Rogers, G. and Revelle, W. (1998) Personality, mood, and the evaluation of affective and neutral word pairs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, 1592-1605.
Differential susceptibilities to positive and negative affective states have been proposed to underlie two major personality dimensions, Extraversion and Neuroticism, respectively. Concurrently, the influence of emotional states on cognitive processes has been heavily researched in clinical and social psychology. Four studies investigated the relations between Extraversion, Neuroticism, and the evaluation of affectively pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral word pairs. Specifically measured were affectivity ratings, categorization, judgments of associative strength, and response latencies. A strong, consistent bias toward affective as opposed to neutral stimuli was found across participants. Although some cognitive biases were systematically related to personality and mood, effects of individual differences were present only under specific conditions. The results are discussed in terms of a personality/affective framework and its implications for cognitive functioning.