Temperament and attention to positive and negative trait information

Neuroticism and extraversion as predictors of negative and positive emotional information processing: comparing Eysenck's, Gray's, and Newman's theories

This study compared how extraversion, neuroticism, and extraversion × neuroticism are related to processing of pleasant and unpleasant emotional information as predicted by Eysenck's, Gray's, and Newman's theories. Initially, the participants' levels of extraversion (as measured by the sociability subscale) and neuroticism were assessed with Eysenck's Personality Inventory. They were then tested individually. After completing a questionnaire of current positive and negative moods, they completed three tasks measuring processing of pleasant, unpleasant, and also neutral information. The results showed that extraversion was associated positively with the processing of pleasant information, while neuroticism was associated positively with the processing of unpleasant information. These findings support predictions from Eysenck's theory. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shopping Motives and the Five Factor Model: An Integration and Preliminary Study

In consumer psychology, a primary and recurring goal of retail patronage and research on segmentation has been the identification of enduring differences in shopping patterns and predispositions. Generally, researchers have profited from the development of narrow and focused individual differences including differences across shopping motives. At the same time, in the personality literature, the Five Factor Model has emerged as an important taxonomy of global personality traits This paper relates shopping motives to the Five Factor Model and thereby enriches our understanding of individual differences at both the global and domain-specific levels and advances the integration of models of consumers' behavior with emerging scholarship and theory on personality.

Temperament, Anxiety, and Attentional Control

To regulate attention has been a significant component of individual differences in temperament, and other research supported a relation between measures of attentional control and anxiety, i.e., high scores on trait anxiety were correlated with inability to regulate attention in response to the environment, so enhanced attentional control may interact with dimensions of temperament to modify the effects of generalized anxiety. To test this hypothesis, 69 undergraduates completed the Revised Dimensions of Temperament Survey, the Burns Anxiety Scale, and the Derryberry and Reed measure of Attentional Control. Analysis suggested attentional control may be a significant factor in modifying reported anxiety. Further research is warranted, given the present small sample tested with numerous measures.

Self-Reported Processing Bias and Naturally Occurring Mood: Mediators between Personality and Stress Appraisals

Although past research has shown that neuroticism and extraversion predict stress appraisals, how these traits affect appraisals is not known. In the present study, mood and two processing biases were predicted to mediate between personality and appraisals. Participants (N = 236) completed measures of personality, mood, appraisals for five hypothetical stressors, and whether they relied (when making appraisals) on the positive or negative features of those events. Three months later, participants also made appraisals of a recent stressful event. As predicted, the negative and positive processing biases mediated between neuroticism, extraversion, and appraisals of the hypothetical events and mediated between neuroticism and appraisals of the real-life stressor. Indirect effects also were found from positive mood to appraisals. Because appraisals affect stress responses, these findings have wide implications for adaptational outcomes.

Optimism and Attentional Bias for Negative and Positive Stimuli

Optimism, or positive outcome expectancy, correlates with better psychological and physiological adjustment, in part because of conscious behavior such as coping. However, procedural, automatic, and unconscious processes also may affect adjustment. The emotional Stroop task was used to assess the relationships between optimism and unconscious attentional bias for positively valenced, negatively valenced, neutral current concern, and neutral control stimuli. Undergraduate students (n = 48) completed personality measures at the beginning of the semester and completed the Stroop task under separate cover. Optimism was associated with a greater attentional bias for positive stimuli relative to negative stimuli. Optimism also was associated with slower skin conductance response rates during negative stimuli. Unconscious attentional biases may contribute to the better adjustment associated with optimism.

Interpersonal self-support and attentional disengagement from emotional faces

Prior studies have shown that interpersonal self-support is related to emotional symptoms. The present study explored the relationship between interpersonal self-support and attentional disengagement from emotional faces. A spatial cueing task was administrated to 21 high and 24 low interpersonal self-support Chinese undergraduate students to assess difficulty in shifting away from emotional faces. The Sidak corrected multiple pairwise tests revealed that the low interpersonal self-support group had greater response latencies on negative faces than neutral faces or positive faces in the invalid cues condition, F(2, 41) = 5.68, p < .01, η2 = .22. In addition, in the invalid cues condition, the low interpersonal self-support group responded more slowly than the high interpersonal self-support group to negative faces, F(1, 42) = 7.63, p < .01, η2 = .15, the 95% confidence interval for difference of reaction time from 16.30 to 104.70. The results support our hypotheses that low interpersonal self-support is related to difficulty disengaging from negative emotional information and suggest that interpersonal self-support may refer to emotional dispositions, especially negative emotional dispositions.

Moderate threat causes longer lasting disruption to processing in anxious individuals

Anxiety is associated with increased attentional capture by threat. Previous studies have used simultaneous or briefly separated (<1 s) presentation of threat distractors and target stimuli. Here, we tested the hypothesis that high trait anxious participants would show a longer time window within which distractors cause disruption to subsequent task processing, and that this would particularly be observed for stimuli of moderate or ambiguous threat value. A novel temporally separated emotional distractor task was used. Face or house distractors were presented for 250 ms at short (∼1.6 s) or long (∼3 s) intervals prior to a letter string comprising Xs or Ns. Trait anxiety was associated with slowed identification of letter strings presented at long intervals after face distractors with part surprise/part fear expressions. In other words, these distractors had an impact on high anxious individuals’ speed of target identification seconds after their offset. This was associated with increased activity in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala and reduced dorsal anterior cingulate recruitment. This pattern of activity may reflect impoverished recruitment of reactive control mechanisms to damp down stimulus-specific processing in subcortical and higher visual regions. These findings have implications for understanding how threat-related attentional biases in anxiety may lead to dysfunction in everyday settings where stimuli of moderate, potentially ambiguous, threat value such as those used here are fairly common, and where attentional disruption lasting several seconds may have a profound impact.

Phenomenological predictors of psychosocial function in bipolar disorder: is there evidence that social cognitive and emotion regulation abnormalities contribute?

OBJECTIVES

Neurocognitive ability and mood have often been discussed as contributing mechanisms to the severe psychosocial dysfunction experienced in bipolar disorder (BD). In contrast, there has been little discussion on the contribution of social cognition or emotion regulation. This paper aims to assert a potential role for these constructs in psychosocial functioning in BD, with an overarching goal to highlight the necessary importance of considering them in future research examining psychosocial outcomes in the disorder.

METHODS

This paper provides a theoretical synthesis of available and indirect evidence for an influence of (1) social cognition and (2) emotion regulation on psychosocial functioning; it acknowledges important clinical questions that need addressing, and discusses how current research might be translated to improve the treatment of psychosocial dysfunction in BD.

RESULTS

Given their assumed roles in facilitating social interactions and modulating behaviours, it is certainly plausible that abnormalities in social cognition and emotion regulation are detrimental to psychosocial functioning. Currently, there is only minimal direct evidence examining their influence, although existing BD studies are preliminarily supportive of relationships between these constructs.

CONCLUSIONS

There are reasonable theoretical grounds, supported by indirect and preliminary evidence, to suggest that social cognition and emotion regulation may be important in the prediction of psychosocial outcome in BD. However, this proposition is limited by the paucity of empirical research directly examining this matter.

Impact of personality on the cerebral processing of emotional prosody

While several studies have focused on identifying common brain mechanisms governing the decoding of emotional speech melody, interindividual variations in the cerebral processing of prosodic information, in comparison, have received only little attention to date: Albeit, for instance, differences in personality among individuals have been shown to modulate emotional brain responses, personality influences on the neural basis of prosody decoding have not been investigated systematically yet. Thus, the present study aimed at delineating relationships between interindividual differences in personality and hemodynamic responses evoked by emotional speech melody. To determine personality-dependent modulations of brain reactivity, fMRI activation patterns during the processing of emotional speech cues were acquired from 24 healthy volunteers and subsequently correlated with individual trait measures of extraversion and neuroticism obtained for each participant. Whereas correlation analysis did not indicate any link between brain activation and extraversion, strong positive correlations between measures of neuroticism and hemodynamic responses of the right amygdala, the left postcentral gyrus as well as medial frontal structures including the right anterior cingulate cortex emerged, suggesting that brain mechanisms mediating the decoding of emotional speech melody may vary depending on differences in neuroticism among individuals. Observed trait-specific modulations are discussed in the light of processing biases as well as differences in emotion control or task strategies which may be associated with the personality trait of neuroticism.

Frontal brain electrical asymmetry and cardiac vagal tone predict biased attention to social threat

Individual differences in attention biases for motivationally significant stimuli have been reported in clinical and normative populations. Few studies, however, have attempted to examine potential biological mechanisms underlying differences in the cognitive processing of emotional stimuli. The present study examined the extent to which two well-validated psychophysiological vulnerability markers of affective style [i.e., frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry and cardiac vagal tone] predicted biased attention toward rapid presentations (approximately 250 ms) of angry and happy facial expressions. We found that right frontal EEG asymmetry and low cardiac vagal tone, taken together, predicted approximately 37% of the variability in attentional vigilance for angry faces. Frontal EEG asymmetry and cardiac vagal tone did not predict attention for happy faces, independently of each other. Our results provide preliminary evidence that two well established psychophysiological indicators of affective style bias early processing of motivationally salient stimuli.

Regulatory processes and the development of cognitive representations

Although the construct of regulation is usually applied to ongoing behavior, it also has implications for ongoing cognition and the development of cognitive representations. We propose that subcortical motivational systems influence cortical representations in two general ways. First, they regulate response processes, promoting a general selection of information to which the child is exposed. Second, motivational systems regulate attention, promoting a more selective stabilization of representations for motivationally relevant sources of information. Together with the environment, these regulatory processes shape the child's developing representations. Individual differences in these processes result in cortical representational systems that enhance the motivational systems* ability to detect relevant inputs and to guide behavior in light of them. Examples are provided that focus on fearful children, discussing how their self-representation may contribute to anxious psychopathology.

Emotional memory function, personality structure and psychopathology: a neural system approach to the identification of vulnerability markers

It is well established that emotional events are ingrained stronger into memory relative to neutral events. Facilitated emotional memory is highly variable between individuals within the normal population and is particularly exacerbated in those diagnosed with mood and anxiety disorders. In order to elucidate how variation of enhanced emotional memory within the normal population may manifest into psychopathological states, we explored the convergence between studies investigating the neural systems engaged in emotional memory facilitation and studies investigating how these systems differ from person to person. Converging evidence highlights the roles of three neural systems (1. Amygdala function and attention, 2. Neuroendocrine function, 3. Interactive effects with mood) that all govern emotional memory facilitation and are highly variable between individuals as a function of personality. We applied this neural system approach to models of vulnerability of three forms of psychopathology that are particularly characterized by atypical emotional memory function (depression, generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder). This application suggests that the incorporation of known vulnerability markers across psychological, neuroimaging and neuroendocrinological domains is cardinal to how susceptibility is conceptualized and assessed in these disorders.

Emotional reactivity and the overreport of somatic symptoms: somatic sensitivity or negative reporting style?

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of emotional reactivity (ER) in symptom reporting and conceptualize somatizing processes as a signal detection task. Emotional reactivity has been theorized to influence symptom reporting through somatic sensitivity as well as via a negative reporting style. We assess the degree to which these two competing theories about the role of ER are accurate within the signal detection framework.

METHODS

We used a multimethod approach that included using both static and prospective self-reports as well as a signal detection task.

RESULTS

Results suggest that ER exerts its influence on somatization tendencies via a negatively biased reporting style and is not mediated by somatic sensitivity as suggested by the somatosensory amplification and the symptom perception hypothesis.

CONCLUSION

Emotional reactivity has yet to be associated with objective measures of somatic sensitivity. Until such an association is found, it is likely that ER influences symptom reports via negatively biased reporting.

Effect of Trait Anger on Cognitive Processing of Emotional Stimuli

In the present experiment, the authors examined whether trait anger was associated with cognitive biases for anger-related semantic stimuli. Fifty-two undergraduate students completed the Trait Anger Scale (TAS; C. D. Spielberger, G. Jacobs, S. Russell, & R. Crane, 1983), and those reporting TAS scores in the upper (n = 17) or lower (n = 13) quartiles of the sample were assigned to high- and low-anger groups, respectively. The 30 participants then engaged in a lexical decision task that presented various emotion words, neutral words, and nonwords. Results indicated that individuals who reported high levels of trait anger displayed facilitative biases in the processing of semantic anger-related stimuli. This predisposition to more readily process anger-related information may underlie their propensity to experience intense feelings of anger when provoked.

Prefrontal brain electrical asymmetry predicts the evaluation of affective stimuli

Measures of left-right asymmetry in resting brain activity were derived from spectral estimates of electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha-band power density in 13 homologous scalp electrode pairs from 81 right-handed individuals (43 F) on two occasions separated by 6 weeks. At a third, later session, these individuals completed a cognitive task, comparing word-pairs that systematically differed in affective tone. For an extended series of paired-comparisons, the subject chose the one word-pair that 'went together best'. Objectively, associative strength was comparable for both word-pairs. Individuals with relatively greater left-sided anterior frontal resting activity were more likely to select the more pleasant word-pair. Relations between word-pair selection and asymmetry in resting brain activity at central and posterior sites were not significant.

Individual differences in arousal and accessibility to information in memory

The authors conducted 9 experiments to test the hypothesis (S. Schwartz, 1975) that arousal influences the accessibility of information stored in memory. They investigated the relationship between arousal levels (as indexed by personality types) and the type of stimuli or cues presented during study or test. They predicted that low-arousal individuals (stable extraverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and high-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by semantic stimuli, whereas high-arousal individuals (neurotic introverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and low-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by physical (i.e., graphic, phonetic, or both) stimuli. They tested the arousal-accessibility hypothesis by using a variety of tasks including verbal discrimination, false recognition, cued recall, and paired associates. With the exception of the finding that stable extraverted participants performed better than neurotic introverted participants on an incidental associative-matching task (Experiment 3), the results from the verbal discrimination studies (1-5) did not support the hypothesis. In Experiment 6, the authors tested the hypothesis by using a false-recognition task. False alarms varied as a function of phonetic and semantic stimuli, but personality types were not differentially sensitive to the manipulation. The same was true for the cued-recall studies (Experiments 7 and 8); personality types were not differentially sensitive to the semantic and phonetic stimuli. Experiment 9 (paired-associate learning) was a replication of Schwartz's study. The authors found some support for the Schwartz hypothesis: Extraverted participants were adversely affected by semantic similarity. Overall, the findings did not provide much support for the arousal-accessibility hypothesis.