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The aim of the study was to explore personality traits as predictors of coping with disease-related distress in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). All patients with clinically definite MS in a city with a population of approximately 100000 were asked to complete the NEO Personality Inventory and a multidimensional coping inventory (COPE). There was an 83% response rate yielding 49 patients for the study population and 49 controls, matched for age, gender and educational level to the MS-patients, were used as comparison. Only Neuroticism correlated significantly with emotion-focused coping in both groups. Extraversion and Openness to Experience were linked to task-oriented coping strategies in normal controls but not in the MS-group. Agreeableness was associated with avoidance-oriented coping strategies only in the MS-group. Thus, the relation of certain personality characteristics to the choice of strategies for coping with the disease-related distress appear to differ from coping with stressful problems in everyday life. As dispositional characteristics may interfere with adaptive coping responses, analysis of personality traits and coping strategies could contribute while attempting to relieve the consequences of chronic disease on everyday life.

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In this article, we examine universal and culture-speci®c aspects of the Five-Factor Model measured with the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. First, our purpose was to test the replicability of the original (North American) factor structure in the Estonianspeaking population. The translation was administered to 711 Estonian men and women aged 18 to 82. When the 30 facet scales were factored, parallel analysis suggested that ®ve components should be retained. In the interpersonal plane de®ned by Extraversion and Agreeableness factors, Estonian facets formed a semicircular array that resembled the American pattern at a distance of about 218. After these axes were aligned by Procrustes rotation, all ®ve factor congruences exceeded 0.96, providing further evidence that the underlying ®ve-factor structure of the personality instrument is replicable in languages and cultures which dier substantially from those in which it was originally identi®ed. Second, we tested the hypothesis that the orientation of varimax axes in the interpersonal plane is associated with the culture's degree of individualism± collectivism. We calculated the angular degree of dierence between E and A factors in the American sample and in 21 other available samples, correlated it with individualism ratings, and found mixed support for the hypothesis, suggesting that continued research on this issue is merited.