Personality and Emotion

Personality is the coherent patterning of affect, behavior, cognition, and desires (goals) over time and space. Just as a full blown emotion represents an integration of feeling, action, appraisal and wants at a particular time and location so does personality represent integration over time and space of these components (Ortony et al., 2005). A helpful analogy is to consider that personality is to emotion as climate is to weather. That is, what one expects is personality, what one observes at any particular moment is emotion. To understand the personality-affect link it is necessary to consider the ways in which personality may be described. Since Theophrastus’ discussion of characters and Galen’s theory of temperament (Stelmack & Stalikas, 1991), dimensional models of individual differences in personality have consistently identified three (the Giant Three, e.g., Eysenck & Eysenck (1985)) to five (the Big Five, e.g., Digman (1990)) broad dimensions of personality. Two of these dimensions, in particular, Extraversion (E) and Neuroticism (N, sometimes referred to by the other end of the dimension as Emotional Stability) have been associated with individual differences in affective level and environmental responsivity (Corr, 2008; Revelle, 1995). Ever since antiquity, starting with Galen’s classification of the four different humors, it has been assumed that individuals differ in their predisposition to experience certain emotions. Extrapolating from animal studies, E and N have been associated with the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) respectively, while distinctions between trait fear and trait anxiety have been associated with the Fight/Freeze/Flight System (FFFS) (Corr, 2008; Gray & McNaughton, 2000). Indeed, the basic assumptions of Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (Corr, 2008), perhaps better labeled as Three Systems Theory, are that the stable personality traits reflect individual differences in reactivity to emotional and affectively valenced environmental cues. Descriptively, there is much literature on hysteric, neurotic, or anhedonic personalities (Kellerman, 1990), or, in more recent terminology, on trait anger, trait anxiety, or trait positive-negative affect (Spielberger et al., 1999; Tellegen et al., 1999) . These trait differences in emotionality increase the odds of experiencing trait-congruent emotions. In other words, individuals high on trait anxiety run an increased risk of experiencing anxiety bouts, individuals high on trait anger get irritated more often, and so forth. Thus, in a quasi-representative survey of everyday emotion experiences Scherer et al. (2004) showed that the emotionality dispositions may significantly increase the risk to experience certain emotions. Concretely, the more frequently respondents habitually experienced a particular kind of emotion (trait emotionality), the more likely they experienced an exemplar of that emotion category yesterday. Thus, respondents high on trait anxiety were almost three times as likely to have experienced anxiety yesterday compared to those who are low on this trait. In the case of trait sadness and trait despair, the likelihood is about two times higher. Respondents high on trait irritation are about 1.5 times more likely to have experienced anger yesterday. Similarly, respondents reporting frequent habitual pleasure, surprise, or pride experiences are also 1.5 times more likely to have experienced joy or happiness. Because some emotions occur less frequently than expected for respondents with certain habitual emotion dispositions, some types of trait emotionality might inoculate, or shield, against particular emotions. The results seem to indicate that trait pleasure may reduce the risk of despair, and that trait surprise may reduce the risk of anxiety. These results do not just reflect common responses to questionnaires, but rather reflect basic neural processes. Using functional brain mapping (e.g., fMRI), trait extraversion and neuroticism were