Chapter 13 McCrae and Costa’s Five-Factor Trait Theory 401It makes intuitive sense that teens who are more introverted and neurotic and
less agreeable might find face to face social interaction less rewarding than their
more extraverted, agreeable, and emotionally stable peers. Because of this, such
youth likely find the Internet a more enjoyable context for communication. Van
der Aa and colleagues (2009) hypothesize that these young people may end up in
a vicious cycle of ever greater Internet use that may become compulsive, setting
themselves up for lower well-being. Perhaps, then, targeting teens with this trait
profile to reduce Internet usage and provide rewarding offline activities could
improve their mental health.
Traits and Emotions
Personality traits affect more than success at school and other long-term outcomes.
Traits can also affect the mood a person experiences on a daily basis. If you look
carefully at the descriptors of each trait, particularly extraversion and neuroticism,
this is not surprising. To be high on extraversion is to be fun loving and passion-
ate (both positive feelings), whereas to be high on neuroticism is to be anxious
and self-conscious (both negative feelings). Therefore, researchers have long con-
sidered positive emotion to be the core of extraversion and negative emotion to be
the core of neuroticism (Costa & McCrae, 1980).
Although the predictions seem intuitive that more “positive” feelings should
be associated with extraversion and more “negative” feelings with neuroticism,
what about the other traits of the Big Five? Also, what about more specific
emotional states? Shiota, Keltner, and John (2006) explored the relationships
among multiple positive emotions and the core personality dimensions of the Big
Five for a more nuanced picture of the relationship between personality and
emotion. In this case, the researchers asked students enrolled in an undergraduate
personality psychology class (surely much like the one you are enrolled in as
you read this textbook!) to rate their general experiences of seven distinct posi-
tive emotions (joy, contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement, and awe)
on a scale the researchers had developed, called the Dispositional Positive Emo-
tions Scale (DPES). Some example questions on this scale were “I am at peace
with my life”—contentment; “I feel wonder almost every day”—awe; “Good
things happen to me all the time”—joy. In addition, participants also completed
the NEO-PI to assess their scores on the Big Five dimensions of personality. As
well, peers completed ratings of the participants’ personalities.
This was a correlational study. Many interesting significant relationships
emerged between participants’ self-ratings of their positive emotions and their per-
sonality traits. All seven positive emotions were significantly correlated with Extra-
version, as predicted, with more extraverted people experiencing more daily joy,
contentment, pride, love, compassion, amusement, and awe than more introverted
people. Interestingly, domain-relevant positive emotions correlated with Conscien-
tiousness and Agreeableness. That is, more conscientious people experience more of
the agency-related emotions of joy, contentment, and pride than their less conscien-
tious peers, and more agreeable individuals experience (perhaps intuitively) more
love and compassion than their more disagreeable counterparts. Awe was, as we
might anticipate, the most strongly related positive emotion to Openness to Experience.