The relationship between cognitive processing of affective verbal material and the basic personality structure

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive processing of affective verbal material and the basic personality structure. For the purposes of research a new experiment was created, where affective priming was measured in a lexical decision task. The term affective priming stands for facilitation in recognition of the stimuli that comes after the presentation of stimuli of the same valence. In this experiment, two words were presented on a screen in front of the subject (stimuli-prime and stimuli-target). Those two words were of the same or different affective valence, and the subject's were instructed to respond whether the second word on the screen had a meaning or not. The basic personality structure was defined by the 'Big five' model and the Disintegration model and measured by NEO PI-R and Delta 10 questionnaires. The results of the affective priming experiment indicated a strong effect of positive facilitation and much weaker effect off negative facilitation. Two significant functions were extracted by quasicanonical correlation analysis. The first function showed correlation between the effect of positive facilitation and all of the subscales of Neuroticism, Extraversion and Conscientiousness (NEO PI-R), as well as all sub dimensions of Disintegration (DELTA 10). The second one indicated to a correlation between the negative facilitation effect and some subscales of Neuroticism, Extraversion and Agreeableness (NEO PI-R), as well as all subscales of Disintegration (DELTA 10).