Journal of

Introduction: Heart disease is a psycho-physiological disorder that in addition to physical and biological factors, psychological factors such as stressful events, personality traits and coping strategies play an important role in its occurrence and exacerbation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate personality dimensions and stress-coping strategies within healthy individuals compared with heart patients.

Methods: In this analytical-comparative study, 50 patients with heart disease(26 males and 24 females) and 50 healthy subjects (28 males and 22 females) were selected. The participants were required to respond to the Eysenck personality questionnaire (EPQ-R) and Folkman and Lazarus’s stress-coping strategies questionnaire. In order to analyze the studydata, descriptive indicators and independent t-test were applied using SPSS software(ver, 19) and  the significance level was set at α= 0/01.

Findings: The study results revealed a significant defference between heart patients and healthy individuals in terms of personality dimensions, neuroticism, and psychoticism, though no significant difference was observed in regard with emotion-focused coping strategies between the two groups. In the present study, the effect of gender was also examined on personality dimensions and coping strategies. Moreover, extraversion features as well as emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies were demonstrated to differ significantly between males and females.

Conclusion: The study findings indicated that heart patients seem to be more anxious, fearful, violent, aggressive and fast developing for anxiety, depression and aggression compared to healthy individuals who apply emotion-oriented coping style dealing with the problems.