Individual differences in personality traits affect performance, frustration, and effort in a speech-in-noise task

Abstract

Individual personality traits may influence psychological and physiological response to background noise. Here, we assessed participants’ (N = 93) performance on a speech-in-noise arithmetic task along with self-rated effort and frustration and several emotion/personality-related questionnaires. We also manipulated the feeling of control that participants had over noise level by allowing half to choose task difficulty ("easy” or “hard") while assigning the others to a difficulty level without agency. On each trial participants heard three spoken digits and added them. On half of the trials, one digit was masked by noise. To better assess the impact of choice and perceived difficulty, signal-to-noise ratio and spoken digits were identical across all conditions. Participants who scored higher on the Extraversion scale of the Big-5 personality inventory expressed significantly more frustration when they had no control over task difficulty, and less frustration when they had control (interaction, p = 0.03). Similarly, participants with a more external (higher) Locus of Control reported putting significantly more effort into the hard task (whether assigned or chosen) but less effort into the easy task (interaction p = 0.01). Results will be discussed in terms of implications for future research on noise sensitivity and long-term health.