in that they operate in the service of social-problem solving. We might link
appraisal to the apprehension of experience and coping to practical intelli-
gence (cf. Zeidner & Matthews, 2000). However, especially in challenging
and stressful circumstances, adaptation is multilayered, requiring not just
higher-level cognitive skills but also lower level, often implicit processes, such
as threat evaluation, and neural processes controlling arousal and stress re-
sponses. Lower-level processes may influence both skill acquisition (compe-
tence), and the extent to which skills can be successfully executed within a
given context (performance).
In general, adaptation involves a multitude of independent processes, at
different levels of abstraction. However, despite the distributed nature of
adaptive processing, individual differences are given coherence by self-regu-
lation. Over the long term, self-regulation supports personal goals and aspi-
rations. Understanding the individual’s long-term goals is necessarily ideo-
graphic (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 2000), but we can identify some consistencies
associated with personality traits. We have argued that traits represent adap-
tations to the major challenges of human life that constrain long-term self-
regulation, shaped by both heredity and social learning. For example, if
extraversion represents adaptation to cognitively demanding social environ-
ments, we expect that, typically, extraverts’ long-term goals will involve what
are, in the occupational field, termed social and enterprising interests (e.g.,
Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997).
The stable adaptations described as traits are supported by a set of often
small biases in cognition, emotion and motivation. Biases include both low-
level biases in biocognitive components, and high-level biases in assigning
personal meaning to situations. Thus, we have an explanation for the person-
ality paradox. Traits are not controlled by some single master-process, such
as arousability. Instead, we see the trait most clearly through its gross, adap-
tive features. Even the lay observer can see that extraverts are more sociable
than introverts, but the roots of individual differences in sociability are a
complex set of small influences, that feed into social skill acquisition over
time. Effects of personality traits on intellectual functioning may reflect sev-
eral of these separate biases, depending on the context. In this chapter, we
discussed how traits may influence: (a) social skills and problem-solving abili-
ties, (b) effects of arousal and stress on basic information-processing func-
tions, (c) the priority given to self-evaluative thinking that may interfere with
intellectual functioning, and (d) the priority given to applying the intellect to
detecting and evaluating personal risk.
In the short term, the task for self-regulation is to solve some immediate
adaptive problem, whose terms are often outside of personal control. Again,
we emphasize that within-situation adaptation is supported by multiple levels
and domains of process. Studies of transient states suggest how emotions,
cognitions and motivations may cohere around self-regulative goals. For ex-
170 MATTHEWS AND ZEIDNER