Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 14. Eysenck, McCrae, and
Costa’s Trait and Factor
Theories(^440) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
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 ini-
tially want to respond with “red” and have to overcome that tendency.
In the study conducted by Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore (2007), partic-
ipants 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) pre-
dicted that this would be the case only for those who were relatively slow at the cat-
egorization 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 predict ex-
periencing 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 neu-
roticism but fast at the computer task did not report any more negative emotion over
the course of the 2-week period than their low neuroticism 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 portray the
complete picture of the complex relationship between traits and emotion. The re-
search by McNiel and Fleeson (2006) showed that acting extraverted, even if you are
not high on extraversion, can increase positive mood. Furthermore, although neu-
roticism is related to experiencing more negative mood, Robinson and Clore (2007)
demonstrated that this was the case only for those who not only were high on neu-
roticism but also were relatively slow at categorizing incoming information. Traits
are good predictors of grades in school, SAT scores, and even daily mood, but traits
are not an immutable destiny. Even if your traits predispose you toward certain types
of behavior, your actions can subvert those dispositions.
Critique of Trait and Factor Theories
Trait and factor methods—especially those of Eysenck and advocates of the Big Five
model—provide important taxonomies that organize personality into meaningful
classifications. As pointed out in Chapter 1, however, taxonomies alone do not ex-
plain or predict behavior, two important functions of useful theories.
Do these theories go beyond taxonomies and produce important personality
research? The trait and factor theories of Eysenck and Costa and McCrae are exam-
ples of a strictly empirical approach to personality investigation. These theories were
built by collecting as much data as possible on a large number of people, intercorre-
lating the scores, factor analyzing correlation matrices, and applying appropriate
psychological significance to the resultant factors. A psychometric approach, rather
434 Part IV Dispositional Theories