Emotion and Personality

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Emotion and Personality
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Emotions

• Components of Emotions (e.g., fear)
• Distinct subjective feelings (e.g., anxiety)
• Accompanied by bodily changes (e.g., increase
  heart rate)
• Accompanied by action tendencies, or increases in
  the probabilities of certain behaviors (tendency
  to fight or flight)

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Emotions

• People differ in emotional reactions, even to the
  same event, so emotions are useful in making
  distinctions between persons

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Issues In Emotion Research

• Emotion States versus Emotion Traits
• Categorical Approach to Emotions versus
  Dimensional Approach
• The Content versus Style of Emotional Life

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Issues In Emotion Research
Emotion States versus Emotion Traits

• Emotion states are transitory and depend more on
  the situation than on the specific person
• An emotional trait is a pattern of emotional
  reactions that a person consistently experiences
  across a variety of life situations

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Issues In Emotion Research

• Categorical Approach
• Emotions are a small number of primary and
  distinct emotions

• Dimensional Approach
• Emotions are broad dimensions of experience

Anger, Joy, Anxiety
Pleasant
Unpleasant
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Issues In Emotion Research
Content versus Style of Emotional Life

• Content specific kinds of emotions
• Style how emotions are experienced and expresses

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The Content of Emotional Life
Pleasant Emotions versus Unpleasant Emotions
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The Content of Emotional Life

• Pleasant Emotions
• Pleasant emotions Happiness and life
  satisfaction (Subjective Well-Being)
• Researchers have defined happiness in two
  complimentary ways
• (1) Judgment that life is satisfying
• (2) Predominance of positive relative to
  negative emotions
• Happiness not just absence of negative
  emotions

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Are self-reported happier people really happier?
• Self-report and non-self-report measures of
  happiness correlate with self-report scores on
  social desirability
• Part of being happy is to have positive illusions
  about the self, an inflated view of the self as a
  good, able, desirable person (Defense Mechanisms)

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Survey measures of happiness and well-being
  predict other aspects of peoples lives we would
  expect to relate to being happy
• Compared to unhappy people, happy people are less
  abusive, less hostile, report fewer diseases, are
  more helpful, creative, energetic, forgiving, and
  trusting
• Thus, self-reports of happiness are valid and
  trustworthy

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The Content of Emotional Life

• What We Know About Happy People
• No difference between the genders
• No difference between age groups however, the
  circumstances that make us happy changes with age
• No differences with race or ethnicity

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Money?
• Within a country?
• Over time?
• Education?
• Marriage?
• Children?
• Religion?

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Personality and Well Being
• Two personality traits that influence happiness
• Extraversion
• Neuroticism
• Two different models
• Indirect model Personality causes a person to
  create a certain lifestyle, and lifestyle causes
  emotion reactions
• Direct model Personality causes emotional
  reactions

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Explanations
• Goal Satisfaction vs. Activity (goal striving)
• Top down (trait) vs. Bottom up (state)

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Unpleasant Emotions
• Trait anxiety, negative affectivity, or
  neuroticism
• Depression and melancholia
• Anger-proneness and hostility

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Anxiety, Negative Affectivity, or Neuroticism
• Eysencks Biological Theory
• Neuroticism is due primarily to the tendency of
  the limbic system in the brain to become easily
  activated

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Anxiety, Negative Affectivity, or Neuroticism
• Cognitive Theories
• Neuroticism is caused by styles of information
  processingpreferential processing of negative
  (but not positive) information about the self
  (not about others)
• Related explanation holds that high neuroticism
  people have richer networks of association
  surrounding memories of negative
  emotionunpleasant material is more accessible

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Depression and Melancholia
• Becks Cognitive Theory
• Certain cognitive style is a pre-existing
  condition that makes people vulnerable to
  depression
• Depressive schemas for
• Self, World, Future
• Versus Depressive realism

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Anger-Proneness and Hostility
• 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 subsequently identified hostility as a
  trait of Type A most strongly related to heart
  disease

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The Content of Emotional Life

• Hostility Tendency to respond to everyday
  frustrations with anger and aggression, to become
  easily irritated, to act in a rude, critical,
  antagonistic, uncooperative manner in everyday
  interaction
• Hostility in Big Five Low agreeableness, high
  neuroticism

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Emotional Style

• Affect Intensity as an Emotional Style
• Assessing Affect Intensity and Mood Variability
• Research Findings on Affect Intensity

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Emotional Style

• High Affect Intensity
• Individuals who experience emotions strongly and
  are emotionally reactive and variable

• Low Affect Intensity
• Individuals who experience emotions only mildly
  and with only gradual fluctuations

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Emotional Style

• Assessing Affect Intensity and Mood Variability
• Affect Intensity Measure
• Beeper studies

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Emotional Style

• Research Findings on Affect Intensity
• High affect intensity subjects tend to evaluate
  the events in their lives (both positive and
  negative) as having more emotional impact
• Individuals high on the affect intensity
  dimension exhibit more mood variability
• Affect intensity relates to the personality
  dimensions of high activity level, sociability,
  and arousability

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The Interaction of Content and Style in
Emotional Life

• Hedonic balance interacts with affect intensity
  to produce specific types of emotional lives that
  may characterize different personalities

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Summary

• Emotions as States or as Traits
• Emotional Content
• Emotional Style