[Volunteers and their vulnerability to stress: the impact of personality]

Volunteerism assumes a growing importance in the context of health, due to the significant number of practitioners and to the contribution given by the volunteers in the humanization of health care. However, as the continued interaction with the sick person might also originate negative emotions, we looked up in this article to describe the main results about vulnerability to stress in volunteers. The results revealed that 30.00% of volunteers were vulnerable to stress. We also observed that the civil state, socio-economic level and familiar functionality variables revealed to be protectors of the occurrence of stress. On the other side, the predominance of neuroticism as a personality trace was associated to a higher vulnerability to stress.