Did Introverts Have an Advantage During COVID?

• New research suggests that extraverted people experienced lower moods during the pandemic, while introverted people experienced slightly higher moods than usual.
• Decreases in mood were larger for people low in neuroticism than people high in neuroticism.
• The findings demonstrate that personality traits can produce surprising benefits in certain situations.

Personality traits have been shown to be strong predictors of health and well-being. They’ve also been shown to be important components of resilience and one’s ability to cope with stressors. Overall, people who are more active and lively (i.e. extraverted), less worried, more persistent, and have better abilities to regulate their thoughts and behaviors tend to fare better under duress. Indeed, this combination has even been referred to as the “Resilient” personality profile.

But not all stressors are the same, and thus what can promote resilience might not be as universal as is commonly depicted. The COVID pandemic, for example, has been a pretty major stressor for quite a few of us, but it has some characteristics that are a little different than other stressful events. For one, the pandemic has pushed many people into inaction rather than action. It’s also, as many of us know all too well, has gone on a very long time.

To see how personality traits might be related to successful COVID coping, my colleagues and I at the Wellness Environment Scientific Team at the University of Vermont tried to make some lemonade from a study that COVID disrupted in a major way. The original idea was to look at the mental health and levels of engagement in wellness activities (things like exercise, getting adequate sleep, eating healthy, etc.) among college students across an entire semester.

Prior to the semester, the students completed a number of rating scales, one of which assessed personality traits according to the “Big Five” model (with neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness as the five primary traits). The students then gave daily ratings of their mood, stress levels, and engagement in health promotion activities using a phone-based app.

Right in the middle of the semester, however, COVID hit and students were abruptly sent home to continue their semester online. While Plan A for the study no longer was possible, most of the students continued to do their daily phone ratings of how they were doing, and this provided us an opportunity to track them during COVID, compare these ratings to prior to the pandemic, and see how personality traits might be linked.

How Personality Affected Pandemic Mental Health

When we did this, we found that personality traits were indeed significantly related to mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in wellness activities in the typical pattern. This was interesting but not big news. We also found that, overall, COVID wasn’t helping people’s mood or healthy lifestyles. Interestingly, however, stress levels actually dropped.

What was most interesting was how personality traits were associated with changes in mental health from pre-COVID to COVID. Here, some intriguing but not entirely shocking findings emerged. People who were more extraverted showed drops in the mood ratings during the COVID period while those who were more introverted actually reported a slight rise in their mood.

A similar pattern occurred with neuroticism, a trait related to being more prone to experience negative emotions like anxiety or sadness. Here, students low in this trait experienced a bigger drop in their mood through the pandemic than students who were higher in neuroticism. The size of these effects weren’t large, and the low neuroticism, high extraverted students still had better moods in absolute terms, but these folks seemed to get hit harder emotionally from COVID compared to their peers with lower extraversion and higher neuroticism.

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What are the lessons from this study? Probably the first is to remember that personality traits matter when it comes to coping and resilience. This should not be discouraging news because to some degree we can modify our traits if we choose. Second, we may need to be careful about assuming that all stressors are the same or that certain resilience factors should apply universally. Traits like introversion are not generally considered a benefit when it comes to resilience but here it seemed to help with coping with some of the peculiar characteristics of the COVID pandemic. These data help remind us that traits are not inherently good or bad and that certain less-heralded qualities can prove themselves very useful in some tough situations.