Personality traits modulate skin conductance response to emotional pictures: An investigation with Cloninger’s model of personality

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.12.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Several studies found strong relationships between main personality dimensions and emotions, and more particularly between neuroticism and negative emotions, as well as between extraversion and positive ones. In these studies, personality was mainly assessed with respect to the big five model, and emotions were evaluated with subjective rating scales. To extend the exploration of the associations between personality and emotion, the aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between Cloninger’s dimensions of personality and emotional reactivity assessed by skin conductance response (SCR). In 55 normal subjects, SCR was recorded while they were presented pictures selected as positive, negative and neutral from the International Affective Picture System. The results showed no influence of personality on response magnitude, but subjects with higher harm avoidance scores showed longer half-recovery times for negative relative to neutral pictures. This result is consistent with the dispositional bias of harm avoidance to respond intensely to signals of aversive stimuli.

Introduction

Relationships between personality and emotions have been extensively studied. Several studies found robust associations between extraversion and positive emotions as well as between neuroticism and negative ones (Canli et al., 2002, Costa and McCrae, 1980, Gross et al., 1998, Rusting and Larsen, 1997). Despite these general findings, the exact influence of personality on emotional responses (i.e., which aspect of the emotional response is involved in the personality–emotion relationships) is still unclear.

Most studies on this topic focused on subjective ratings as measures of emotion (Gomez et al., 2000, Gross et al., 1998, Heponiemi et al., 2003), which is of course a crucial issue of emotion, but might be attached to some problems, especially the individual differences in willingness to conform to social desirability and in the understanding of rating criteria. Moreover, subjective ratings do not allow one to identify the source of individual differences in emotional reactivity, because subjective emotional responses are complex and can depend upon other parts of the emotional reaction, including peripheral, cognitive and behavioral aspects.

Psychophysiological methods could add interesting information for the study of personality–emotion relationships. Indeed, some studies including acoustic startle probes (Corr, 2002), event-related potentials (ERPs) (De Pascalis, Strippoli, Riccardi, & Vergari, 2004), and neuroimaging techniques (Canli et al., 2002) reported results that were generally consistent with those obtained with subjective ratings. For instance, Canli et al. (2002) reported a positive correlation between extraversion and activation of the amygdala following the presentation of happy, but not angry, fearful, sad or neutral faces, indicating that emotional responses to pleasant stimuli are modulated by extraversion. Thus, these studies support and extend previously observed relationships between personality traits and emotions by using objective measures.

Furthermore, autonomic reactions are an important component of the emotional response. More particularly, skin conductance response (SCR) is a classical and sensitive way to assess affective arousal and directly reflects sympathetic nervous system reactions (Dawson, Schell, & Filion, 2000). Interestingly, some studies have demonstrated that electrodermal activity (EDA) is related to behavioral inhibition and to individual differences in Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) strength (Clements and Turpin, 1995, Fowles, 2000). In contrast, other studies failed to link EDA to the activity of the BIS (Keltikangas-Jarvinen et al., 1999, Sosnowski et al., 1991). Thus, SCR recording could address the question of whether specific autonomic responses could be responsible, in part, for the personality influences on emotional reactions. Recently, Yoshino, Kimura, Yoshida, Takahashi, and Nomura (2005) showed that SCR were significantly larger in subjects with higher novelty seeking (NS) scores on the Cloninger’s model (Cloninger, Svrakic, & Przybeck, 1993) as compared with subjects with low NS scores when positive or negative stimuli were subliminally displayed. In addition, subjects with higher harm avoidance (HA) scores showed larger SCR than subjects with low HA scores for stimuli of all three valences. The authors concluded that dimensions of temperament could be associated with different patterns of unconscious emotional responses.

The main stream of research investigating the relationships between personality and emotions was mostly focused on the extraversion and neuroticism dimensions. However, more recently, some studies examined the associations between personality and emotions in reference to Gray’s Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Systems (BIS/BAS) which were related, as expected from their theoretical foundations, to negative and positive affects, respectively (De Pascalis et al., 2004, Gomez et al., 2000, Heponiemi et al., 2003). For instance, Gomez et al. (2000) found that either positive or negative mood was induced within a go/nogo task involving rewards or punishments (winning and losing money), and results indicated that BIS (anxiety) and BAS (impulsivity) predicted sensitivity to negative or positive mood induction, respectively. On the other hand, Corr (2002) reported that anxious subjects (high-BIS) showed greater startle response potentiation within a negative emotional context than non-anxious subjects (low-BIS), indicating that BIS modulates sensitivity to aversive stimulations.

In the present study, like Yoshino et al. (2005), the relationships between emotions and personality were investigated in reference to Cloninger’s biosocial model. This model suggested that personality could be divided into innate temperaments (novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence and persistence) and acquired characters (self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence) (Cloninger et al., 1993). Particularly, novelty seeking (NS) is the tendency to respond actively to novel stimuli leading to pursuit of rewards and escape from punishment and harm avoidance (HA) is the tendency to inhibit responses to signals of aversive stimuli that lead to avoidance of punishment and non-reward. Reward dependence (RD) is the tendency for a positive response to conditioned signals of reward that maintain behavior. Persistence (P) is perseverance despite frustration and fatigue. Self-directedness (SD) is the ability of an individual to control, regulate and adapt his or her behavior to fit the situation in accord with individually chosen goals and values. Cooperativeness (C) accounts for individual differences in identification with and acceptance of other people. Self-transcendence (ST) is associated with spirituality. Furthermore, NS refers to behavioral activation and HA to behavioral inhibition, since they were defined respectively as the tendencies to activate and inhibit behaviors (Cloninger, 1987); this (consistently with Cloninger’s NS and HA definitions) suggests that these temperaments would be related to differences in the innate emotional reactivity: high-NS subjects are expected to be particularly sensitive to pleasant stimuli, whereas high-HA subjects are expected to be more reactive to unpleasant stimuli. NS is also associated to Zuckerman’s impulsive sensation and sociability dimensions (both being defined as BAS-dependent and related to positive affects) and HA to Zuckerman’s neuroticism-anxiety dimension (defined as BIS-dependent and negative affects-related) (Zuckerman and Cloninger, 1996, Zuckerman et al., 1999).

To extend the exploration of the associations between personality and emotions, the aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between Cloninger’s dimensions of personality and emotional reactivity assessed by SCR. In contrast to the study of Yoshino et al. (2005) where the stimuli were presented subliminally, we want to assess whether personality traits could be associated with different patterns of conscious emotional responses by displaying emotional stimuli for a longer duration (5 s). Based on previous studies, we hypothesized that NS and HA dimensions will be related respectively to higher sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli (expressed by larger SCR and/or longer half-recovery time).

Section snippets

Subjects

The study was conducted on 55 healthy volunteers (15 males) with a mean age of 22 years (range from 19 to 30 years, SD = 2.41). Most of them (40) were undergraduate students who were enrolled in psychological courses. The other participants consisted of students’ relatives. They all underwent a clinical interview based on past history to exclude psychiatric and somatic diseases, and to be sure if they had normal or corrected to normal vision. The participants were naı¨ve to the aim of the

Results

The distribution of subjects among the high- and low-NS and HA groups, as well as mean age, NS, HA, PA and NA scores are depicted in Table 1. Pearson’s correlations between SCR recorded for the three picture categories and both arousal and mood ratings are shown in Table 2. Since no correlation reached significance, arousal and mood were not included within the following analysis.

A significant positive correlation was observed between magnitude and half-recovery time of SCR recorded during the

Discussion

The main results of the study showed that HA dimension and gender modulate SCR to emotional stimulations, suggesting that those factors interact with the perception and the processing of emotions. The present results showed that high-HA subjects exhibited shorter half-recovery times than low-HA subjects for neutral and positive pictures. The precise meaning of half-recovery time is still under question. Some authors consider this parameter as a simple index of emotion dissipation, while others

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Sophie Germain for her technical support for SCR recordings.

References (34)

  • L. Silvert et al.

    Autonomic responding to aversive words without conscious valence discrimination

    International Journal of Psychophysiology

    (2004)
  • A. Yoshino et al.

    Relationships between temperament dimensions in personality and unconscious emotional responses

    Biological Psychiatry

    (2005)
  • M. Zuckerman et al.

    Relationships between Cloninger’s, Zuckerman’s, and Eysenck’s dimensions of personality

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1996)
  • M. Zuckerman et al.

    Where do motivational and emotional traits fit within three factor models of personality?

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1999)
  • W. Boucsein

    Electrodermal activity

    (1992)
  • M. Bradley et al.

    Emotion and motivation II: Sex differences in picture processing

    Emotion

    (2001)
  • T. Canli et al.

    Amygdala response to happy faces as a function of extraversion

    Science

    (2002)
  • Cited by (38)

    • Shape of progress bar effect on subjective evaluation, duration perception and physiological reaction

      2021, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics
      Citation Excerpt :

      In addition, we considered the effects of gender, but there was no difference between genders in terms of physiological reaction. Previous research suggested that females (compared to men) were more sensitive to negative emotional stimuli, showing a stronger galvanic skin response (Mardaga et al., 2006), and a significantly slower heart rate when exposed to positive stimuli (Bianchin and Angrilli, 2012). Further studies with a larger number of samples are needed to study the gender differences in the user experience, so that some targeted recommendations can be applied to market segments or vertical markets.

    • A wavelet-based approach to emotion classification using EDA signals

      2018, Expert Systems with Applications
      Citation Excerpt :

      To gain access to these bio-signals, different electrical devices and sensors are needed, which are directly attached to specific parts of the body. For instance, EDA, one of the most commonly used bio-signals to analyze body response and emotion features, can be measured by simple wearable devices such as a Q-sensor (Mardaga, Laloyaux, & Hansenne, 2006; Ooi et al., 2016). Even though there are some difficulties in using EDA-sensitive sensors, such as the skin status and skin contact (SC) level, they are easily accessible devices for emotion recognition purposes.

    • Harm avoidance in adolescents modulates late positive potentials during affective picture processing

      2013, International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience
      Citation Excerpt :

      Skin conductance response, which measures autonomic response, provides further evidence for HA modulation of selective attention toward affective stimuli. High-HA adults show longer half-recovery times after viewing negative pictures than neutral pictures (Mardaga et al., 2006); whereas low-HA adults show longer half-recovery time after viewing positive pictures (Mardaga and Hansenne, 2010). That is, High-HA adults sustain emotional reactivity to negative pictures for a longer period of time than to neutral pictures, while low-HA adults sustain longer emotional reactivity to positive pictures than to neutral pictures.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text