Emotion regulation mediates the relationship between personality and sleep quality

Despite a long history of interest in personality as well as in the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between personality and sleep is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to explore how personality affects sleep.

The present cross-sectional study, based on a sample of 1291 participants with a mean age of 31.16 years (SD = 12.77), investigates the impact of personality styles, assessed by the Personality Adjectives Checklist (PACL), on subjective sleep quality, as well as the possible mediation of this relationship by dispositional emotion regulation (ER) styles.

The dispositional use of suppression was a quite consistent predictor of poor subjective sleep quality for individuals scoring high on Confident, Cooperative or Introversive personality traits, but low on Respectful personality traits. Although a positive relationship between reappraisal and subjective sleep quality was found, there was only little evidence for a relationship between the assessed personality styles and the use of cognitive reappraisal.

The present results indicate that in the evaluation of subjective sleep, the impact of personality and ER processes, such as emotion suppression, should be taken into account.