Abstract
The present research examined the moderating effects of four personality traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism) and their facets as measured by NEO-PI-R ( Costa & McCrae, 2005 ) on the relationship between emotion suppression and sympathetic activation. Peripheral pulse amplitude (PPA), spontaneous skin conductance response fluctuations (SCR), and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded in 129 university students, who were given instruction to behave as usual or to suppress their emotions while watching neutral and emotional movie clips. The results show that only agreeableness and one of its facets, tendermindedness (A6), moderated the effects of suppression on changes in PPA and SCR. While participants were watching emotional movie clip under the instruction to suppress, the level of sympathetic arousal in high agreeable persons increased more compared to those with lower agreeableness. These results were explained by the mechanisms related to the arousability and trait-incongruence responses.
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