Nightmare Coping Strategies and Their Association With Big Five Personality Traits

Although about 5% of the German population report having nightmares at least once a week, nightmares are inadequately diagnosed and treated. We therefore examined how people in the general population cope with nightmares in everyday life. The present study aimed to examine the influence of Big Five personality traits on nightmare-coping behaviour. In an online survey of 411 participants (mostly psychology students), we used established questionnaires and a modified coping scale to assess strategy use and perceived effectiveness. We hypothesized that openness predicts information seeking, extraversion predicts discussing nightmares, and neuroticism predicts avoiding potential nightmare triggers. The findings revealed that extraversion had a small positive effect on talking about nightmares (β = 0.44, p < 0.05). Contrary to our hypotheses, openness did not predict information seeking and neuroticism did not predict trigger avoidance. Exploratory analyses suggested further trait-coping links and that demographic variables may relate to perceived effectiveness of coping strategies. Overall, personality was related to some nightmare-specific coping behaviours, but effects were small in this non-clinical sample.