Personality traits and depressive symptoms: The moderating and mediating effects of resilience in Chinese adolescents

•Personality traits were associated with depressive symptoms.•Resilience respectively moderated the associations of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness with depressive symptoms.•Resilience partly mediated the associations of all five personality traits with depressive symptoms. Various studies showed that personality traits and resilience might have impacts on depressive symptoms, separately. However, the relationships among personality traits, resilience and depressive symptoms are still undefined. Thus, this study tried to explore the potential effect of resilience on the associations between personality traits and depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents. Adolescents (n = 6019) aged 10–17 years were recruited from nine schools in Wuhan, China. Depressive symptoms, personality traits, and resilience were evaluated by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D), the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), respectively. Neuroticism was positively associated with depressive symptoms, whereas extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were negatively associated with depressive symptoms. Resilience separately moderated the associations of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness with depressive symptoms, and partly mediated the associations of all five personality traits with depressive symptoms. This study is a cross sectional study and cannot ascertain the causal relationships between the variables. Also self-reported questionnaire instruments were used in the data collection. These findings suggested that resilience might play moderating and mediating roles in the associations of personality traits with depressive symptoms, and prompted that it was critical to improve resilience and develop adaptive personality traits in the prevention and intervention of depression in adolescents.