Mental health literacy and personality traits in psychiatric nurses in China: application of latent profile analysis and network analysis

Mental health literacy (MHL) is a crucial public health indicator, while personality traits are known to influence career adaptation. This study aimed to identify distinct personality traits profiles among Chinese psychiatric nurses and to elucidate the network of relationships between these personality traits and dimensions of MHL. In a cross-sectional study, 120 psychiatric nurses from two hospitals in China completed the Chinese Mental Health Literacy Scale and the Chinese Big Five Personality Inventory-Brief Version. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to identify homogeneous personality subgroups. Subsequently, a correlation network was estimated to analyze the connections between the personality traits and MHL dimensions. Node centrality and bridge centrality were calculated to identify the most influential factors. LPA identified three personality profiles: ‘Adaptive: Low Openness, High Agreeableness’ (2.5%), ‘Social: High Conscientiousness, High Agreeableness’ (29.2%), and ‘Balanced: Moderately’ (68.3%). Network analysis revealed the two strongest connections were the bridge edges between conscientiousness and knowledge of how to seek mental health information (edge weight = 0.45) and between neuroticism and knowledge of self-treatments (edge weight = 0.43). Centrality analysis identified knowledge of how to seek mental health information, conscientiousness, and openness as the most central nodes. Bridge centrality indices indicated that conscientiousness activated the MHL community, whereas neuroticism deactivated it. This study provides direct empirical evidence of the specific pathways linking personality traits to MHL in psychiatric nurses. The findings underscore the need to develop targeted interventions, focusing on enhancing information-seeking skills and addressing the roles of conscientiousness and neuroticism as key mechanisms influencing MHL.