Risk perception, treatment adherence, and personality during COVID-19 pandemic: An international study on cancer patients

Objective

To explore the role of personality traits in moderating the relation between COVID‐19 risk perception and treatment adherence, and between risk perception and psychosocial distress in patients diagnosed with cancer.

Methods

An online survey (n = 1281) was conducted worldwide in seven countries (Austria, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey). Inclusion criteria were to be 18 years of age or older, have received a cancer diagnosis, and be in treatment or follow‐up. A few moderated regression models were performed with both personality traits and Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology super‐spectra as moderators.

Results

Detachment, negative affectivity, psychoticism and all the super‐spectra significantly moderated the relation between coronavirus risk perception and psychosocial distress, after the adjusting effect of confidence in safeguards. Only negative affectivity moderated the association between coronavirus risk perception and treatment adherence.

Conclusions

Personality traits may foster the understanding of how a patient might adjust to cancer treatment and, more generically, to highly stressful events such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. Further research is needed to confirm the results in different cancer stages and types.

DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorder Dysfunctional Personality Traits as Predictors of Self-Reported Aggression in an Italian Sample of Consecutively Admitted, Personality-Disordered Psychotherapy Patients

In order to assess the relationships between DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorder (AMPD) maladaptive personality traits and self-reports of aggression, 508 Italian adult participants who met at least one DSM-IV Axis II/DSM-5 Section II personality disorder (PD) diagnosis were administered the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) and the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ). Analysis results showed that multiple regression results, PID-5 Hostility, Callousness, and Risk Taking trait scale scores explained a large amount of variance in AQ Physical Aggression (PA) scores. Moreover, PID-5 Hostility, Callousness, and Risk Taking explained more than 20% of the variance in the AQ Physical Aggression scale scores that was left unexplained by selected continuously scored DSM-IV Axis II/DSM-5 Section II PDs, whereas SCID-II Paranoid, Narcissistic, Borderline, and Antisocial PDs added only 4% of variance to the amount of variance in AQ Physical Aggression scores that was already explained by the PID-5 trait scale scores.