Examination of the relationship between emotion regulation difficulties, defense styles and dark triad personality traits

In this study, the predictive effect of the emotion regulation difficulties and defense mechanisms on the dark triad personality traits was investigated. In addition, it was thought that individuals' difficulty in emotion regulation, defense mechanisms and dark triad personality traits scores would differ according to sociodemographic variables, and similarly, the predictive effect of these variables might differ according to age, gender, education and marital status. The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) was used to measure emotion regulation difficulties, the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40) was used to measure defense mechanisms, and the Short Dark Triad Scale (SD3-T) was used to measure dark triad personality traits. In addition to these scales, a personal information form was applied to collect data on sociodemographic variables including age, sex, education status, marital status and the status of psychiatric diagnoses. A sample of 1301 people was analyzed by excluding those who declared that they were psychiatrically diagnosed from a total of 1691 people. According to the results of the Multivariate Analysis of Variance applied, it was observed that the DERS SBT-40 and SD3-T sub-dimension scores of the individuals differed according to age, gender, education and marital status of the individuals. According to the results of Multiple Linear Regression Analysis performed to examine the predictive effect, it was observed that DERS and SBT-40 subscale scores predicted SD3-T subscale scores. Also it is observed that the predictive effect of these variables differ according to age, gender, education and marital status. Understanding the effects of sociodemographic variables, emotion regulation difficulties and defense mechanisms on the degree of having dark triad personality traits makes it possible to interpret that these variables are important structures in the understanding of personality and that these structures can be used as important tools for classification systems and understanding the etiology of psychopathologies.