the relationship between personality characteristics and attachment styles and emotional breakdown

abstract the present research aims to study the relationship between personality characteristics and attachment styles with students’ love trauma. a descriptive survey method of correlation type was used in this research. the population included 4899 students of ferdowsi university of mashhad living on campus where 350 questionnaires were gathered and analyzed in a simple random way. the tools used in this study were: five-factor model of personality, adults’ attachment styles, and rosse love trauma inventory. the results indicated a positive significant relationship between the scores of neuroticism and love trauma (p = 0.00), however, a negative significant relationship was seen between extroversion/introversion (p < 0.05), agreeableness (p <0.01) and conscientiousness (p < 0.05) with love trauma. from the three attachment styles, only the ambivalent attachment had a significant relationship with love trauma (p = 0.001). the lowest and highest scores of 5 personality characteristics for females were respectively related to conscientiousness (45.08) and neuroticism (35.12). the scores of males were 43.35 and 34.45 in the same order for the above characteristics. in addition, for the female group, the secure style (16.50) had the highest and the ambivalent style (10.86) had the lowest scores. for the male group, the secure style (16.39) had the highest and the ambivalent style (11.42) had the lowest scores. also, there was a significant difference (p < 0.001) between the female (45.08) and male (43.35) groups in the conscientiousness and love trauma scores. the present study showed that there is a significant relationship between the personality characteristics and attachment style with love trauma. even the love trauma can be explained by some personality characteristic and attachment styles. therefore, studying the personality characteristics and attachment style can be effective in explaining the love trauma.