Individuals distinct in a relatively constant pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are known as personality traits. Traits have been categorized as "essential psychological constructs" are due to they have a significant impact on important life aspects of health-related behaviors [e.g., 1,2], and the likelihood of psychopathology [e.g., 3,4], crime [e.g., 5], work experiences [e.g., 6,7], academic achievement [e.g., 8], romantic relationships [e.g., 9,10] and parent-child interaction [11]. Nevertheless, it is unusual for social scientists to find a single domain of interests in which no evidence supporting the importance of personality traits has been presented. Personality psychologists generally believe that five major dimensions may appropriately organize a large range of possible personality characteristics. Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience are the five “super traits” that comprise the Big Five [12]. Extraversion refers to individual differences in friendliness, gregariousness, amount of activity, and positive affect experience. Agreeableness refers to individual variances in altruistic conduct, trust, warmth, and friendliness. Conscientiousness refers to individual variances in self-control, task focus, and rule-following. Neuroticism refers to individual differences in susceptibility to distress and unpleasant emotions such as anxiety, wrath, and melancholy. Finally, individual differences in originality, inventiveness, and acceptance of new ideas are referred to as openness to experience [13].
The Big Five's widespread acceptance offers a systematic language for defining personality differences at the most fundamental levels, helping the accumulation of knowledge regarding how personality traits are linked to a variety of life outcomes. To test personality traits, long questionnaires are typically utilized. Recent scale development research, on the other hand, has demonstrated that the Big Five features may be scored consistently with a small number of items [e.g., 14]. For example, the pilot work of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) Study resulted in a 15-item version of the well-validated Big Five Inventory (BIF) [15], which may be used in large-scale surveys such as the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Psychological health is a significant aspect in total happiness. Mental health, according to the World Health Organization [16], is "a condition of well-being in which each person fulfills his or her own potential, can cope with typical stressors of life, can work successfully and fruitfully, and can contribute to her or his community". Traditionally, healthcare providers have been able to accurately assess an individual's well-being by looking at their substance misuse, anxiety, distress, and depression [17]. As a result, mental health is described as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being rather than the absence of openly acknowledged negative difficulties [16]. Several instruments are used to assess an individual's general health, but the general health questionnaire (GHQ), which was developed by Goldberg [18] and is known for being a reliable indicator of mental health, is one of the most extensively used self-reported questionnaires. The GHQ has been used in cross-cultural settings [19, 20] and to screen for psychological diseases in primary health care and outpatient settings [18, 21, 22]. The GHQ has been utilized in demographic research as well as health assessment surveys [23]. It is simple to administer and can be completed by a single participant in less than 10 minutes [24]. The original GHQ consisted of 60 items and has a number of different versions such as the GHQ-12, GHQ-20, GHQ-28 and GHQ-30. Given its ease of use, the GHQ-12 is one of the most commonly used versions among those listed [25, 26]. The GHQ-12 is a self-reported 12-item questionnaire with four indexes for each item. The Likert scoring approach (0-1-2-3) and the bi-modal (0-0-1-1) scoring system are two of the most widely used scoring systems [24]. Banks and collaborators [27] have shown the effectiveness of utilizing the GHQ-12 to compare degrees of psychiatric impairment within and between groups. Several studies have validated the psychometric features of this questionnaire [28, 29, 30, 31, 32]. The GHQ-12 has been demonstrated to have strong specificity, reliability, and reasonably high sensitivity [33, 34]. Thus, since Goldberg’s development of the GHQ, it has been used in a variety of countries and cultures, and it has been translated into 38 languages [35, 36, 37, 38, 39].
Recently, many studies began to examine the factor structure of the GHQ-12, regardless of the fact that the GHQ-12 was originally created as a unidimensional scale, just a few studies have been conducted using it. These studies provided empirical evidence in support of its one-factor latent structure [27, 40]. Instead, other multidimensional models, like 2 or 3 component models, have been shown to be more appropriate. Consequently, Graetz’s three-factor model, introduced in 1991, had a lot of scientific support [41, 42, 43, 44, 45]. Specifically, the three components in the model include the GHQ-12A (social dysfunction and anhedonia; 6 items), GHQ-12B (depression and anxiety; 4 items), and GHQ-12C (loss of confidence; 2 items).
It has been proposed personality as a strong predictor of psychological health [46, 47, 48], which comprises positive mental health/wellbeing [49, 50, 51]. Healthy personality development contributes to many areas of well-being and there is a necessity to include personality’s contributions to well-being into current treatments to mental health [52, 53, 54]. Neuroticism and extraversion have the strongest links to mental health according to the five-factor model of personality (FFM) [55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60]. In comparison to people who score low on the neuroticism trait, people who score high on the neuroticism trait have more negative affectivity (i.e., anxiety, anger, self-consciousness, irritability, and fear), respond worse to stressors, making them more vulnerable to negative outcomes in stressful situations, are more anxious and insecure [61], predisposing them to psychological distress [57], and act more impulsively [62]. Low subjective well-being [63], depressive symptoms, anxiety, mood, and substance abuse disorders are all linked to high neuroticism [58, 64, 65, 66].
Extraversion is another personality trait that has been linked to psychological health outcomes. Introverts and extroverts have quite diverse behaviors in social life [67, 68]. People with a high extraversion score are more expected to feel pleasant emotions, activity, assertiveness, a need for stimulation, and gregariousness than those with a low extraversion score [69, 70]. Individuals with higher extraversion traits are invigorated and flourish when they are around other people, and they love activities that include social connections, which helps them increase their level of positive emotions [71]. A higher extraversion trait score has been linked to greater perceived health [72], well-being [63, 73, 74, 75], resilience [76, 77], positive affect [78, 79], and good mental health [80]. In contrast, introverts have fewer social interactions than extroverts, suffer from more psychological issues in general, and experience more intense emotions., struggle to regulate their emotions, and have more adjustment problems [78, 81, 82].
Although many studies have investigated how personality could predict mental health, few studies have investigated the other way around. To understand whether individuals’ general mental health are associated with their personality traits, we explore the factor structure of GHQ-12 and investigate whether these dimensions could predict the Big Five after taking age and sex into account. We hypothesize that individuals’ dimensions of general mental health will positively predict extraversion and negatively predict neuroticism while controlling for age and sex. Since we do not have enough data to pose hypotheses for the other three personality traits, we ask if individuals’ general mental health predicts their personality traits after taking control of age and sex?