Emotional topics in personality |  |
Chapter OutlineEmotion and Personality
Introduction
- Emotions include three components
- Associated with distinct subjective feelings or affects
- Accompanied by bodily changes, mostly in the nervous system
- Accompanied by distinct action tendencies, or increases in probabilities of certain behaviors
- People differ in emotional reactions, even to the same event, so emotions are useful in making distinctions between persons
Issues in Emotion Research
Emotional States Versus Emotional Traits
- Emotional states: Transitory, depend more on the situation than on a specific person
- Emotional traits: Pattern of emotional reactions that a person consistently experiences across a variety of life situations
Categorical Versus Dimensional Approach to Emotions
- Categorical approach
- Focus on identifying a small number of primary and distinct emotions
- Lack of consensus about regarding which emotions are primary
- Lack of consensus is attributable to different criteria used for defining an emotion as primary
- Dimensional approach
- Based on empirical research rather than theoretical criteria
- People rate themselves on a variety of emotions, then the researcher applies statistical techniques (mostly factor analysis) to identify dimensions underlying ratings
- Consensus among researchers on two basic dimensions: Pleasant/Unpleasant and High Arousal/Low Arousal
- Two-dimensional model suggests every emotion can be described as a combination of pleasantness/unpleasantness and arousal
Content Versus Style of Emotional Life
- Content refers to the specific kinds of emotions that a person experiences
- Style refers to how emotions are experienced
- Content and style have trait-like properties (stable over time and situations, meaningful for making distinctions between people)
Content of Emotional Life
Pleasant emotions
- Happiness and life satisfaction
- Researchers have defined happiness in two complimentary ways
- Judgement that life is satisfying
- Predominance of positive relative to negative emotions
- 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
- Survey measures of happiness and well-being predict other aspects of people's 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
- What we know about happy people
- No sex difference 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
- People in countries that provide citizens 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
A Closer Look: Does Money Make People Happy?
- Wealthier countries have higher levels of life satisfaction than poorer countries, but national wealth is confounded with many variables that influence well-being, such as health care services, education
- Researchers address confounds by looking at the relationship between income and happiness within countries
- In very poor countries, economic status predicts happiness; however, once people can afford necessities, increasing financial status isn't related to well-being
- Within affluent societies, economic growth is not accompanied by the rise in life satisfaction among the population
- How can poverty be associated with many problems, and yet income is unrelated to happiness?
- Answer may lie in the notion of the threshold of income, below which a person is unlikely to be happy; once a person is above threshold, more income doesn't produce more happiness
- Thus, the absence of health and wealth bring misery, but the presence of health and wealth does not guarantee happiness
Personality and well-being
- High extraversion and low neuroticism contribute more to happiness than gender, ethnicity, age and all other demographic characteristics
- Two different models of relationship between personality and well-bring
- Indirect model: Personality causes a person to create a certain lifestyle, and lifestyle causes emotion reactions
- Direct model: Personality causes emotional reactions
- 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
- Best predictor of responsiveness to negative mood induction is neuroticism
- Thus, it is easy to put an extravert into a good mood and a high neuroticism person into a bad mood
- Suggests personality had a direct effect on emotions
A program to increase happiness
- Spend time with others, particularly family friends, and loved ones
- Seek challenge and meaning in work
- Look for ways to be helpful to others
- Take time out for yourself, enjoy activities that give you pleasure
- Stay in shape
- Have a plan but be open to new experiences
- Be optimistic
- Don't let things get blown out of proportion
Unpleasant emotions
- Anxiety, negative affectivity, or neuroticism
- Person high on neuroticism is moody, touchy, irritable, anxious, unstable, pessimistic, and complaining
- Eysenck's biological theory
- Neuroticism is due primarily to the tendency of the limbic system in the brain to become easily activated
- Limbic system is responsible for emotion and for "fight-flight" reaction
- No direct tests of this theory, but indirect evidence supports
- Neuroticism is highly stable over time
- Neuroticism is a major dimension of personality found with different data sources in different cultures and by different researchers
- Neuroticisms shows moderate heritability
- Cognitive theories
- Neuroticism is caused by styles of information processing—preferential 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 emotion—unpleasant material is more accessible
- One type of unpleasant information is poor health—link between neuroticism and self-reported health complaints
- Major diseases categories are not related to neuroticism
- But neuroticism is related to diminished immune functioning during stress
- Matthews' attentional theory that high neuroticism people pay more attention to threats and unpleasant information in environments
- Depression and melancholia
- Diathesis-stress model: Stressful life event triggers depression among those with pre-existing vulnerability, or diathesis
- Beck's cognitive theory: Certain cognitive style is a pre-existing condition that makes people vulnerable to depression
- Vulnerability lies in the particular cognitive schema, a way of looking at world
- Three areas of life most influenced by depressive cognitive schema—Cognitive triad: Information about self, world, future
- Explanatory style
- Depressed people maintain an internal, stable, and global explanatory style—Pessimistic explanatory style
- Anger-proneness and potential for hostility
- 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 subsequently identified hostility as a trait of Type A most strongly related to heart disease
- Hostility: Tendency to respond to everyday frustrations with anger and aggression, to become easily irritated, to feel frequent resentment, to act in a rude, critical, antagonistic, uncooperative manner in everyday interaction
- Hostility in Big Five: Low agreeableness, high neuroticism
Style of Emotional Life
- Emotional content refers to the "what" of person's emotional life, whereas style refers to the "how" of an emotional life
Affect intensity as an emotional style
- High affect intensity people experience emotions strongly and are emotionally reactive and variable
- Low affect intensity people experience emotions only mildly and only gradual fluctuations and minor reactions
- Assessing affect intensity and mood variability
- In early studies, affect intensity was assessed using a daily experiential sampling technique
- Affect Intensity Measure (AIM): Questionnaire measure that allows quick assessment of emotional style in terms of intensity
- Research findings on affect intensity
- High (relative to low) affect intensity people display greater mood variability 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
The Interaction of Content and Style in Emotional Life
- Hedonic balance between positive and negative emotions represents the content of emotional life
- Affect intensity represents the style of emotional life
- Hedonic balance and affect intensity are unrelated to each other and interact to produce specific types of emotional lives that characterize different personalities
- Positive hedonic balance, low affect intensity
- Positive hedonic balance, high affect intensity
- Negative hedonic balance, low affect intensity
- Negative hedonic balance, high affect intensity
Summary and Evaluation
- Emotion states versus emotional traits
- Emotional content versus emotional style
- Content and style interact within persons to produce distinct varieties of emotional lives
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education