From war-related trauma exposure to PTSD and depression: A personality perspective

The aim of the study is to test a model specifying the relations between personality traits, war-related traumas, PTSD and depression, as well as the measurement aspects of the model. This study was carried out in hospital on 400 male participants. Five-Factor Model of personality was complemented by a recently proposed trait Disintegration representing proneness to psychotic-like experiences/behaviors in the general population. The proposed model had excellent fit, despite its complexity. The results show that PTSD or depression symptoms after traumas are largely related to the number of traumas, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Disintegration, and their different configurations and quantities. Disintegration turned out to be one of the most important dispositional correlates of depression and PTSD, but also of trauma exposure.