Coping strategies within a personality space

Most taxonomies of coping have been built as if coping strategies were unrelated to all other aspects of personality. However, the evidence suggests some overlaps, and it may be that basic personality axes such as constraint, fearfulness or affiliation constitute a meaningful organizing principle for coping. In a sample of 499 outpatients, we examined the ability of the Temperament and Character Inventory to predict the fifteen coping strategies measured by the COPE. We also studied the joint structure of personality dimensions and coping. Engagement strategies were mainly enacted by subjects with low fear, high self-efficacy and high persistence, whereas roughly the opposite was true for Disengagement. Help-seeking strategies were exclusively aligned with affiliation dimensions. Our results clarify the empirical structure of coping strategies, and locate them within the broader and better-known space of personality axes.