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An individual's personality, especially how strongly they react to uncertainty, may help indicate how vulnerable they are to prolonged mental distress during a major crisis, according to a new USC-led study.

An analysis of several years of nationally representative U.S. data found that people scoring higher in neuroticism experienced larger and more persistent increases in anxiety and depression symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic than people scoring lower in the trait, said lead author Marco Angrisani, senior economist at the USC Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) and associate professor (research) of economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"There is a wide variety of mental health responses to large-scale societal stressors," Angrisani said. "Our study shows that personality traits, and neuroticism in particular, play a role in shaping heterogeneous responses in a major crisis across individuals and could therefore inform better-targeted interventions."

The researchers followed 4,030 U.S. adults using data from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative internet panel managed by CESR. The analysis included more than 100,000 survey responses collected from 2019 through early 2024, allowing researchers to compare mental health before, during and after the pandemic.

These characteristics occur on a continuum. Everyone has some degree of each, and a high or low score does not constitute a disorder.

In the study, mental distress was measured with the PHQ-4, a brief questionnaire assessing symptoms of anxiety and depression.

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