Personality-Related Risk and Resilience Factors in Coping with Daily Stress among Adult Cancer Patients.

We employed a diary design to study personality-related risk and resilience factors in adult cancer patients coping with daily stress. We focused on individuals' self-concept incoherence (SCI) as a personality-related risk factor and on psychological well-being (PWB) at baseline and daily beliefs of control as resilience factors. Reactivity to daily stress was assessed in terms of negative daily mood. Multilevel modeling analyses yielded significant main effects of daily stress, PWB at baseline, and daily control. These main effects were qualified by significant two- and three-way interactions. The significant Stress X Control interaction indicated that individuals reported more negative mood in response to daily stress on low-control days compared to high-control days. Similarly, a significant SCI X Control interaction suggested that individuals with a more coherent self-concept benefited more from feeling in control in terms of experiencing less increase in negative mood compared to individuals with a more incoherent self-concept. Significant three-way interactions also indicated that the associations between stress, control and negative daily mood differed by level of SCI and level of PWB at the beginning of the study. Overall, the findings from this study show the complex associations between risk and resilience factors and daily emotional well-being in a sample of adults who were affected by a life-threatening illness.