Personality traits in action: A cognitive behavioral version of the social cognitive paradigm

Examination of Rumination's Mediating Role in the Relation Between Distal Personality Predictors, Cannabis Coping Motives, and Negative Cannabis-Related Consequences

Objective

Perseverative cognitive processes, such as rumination, may indirectly influence effects of personality traits on cannabis use and related problems. Understanding relations among personality, rumination, and cannabis use motives may lead to better understanding of problematic cannabis use. The present study examined personality traits' influence on negative cannabis-related consequences via rumination and cannabis use coping motives.

Methods

We tested a sequential path model across two independent samples such that the model was tested in one sample and replicated in the second sample. Participants were U.S. undergraduate students from multiple universities who reported using cannabis at least once in the prior thirty days.

Results

Results partially supported hypotheses such negative urgency and distress tolerance were indirectly related to negative cannabis-related consequences via rumination and coping motives. Specifically, higher negative urgency and lower distress tolerance were related to higher rumination. Higher rumination was related to higher coping motives; which in turn was related to more negative cannabis-related consequences. Results indicate that rumination is a risk factor belying associations between personality and cannabis use to cope and negative consequences of use.

Conclusions

Implementing techniques that attenuate rumination for individuals high in negative urgency or low in distress tolerance may reduce or prevent problematic cannabis and unintended outcomes.

Five Approaches to Understanding Interpersonal Competence: A Review and Integration

Social connectedness has been linked to beneficial outcomes across domains, ages, and cultures. However, not everyone receives these benefits, as there are large individual differences in the capacities required to create and sustain functional interpersonal relationships. A great deal of research has been devoted to assessing and understanding these differences, often focusing on how competent interpersonal behavior renders it more likely that one will succeed interpersonally. The current paper examines five relevant approaches that have emerged from personality (global traits), social (social cognition), clinical (social skills interventions), developmental (social information processing), and industrial/organizational (situation judgment) areas of psychology. A comparison of these approaches highlights important considerations related to bandwidth and fidelity, whether the focus should be on overt behavior or underlying processes, and whether to emphasize tendencies or their effectiveness. The review concludes with calls for greater integration efforts, which can capitalize on strengths inherent to different approaches.

Misattribution of duties as free choices: The role of emotional awareness in self-infiltration

Individuals sometimes mistake others' expectations or imposed duties for self-chosen goals, even though they are not congruent with their emotional preferences or integrated values-a phenomenon coined as self-infiltration. Previous studies demonstrated that self-infiltration is more likely to occur in individuals with reduced self-regulation abilities. Here, we investigated in a sample of 250 students whether this association may be mediated by trait emotional awareness, the ability to recognize and understand one's emotions. This mediation hypothesis could be confirmed. We discuss our findings with respect to their potential relevance for research on motivated goal pursuit and health and practical applications.

Attention to emotion and reliance on feelings in decision-making: Variations on a pleasure principle

Individuals are thought to differ in the extent to which they attend to and value their feelings, as captured by the construct of attention to emotion. The well-being correlates of attention to emotion have been extensively studied, but the decision-making correlates have not been. A three study program of research (total N = 328) sought to examine relationships between stimulus-specific feelings and decisions concerning those stimuli in the context of high levels of within-subject power. Evidence for the pleasure principle was robust, in that individuals placed a virtual self closer to stimuli that they found more pleasant (Study 1) and they wished to re-view such stimuli more frequently (Studies 2 & 3). These relationships, however, were more pronounced at higher levels of attention to emotion. The findings affirm the importance of feelings in decision-making while highlighting ways in which individual differences in attention to emotion operate.

Having no words for feelings: alexithymia as a fundamental personality dimension at the interface of cognition and emotion

This special issue brings together two important reviews and seven cutting-edge empirical papers concerning the influence of alexithymia on cognitive and emotional processing. Alexithymia is a multifaceted construct that is characterised by difficulties identifying one's feelings; difficulties describing one's feelings to others; and an externally focused, utilitarian cognitive style. In this paper, we begin by considering how emotion science has evolved in its understanding of personality traits, before highlighting the potential importance of alexithymia research for the field of cognition and emotion. After summarising the historical context of alexithymia research, we consider the contributions of the featured papers to the literature of cognition and emotion. The collected works highlight that alexithymia influences several aspects of how one perceives and responds to neutral and emotional situations, by impacting upon multiple processes (attention, appraisals, memory, language and behaviour), showing the importance of drawing better connections amongst multiple processes, toward disentangling the effects of early processes on later ones. A lack of correspondence between processes, as well as amongst alexithymia facets, is another central finding of the special issue. This pattern is thought to lead to ineffective and inflexible emotion regulation and to pose significant risks for physical and mental illness.

Cognitive-emotional processing in alexithymia: an integrative review

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct characterised by difficulties identifying one's feelings and distinguishing them from bodily sensations, difficulties describing one's feelings to others, and an externally oriented cognitive style. Over the past 25 years, a burgeoning body of research has examined how alexithymia moderates processing at the cognition-emotion interface. We review the findings in five domains: attention, appraisals, memory, language, and behaviours. The preponderance of studies linked alexithymia with deficits in emotion processing, which was apparent across all domains, except behaviours. All studies on behaviours and a proportion of studies in other domains demonstrated emotional over-responding. Analysis at the facet level revealed deficits in memory and language that are primarily associated with externally oriented thinking, while over-responding was most often linked to difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings. The review also found evidence for contextual modulation: The pattern of deficits and over-responding was not restricted to emotional contexts but also occurred in neutral contexts, and in some circumstances, emotional over-responding in alexithymia was beneficial. Taken together, this review highlights alexithymia as a central personality dimension in the interplay between cognition and emotion.