Short Version (IUS-12), Chinese Version of Perceived Stress Scale (CPSS), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-10 (CD-RISC-10) and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ).

RESULTS

(1) Significant correlations between intolerance of uncertainty, perceived stress, psychological resilience and neuroticism were found. (2) Intolerance of uncertainty affected medical university students' perceived stress via three paths: the mediating effect of psychological resilience, the mediating effect of neuroticism, and the chain mediating effect of both psychological resilience and neuroticism.

CONCLUSIONS

Intolerance of uncertainty could directly affect the perceived stress of medical university students, and also affected perceived stress through the mediating roles of psychological resilience and neuroticism, as well as through the chain mediating role of these two variables.

The effect of perceived stress on cognition is mediated by personality and the underlying neural mechanism

Perceived stress impairs cognitive function across the adult lifespan, but the extent to which cognition decline is variable across individuals. Individual differences in the stress response are described as personality traits. Substantial individual differences in the magnitude of cognitive impairment that is induced by short-term perceived stress are poorly understood. The present study tested the hypothesis that the relationship between short-term perceived stress and different aspects of cognition is mediated by personality traits. The study included 1066 participants with behavior and neuroimaging data from the Human Connectome Project after excluding individuals with missing variables. In the result, the parallel multiple mediation model demonstrated that the influence of perceived stress on the total and crystalized cognition is mainly mediated by neuroticism (indirect effect = -0.04, p < 0.05) and conscientiousness (indirect effect = 0.05, p < 0.05) in adults. Cortical thickness value (n = 1066) of the right superior frontal gyrus (SFG) showed not only positive correlations with short-term perceived stress and neuroticism, but negative associations with cognition. The chain mediation model found that the right SFG and neuroticism play a small but significant chain mediating effect between stress and total cognition. The strength of the resting-state functional connectivity (n = 968) between the left orbitofrontal cortex versus the left superior medial frontal cortex was positively correlated with crystallized cognition and negatively associated with conscientiousness. These results extend previous findings by the impacts of short-term perceived stress on cognitive function is mediated by neuroticism and the right SFG was the underlying neural mechanism.