This study will examine the relationship between preference for routine and psychological distress, and the personality trait openness to experience and psychological distress. Through research, we found that during the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a rise in rates of psychological distress. Psychological distress can be caused by a variety of different elements; however, in this case, we wanted to study how preference for routine and openness to experience relate to undergraduates students psychological distress. Our overall research question is “ Does routine preference and openness to experience have a relationship to rates of psychological distress? †We predict that some participants in our study that had psychological distress had trouble with being able to manage new routines. We also predicted that participants who scored higher on the Big Five Personality traits on openness to experience also scored lower on the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale. We predict there will be a negative relationship between openness to experience and overall psychological distress. We predict there will be a positive relationship between a high score on preference to routine and a high level of overall psychological distress. We tested this by having participants complete a self-report questionnaire that included a shortened version of the Big Five Inventory, the Routinization Inventory, the DASS-21 Inventory, and a few demographic questions. From the research provided we hypothesize that there will be a positive correlation between preference for routine and psychological distress. We also predict that there will be a negative correlation between the personality trait openness to experience and psychological distress
