Relationship between Personality Traits and Quality of Life in Heart Failure Patients: The Mediating Role of Self-Care Behaviors

Quality of life in patients with heart failure can be affected by several factors. The present study aimed to examine the relationship between personality traits and quality of life in heart failure patients mediated by self-care behaviors.

This study is a structural equation modeling. Among the heart failure patients referred to Tehran Heart Hospitals, 300 patients referred to Jam Hospital and Bustan Cardiovascular Clinic were recruited through convenient sampling. In order to collect information, NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992), MOS (Ware & Sherbourne, 1992) and EHFSCB (Jarsma et al., 2003) were used. Data were analyzed using SPSS and AMOS 24 software.

The results of correlation coefficients showed that there are significant negative correlation between the personality traits of neuroticism and agreeableness with quality of life, while there are significant positive correlation between extroversion and quality of life (P<0.01). Also, there are significant negative correlation between self-care behaviors and quality of life (P<0.01). According to the results the proposed model has a good fit (x2/df=2.786, p<0.001, CFI= 0.92, RMSEA=0.07). In addition, the direct effect of neuroticism, extroversion and agreeableness on quality of life is significant (P<0.01). When self-care behaviors are included as mediators in the relationship between personality traits and quality of life, the indirect effect of neuroticism and conscientiousness on quality of life is 0.09 and 0.049 respectively, and these indirect effects are significant (P<0.01). Therefore, self-care behaviors mediate the relationship between personality traits of neuroticism and conscientiousness with quality of life.

These results have important implications for clinical practice and research in the field of cardiac health psychology and indicate the need to develop approaches and better management of these patients in self- care behaviors. Considering the widespread prevalence of heart diseases as a chronic disease and the high costs of treatment, the results of this research have many practical implications for health psychologists, doctors and nurses. Interventions aimed at changing personality characteristics (especially reducing neuroticism and increasing conscientiousness) in order to improve the quality of life of heart patients is a complex and time-consuming task. Therefore, one of the effective interventions to increase these patients’ quality of life can be focusing on increasing self-care behaviors. Hence, educating patients about the importance of this issue can play an important role in improving these patients’ quality of life.