Young adults in college are generally perceived as being engrossed in a state of fun, but this is not always the case. The transitions that college students go through, whether they are educational, social, psychological, or environmental, can make it hard for them to cope with the stress that can accompany them during these years. Upon graduation, these students enter the workplace and become part of the workforce. Everyone deals with stress at some point in their lives, but not everyone handles it the same way. Scholars found that coping is a major factor in counteracting stress and that a person's personality traits are a reflection of how they deal with situations or interact with their environment. As a construct, emotional intelligence is also being recognized as an important one in psychology, as well as the ways in which people with strong and weak emotional intelligence deal with stress in different ways. An analysis of the relationship between personality traits, stress coping strategies, and emotional intelligence was conducted in this study, using the Big Five personality traits as an independent variable and stress coping strategies as a dependent variable, and examining whether emotional intelligence mediates the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The participants were Taiwanese university students who were in the third or fourth year of their college. With 250 valid responses, the analysis revealed that all four hypotheses were accepted, and emotional intelligence does mediate the relationship between Big Five personality traits and stress coping strategies. The analysis also showed that Task-oriented coping was positively associated with all personality traits. Emotion-oriented coping showed negative associations with extraversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness and avoidance coping exhibited positive associations with all types of personality traits. By taking a closer look at the relationship between Big Five personality traits, stress-coping strategies, and emotional intelligence, this study expects to contribute to the literature regarding these three variables in Taiwan.

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