Chapter 13 McCrae and Costa’s Five-Factor Trait Theory 403wanted to extend their findings for extraversion and positive mood, so they conducted
another study, but this time investigated the effects for neuroticism and negative mood.
The procedure was essentially the same as their previous study, but instead of one
person being instructed to act extraverted or introverted, one participant was instructed
to act “emotional, subjective, moody, and demanding” (all of which are aspects of
high neuroticism) and another participant was instructed to act “unemotional, objec-
tive, steady, and undemanding” (all of which are aspects of low neuroticism). The
roles of high neuroticism and low neuroticism were switched for the second group
discussion. As predicted, participants reported being in a worse mood when they acted
neurotic than when they did not. The general conclusion of this research then is that
if you are in a bad mood but want to be in a good mood, act extraverted.
So far we’ve discussed how the trait of neuroticism is generally related to
negative emotion and how acting neurotic can cause negative emotion. But there is
some recent research that suggests that it is not the case that everybody who scores
high on neuroticism experiences more negative emotion (Robinson & Clore, 2007).
There are individual differences for the speed with which people process incoming
information, and these differences might influence the relationship between neuroti-
cism and negative mood. These differences in speed are measured in milliseconds
and are therefore imperceptible both to the individual and to other people, but there
are computers that can measure these differences quite accurately. To measure these
speed differences, participants sit in front of a computer and complete a Stroop task,
which involves identifying whether the color of the font for a word presented on the
screen is red or green. This task is more difficult than it sounds because sometimes
the word “red” appears in green font, so while the correct response is “green,”
people will initially want to respond with “red” and have to overcome that tendency.
In the study conducted by Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore (2007),
participants first completed this Stroop task while a computer measured how fast
they completed the task. After completing the computer task, participants also
completed a standard self-report measure of neuroticism. Then participants were
asked to record their mood at the end of every day for 2 weeks. According to
past research, neuroticism should predict daily negative mood, but Robinson and
Clore (2007) predicted that this would be the case only for those who were
relatively slow at the categorization task (Stroop task). The reasoning for this
prediction is that those who are fast at processing things in their environment do
not need to rely on traits such as neuroticism to interpret events and thereby
cause negative mood. In other words, fast processors objectively interpret their
environment whereas slow processors are more subjective in their evaluations by
relying on trait dispositions to interpret events.
Indeed, this is exactly what the researchers found: Neuroticism did pre-
dict experiencing more negative mood over the course of the 2-week reporting
period but only for those who were slow at the computer task. Those who were
high on neuroticism but fast at the computer task did not report any more
negative emotion over the course of the 2-week period than their low neuroti-
cism counterparts.
Taken together, the research on traits and emotion shows that although
the early research in this area showing that extraversion and neuroticism are
related to positive and negative mood respectively is not inaccurate, it does not