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Investigating the "Rescue Personality"

University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George,British Columbia, Canada, wagners{at}unbc.ca
University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George,British Columbia, Canada
University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George,British Columbia, Canada

Mitchell and Bray use the term rescue personality as a way of describing characteristics of individuals who serve in the emergency services and describe emergency service workers as inner-directed, action oriented, obsessed with high standards of performance, traditional, socially conservative, easily bored, and highly dedicated.This rescue personality has provided an important foundation for the controversial Critical Incident Stress Management model; however, little empirical evidence is available demonstrating its existence.Previous literature has primarily considered emergency service personality characteristics as predictors of posttraumatic symptoms and/or effective job performance. Consequently, a gap in the literature exists with respect to research investigating the existence of a particular personality type for emergency service workers, as compared with those working in nonemergency occupations. The present project compared a group of paid professional firefighters (n = 94) with a comparison group (n = 91) who worked in nonemergency occupations. The hypotheses were guided by Mitchell’s description of the rescue personality.That is, according to Mitchell’s description, firefighters were expected to self-report lower levels of the characteristic openness to experience, higher levels of the characteristic conscientiousness, higher self-reported Type A behavior, and higher self-reported tolerance for risk-taking behavior. None of these hypotheses were supported; however, firefighters reported the characteristic of extraversion at significantly higher rates than did comparison participants.

Key Words: rescue personality • Critical Incident Stress Management • posttraumatic stress disorder • mental health • firefighters • emergency services

This version was published on September 1, 2009

Traumatology, Vol. 15, No. 3, 5-12 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1534765609338499


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