Chapter 13

Emotion and Personality

 LECTURE OUTLINE
• Introduction
• Issues in Emotion Research
• Emotional States versus Emotional Traits
• Categorical versus Dimensional Approaches to Emotions
• Content Versus Style of Emotional Life
• Content of Emotional Life
• Pleasant Emotions
• Unpleasant Emotions
• Style of Emotional Life
• Interaction of Content and Style in Emotional Life
• Personality and Well-Being
 Introduction: Components of Emotion

• Distinct subjective feelings or affects

• Bodily changes, mostly in the nervous system
• Cognitions/thoughts
• Distinct action tendencies, or increases in probabilities of certain
behaviours
Issues in Emotion Research
• Emotional States versus Emotional Traits
• Categorical versus Dimensional Approach to Emotions
Emotional States versus Emotional Traits
• Emotional states: Transitory (temporary), depend more on situation than on a specific
person
• Emotional traits: Pattern (longer term) of emotional reactions person consistently
experiences across variety of life situations
Categorical versus Dimensional Approaches
to Emotions
• Categorical approach
• Focus is on identifying a small number of primary and distinct emotions
• Lack of agreement regarding which emotions are primary
• Why?

• Dimensional approach
• Two basic dimensions:
• Pleasant/Unpleasant;
• High Arousal/Low Arousal
• Every emotion can be described as combination of
pleasantness/unpleasantness and high/low arousal
 HIGH ACTIVATION/AROUSAL
Two- Distressed Excited
dimensional Anxious
Hostile
Lively
Enthusiastic
model of
emotions

Negative affect

Positive affect
Sad Happy
Unhappy UNPLEASANT PLEASANT Cheerful
Grouchy Pleasant

Bored Relaxed
Drowsy Calm
Dull Content

LOW ACTIVATION/AROUSAL
Content Versus Style of Emotional Life
• Content (what): specific kinds of emotions experienced
• Style (how): how intensely emotions are experienced

• Content and style have trait-like properties (stable over time and situations),
useful for seeing differences between people
 Content (what) of Emotional Life
• Pleasant emotions: Happiness and life satisfaction
• Researchers have defined happiness in two complimentary ways:
• (1) Judgement that life is satisfying
• (2) More positive than negative emotions overall
• Part of being happy is to have:
• Positive illusions about the self
• Why? Is it always a good thing?
• Inflated view of the self as a good, able, desirable person
• Happy people remember more happy events than unhappy events
• Compared to unhappy people, happy people are less abusive, less hostile, report fewer
diseases, are more helpful, creative, humorous, energetic, forgiving, and trusting
 Content of Emotional Life
• What we know about happy people:
• No sex differences in overall happiness, global well-being, life satisfaction, and
across cultures and countries
• No age differences in overall happiness, although circumstances that make
people happy change with age
• Ethnic group membership is unrelated to subjective well-being
• National differences in subjective well-being
• People in poorer countries are less happy and satisfied with life
• People in countries where citizens have fewer civil and political rights are
less happy
• Differences in economic development of nations may be a key source of
differences in happiness of countries
 Does Money Make People Happy?

• Wealthier countries:
• Higher levels of life satisfaction but confounded with other variables that influence well-
being, such as health care services, education
• Very poor countries:
• Economic status predicts happiness
• But: increasing financial status isn’t related to well-being
• In rich societies, economic growth does not lead to life satisfaction
• How can poverty be associated with many problems, and yet income is unrelated to
happiness?
• Could be threshold of income below which person is unlikely to be happy; once above
threshold, more income doesn’t produce more happiness
• Thus, absence of health and wealth bring misery, but presence of health and wealth does not
guarantee happiness
Unpleasant Emotions: Anxiety, Negative Affectivity,
or Neuroticism
• High on neuroticism
• Moody, touchy, irritable, anxious, unstable, pessimistic, and complaining
• Eysenck’s biological theory
• Neuroticism is due mostly to tendency of limbic system in brain to become easily activated
• Limbic system is responsible for emotion and for “fight-flight” reaction
• Biological basis for neuroticism:
• Neuroticism is highly stable over time
• Neuroticism is a major dimension of personality
• Neuroticism is found across cultures
• Neuroticism shows moderate heritability
• Activation of anterior cingulate cortex
• Associated with (negative) emotion
• Activated during social rejection
• Prefrontal cortex
• Very involved with control of emotion, incl. anger regulation
Unpleasant Emotions: Anxiety, Negative Affectivity, or
Neuroticism
• Cognitive theories
• Neuroticism is caused by styles of information processing
• Preference for processing of negative (but not positive) information about
the self (not about others)
• OR:
• High neuroticism people have many neural networks of association
surrounding memories of negative emotion
• Unpleasant material, e.g., recall of illness, is easier to access in brain
Anger-Proneness and Potential for Hostility

• Some people are characteristically more hostile than others

• Hostility: Tendency to respond to everyday frustrations with anger and aggression, become
easily irritated, act in rude, critical, antagonistic, uncooperative manner in everyday life
• Type A personality and heart disease
• Type A personality: Syndrome or a cluster of traits, including achievement strivings,
impatience, competitiveness, hostility
• Research identified Type A personality as a predictor of heart disease
• Research later identified hostility as a trait of Type A most strongly related to heart disease
• Hostility in Big Five: Low agreeableness, high neuroticism
• Anger
• Associated with lack of self-regulation
• Violent criminals often show lack of self-regulation of anger
• Associated with damage in frontal and temporal lobes
 Style of Emotional Life
• Emotional content
• “What” of person’s emotional life
• Emotional style
• “How” of person’s emotional life
• Affect intensity as emotional style
• High affect intensity people experience emotions strongly and are emotionally reactive and
variable
• Low affect intensity people experience emotions only mildly and have only gradual
fluctuations and minor reactions
• Research findings on affect intensity
• High affect intensity people: Display greater mood changes or more frequent fluctuations in
emotional life over time
• Affect intensity relates to personality dimensions of high activity level, sociability,
arousability, high extraversion, high neuroticism
Interaction of Content and Style in Emotional Life

• Hedonic balance between positive and negative emotions = Emotional Content

content (what) of emotional life

+ emotions - emotions

• Affect intensity = style (how) of emotional life

• Hedonic balance and affect intensity are unrelated but

interact to create specific types of emotional lives that show
different personalities
• Hedonic balance x affect intensity = Types of emotional lives
Types of Emotional Life: Interaction of Content and Style

Affect Intensity

Hedonic
Balance
Personality and Well-Being
• If certain emotions are associated with certain personality traits, can
personality traits affect levels of happiness?
• Extraversion influences positive emotions
• Neuroticism influences negative emotions
• High extraversion and low neuroticism contribute more to happiness
than gender, ethnicity, age and all other demographic characteristics
Personality and Well-Being

• Two different models of relationship

between personality and well-being
• (a) Direct model: Personality causes
emotional reactions
• (b) Indirect model: Personality causes a
person to create a certain lifestyle, and
lifestyle causes emotion reactions
Personality and Well-being
• Research by Larsen et al. to assess the direct model
• Best predictor of responsiveness to positive mood induction is extraversion
• Best predictor of responsiveness to negative mood induction is neuroticism
• So, it is easy to put an extravert into a good mood and a high neuroticism
person into a bad mood
• Suggests personality has a direct effect on emotions and can even increase
experience of emotions in response to life events