The investigation of the relationships among resilience, childhood traumas and autotelic personality in university students

The main aim of this study is to determine predictive power of childhood traumas and autotelic personality in resilience of university students. The sample of the study contains of university 693 students who are studying in Dokuz Eylül Univesity and Mardin Artuklu Uniersity. Childhood Trauma Questionaire, Autotelic Personality Inventory, The Resilience Scale for Adults and Personal Information Form were used as data gathering instruments. Pearson bivariate correlations and multiple regression analysis (method stepwise) were used to statistical analysis. The findings revealed that cildhood emotional neglect, childhood emotional abuse, childhood physical abuse and autotelic personality are siginificant predictors of resilience. These variables explained 45.9 % of total variance on resilience. While the relationship between childhood traumas and psychological resilience is negative, the relationship between autotelic personality and resilience is positive. Among the independent variables, the strongest predictor of resilience was identified as autotelic personality.