Exploring the association between neuroticism and negativity bias in evaluative counterconditioning

Abstract

People high on neuroticism express a negativity bias in attention, memory, and interpretation, giving primacy to negative rather than positive information. Investigating additional forms of negativity bias in neuroticism could provide further insights into the situations where people who score high on neuroticism tend to remain anchored on negative aspects. We examined whether neuroticism is related to negativity bias in evaluative learning. Instruction-based and experience-based counterconditioning are two evaluative learning procedures in which a conditioned stimulus (CS) is related to a positive or a negative unconditioned stimulus (US) in Phase 1 and with a US of the opposite valence in Phase 2. Using these procedures, we obtained partial support for a negativity bias in counterconditioning among people who scored high on neuroticism. Specifically, participants scoring high on negative emotionality altered the CSs ratings more easily from positive to negative than from negative to positive, a pattern observed in instruction-based counterconditioning (Experiment 1) but not in experience-based counterconditioning (Experiment 2). In line with previous findings, we could conclude that people who score high on neuroticism tend to give primacy to emotionally negative information at the expense of positive information, particularly in ambiguous (learning) contexts.