Emotions and personality Flashcards
Why are personality psychologists interested in emotions and how can emotion theories be helpful to understand personality?
Emotions are universal to the human experience but there are individual differences in for example emotional stability, emotional range, emotional content, emotional expressivity and emotional intensity. Individual differences in emotional patterns are thus one way of understanding personality.
Which are the components of emotions and how can they be described?
Physiological component:
autonomic nervous system
Cognitive component:
appraisal in consideration to the environment
Behavioral response:
Basic emotions -> facial movement.
What is the difference between emotional states and emotional traits?
Emotional State:
what you are feeling at this moment or at some particular moment, often connected to an event
“I am sad”
Emotional Trait:
Your general pattern of emotional states over a longer period of time and over different situations
“I am a sad person”
What is the difference between the categorical and the dimensional approach to emotions?
Categorical:
find all the emotions and boil them down into just a few
no consensus among researchers - top down approach
Dimensional:
Bottom up approach, empirically found that people can place all their feelings on two dimensions:
How pleasant the emotions is and what level of arousal
What are the different criteria suggested for emotions to be considered primary?
That depends on who you ask
but in general it can either be that it has a unique facial expression or that it is an emotion described that can not be encapsulated into a larger category, boiled down to the essence so to speak
What does content and style of emotions refer to?
Content is the emotion they are experiencing
style is the way the experience emotion
How are anxiety and neuroticism connected? How is this explained from the point of view of a cognitive theory and a biological theory?
People high on neuroticism are more vulnerable to negative emotions. It is also associated with higher degrees of negative affectivity.
Cognitive theory:
neuroticism lies in the psychology of the person’s overall cognitive system. Certain styles of information processing affect, such as attending, thinking and remembering. There is a connection between neuroticism and cognitive functions.
Biological theory:
neuroticism has a biological basis. In Eysenck’s theory of personality, neuroticism is due primarily to a tendency of the limbic system in the brain to become easily activated. The limbic system is the part of the brain responsible for emotion and the fight or flight reaction. High-neurotic people are anxious, irritated and easily upset because their limbic systems are more easily aroused to produce more emotions.
Why is affect intensity and mood variability interesting from a personality point of view?
Affect intensity can be defined by a description of persons who are either high or low on this dimension. High affect = reacts strongly and are emotional reactive and variable.
Mood variability = how much it alternates between up and down
Individual differences in emotional patterns are thus one way of understanding personality.
Does personality seem to have a direct or indirect effect on well-being? Try to explain why.
Personality is an indirect cause of wellbeing eg. Being neurotic may lead one to be a worrier and complainer, which leads to people not wanting to be around that person which in turn leads that person to being lonely and unwell.
How are personality traits related to well-being according to Costa and Mccrae?
Extraversion and neuroticism predicted the amounts of positive and negative emotions in people’s lives and hence contributed greatly to subjective well-being.
