This paper assessed the possible role of subjective well-being and neuroticism on the development of rumination, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety after a large scale disaster – the Santa Maria’s fire. Our findings point out that Subjective well-being indicates relevant relations with rumination, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety. Only neuroticism, among the other personality factors, was significantly associated with future psychopathological symptoms, and that depression, one of its facets, was the most important indicator. Together, these results show that not only deficit-oriented variables are important to the onset of symptomatology development, and that resource-oriented variables might have an important role on the prediction of psychopathology associated with traumatic situations.
Our first hypothesis was that neuroticism and its facets would predict rumination, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety, once evidence point out neuroticism is associated with many deficit-oriented variables (Claridge and Davis 2001; Ormel et al. 2004). The small relationships of neuroticism with posttraumatic stress disorder (r = .24) and anxiety (r = .20), however, only partially corroborate this hypothesis. On the other side, the moderate association found with rumination (r = .44) support it. Depression presented the highest association with the outcomes pointing out that depressive characteristics are among the most important indicators of subsequent rumination, PTSD, and anxiety. The other neuroticism facets (e.g., vulnerability, emotional instability, and lack of energy) were most related with rumination suggesting that the broad traits of emotional distress that characterize neuroticism play a role on the development of rumination.
Literature indicates neuroticism is associated with anxiety (Roelofs et al. 2008), and the development of post-traumatic stress disorder after exposure to stressful situations (Breslau and Schultz 2013). This study provides small evidences that neuroticism contributes directly to the development of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the higher association verified between neuroticism and rumination suggests that traits of emotional distress predict the development of rumination, a strong predictor of psychopathology (Nolen-Hoeksema 2000) and a mediator between neuroticism and psychopathologies (Roelofs et al. 2008). This study is the first to provide evidence that neuroticism predict rumination after a large scale disaster.
Our second hypothesis was that neuroticism and its facets would be more associated with rumination, anxiety and PTSD than subjective well-being components (except negative affect). We did not corroborate this hypothesis because the correlations of neuroticism, its facets, and subjective well-being components with the outcomes were similar (except that depression that correlated higher with most outcomes). These results indicate SWB components are at least as relevant to the prediction of rumination, anxiety, and PTSD as neuroticism is.
One argument against the relevance of SWB to this issue may be that negative affect, one component of SWB, maybe also considered a component of neuroticism (Costa and McCrae 1992) associated with anxiety (Schwartz and Koenig 1996) and PTSD (Souza et al. 2008). From this perspective, if negative affect items had contributed to the final neuroticism score, the associations would have been higher. We, in fact, verified high associations of negative affect with neuroticism (r = .59), vulnerability (r = .47), emotional instability (r = .77), and depression (r = .39), supporting as expected that negative affect is closely related with neuroticism. However, life satisfaction presented similar correlations with rumination, anxiety, and PTSD, and despite smaller, positive affect correlations with these variables should not be neglected. Thus, our results suggest that happier people ruminate less and may be more resistant to anxiety, and PTSD.
Our third hypothesis, that life satisfaction is negatively associated with rumination, received support in our study. More satisfied people presented lower rumination five months after a large scale disaster. This finding seems to corroborate Martin and Tesser (1996) alternative view about rumination development that suggests the discrepancy between real and ideal conditions motivate rumination. The corroboration of our fourth hypothesis indicates people who live frequent negative affect are more likely to ruminate after a stressful event. Additionally, positive affect and rumination are negatively correlated. Together, these results indicate that happier people are less vulnerable to rumination after a stressful event. Considering that rumination and negative affect creates a loop of negative and repetitive thoughts that exacerbates negative consequences (e.g., negative affect, depressive symptoms, stress (Lyubomirsky and Tkach 2004), happier people may have less reason and inclination to ruminate. Happy people are more likely to feel: a) a sense of adequacy about their lives, b) frequent emotions like confidence, enthusiasm, joyful, and c) less negative emotions as irritation, dissatisfaction, and loneliness. Such characteristics may prevent the initial development of rumination and reduce the periods of rumination about stressful events.
The fifth hypothesis aims to replicate Souza et al. (2008) results about the relationships between negative affect and PTSD in a different stressful event – a fire. Souza et al. suggest that negative affect seems to worsen the consequences of being exposed to a traumatic situation. Our findings support this previous result. Negative affect, in fact, predicts PTSD, and might constitute a vulnerability factor to the development of PTSD to people who experience the stress of a disaster.
Clinical implications
Large scale disasters may affect thousands of people in places without appropriate number of qualified professionals and health care services to attend survivors, families that lost someone, and others somehow involved. The literature suggests that after stressful events people with previous history of depression should have priority on the treatment because they are more likely to develop depression (Felton et al. 2013).
We encourage clinicians to recognize the importance of disasters, but not to stimulate victims and their families to ruminate about this. The impact of news on television about disasters might increase rumination tremendously (Felton et al. 2013), and it might have an even greater impact on unhappy people. Thus, we suggest professionals advise victims and their families to avoiding watching television programs focused on the incident or even to avoid television entirely. Additionally, positive activities (Layous et al. 2014; Lyubomirsky and Layous 2013), therapeutic techniques to improve mood like behavioral activation (Dobson et al. 2008), and treatments focused on the modification of cognitive bias (Hakamata et al. 2010), and metacognitive believes (Wells and King 2006), may constitute prolific interventions to community members affected by disasters.
Some limitations of this investigation concerns the sample studied. This investigation is based on a reduced sample size which restricts its external validity. However, this weakness may be compensated by its ecological validity. Almost all participants were women, so the study may fail to reflect relevant differences in the manifestation of symptoms in men. Because women tend to present higher levels of depression and negative affect than men (Nolen-Hoeksema and Jackson 2001), the correlations might be overestimated due to the lack an adequate proportion of men in the sample. The high refusal rate (96.4 %) suggests that only more cooperative students accepted to participate of the Wave 2 follow up. In other words, the sample appears to be homogeneous in terms of participants’ collaborative characteristics. We did not ask students important information about how many friends, brothers, or sisters they lost in the fire, or if they were in the nightclub during the tragedy. These data may explain part of the variance in psychopathological symptoms not accounted for by the personality factors and SBW components. Lastly, this is a correlational study, which does not allow us to infer causality relations between the variables of wave 1 on the outcomes. Because we do not know if unhappier people were also more ruminative or with higher levels of anxiety before the fire, we recommend caution on the interpretation of these results.
We do not believe, though, the sample homogeneity and smallness restrict considerably the relevance of the presented findings. Although they are not fully representative of the victim population, our study participants did provide meaningful evidence concerning the power of subjective well-being and neuroticism in the prediction of rumination, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety after a large scale disaster. Moreover, they might contribute to the development of interventions for victims in similar situations.