EMOTIONS, TEMPERAMENT, AND PERSONALITY

The emotions are central to the issues of modern times, but perhaps they have been critical to the issues of every era. Poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages have recognized the significance of emotions in individual life and human affairs, and the meaning of a specific emotion, at least in the context of verbal expression, seems to be timeless. Although art, literature, and philosophy have contributed to the understanding of emotion experiences throughout the ages, modern science has provided a substantial increase in the knowledge of the neurophysiological basis of emotions and their structure and functions.

Research in neuroscience and developmental psychology suggests that emotions can be activated automatically and unconsciously in subcortical pathways. This suggests that humans often experience emotions without reasoning why. Such precognitive information processing may be continuous, and the resulting emotion states may influence the many perceptual-cognitive and behavioral processes (such as perceiving, thinking, judging, remembering, imagining, and coping) that activate emotions through pathways involving the neocortex.

The two recognized types of emotion activation have important implications for the role of emotions in cognition and action. Subcortical, automatic information processing may provide the primitive data for immediate emotional response, whereas higher-order cognitive information processing involving the neocortex yields the evaluations and attributions necessary for the appropriate emotions and coping strategy in a complex situation.

Biosocial and constructivist theories agree that perception, thought, imagery, and memory are important causes of emotions. They also agree that once emotion is activated, emotion and cognition influence each other. How people feel affects what they perceive, think, and do, and vice versa.

Emotions have physiological, expressive, and experiential components, and each component can be studied in terms of its structure and functions. The physiological component influences the intensity and duration of felt emotion, expressions serve communicative and sociomotivational functions, and emotion experiences (feeling states) influence cognition and action.

Research has shown that certain emotion expressions are innate and universal and have significant functions in infant development and in infant-parent relations and that there are stable individual differences in emotion expressiveness. Emotion states influence what people perceive, learn, and remember, and they are involved in the development of empathic, altruistic, and moral behaviour and in basic personality traits.

Most theorists agree that emotion thresholds and emotion responsiveness are part of the infrastructure of temperament and personality. There has, however, been little empirical research on the relations among measures of emotions, dimensions of temperament, and personality traits.

Emotions and temperament.

Most theories of temperament define at least one dimension of temperament in terms of emotion. Two theories maintain that negative emotions form the core of one of the basic and stable dimensions of temperament. Another suggests that each of the dimensions of temperament is rooted in a particular discrete emotion and that these dimensions form the emotional substrate of personality characteristics. For example, proneness to anger would influence the development of aggressiveness, and the emotion of interest would account for the temperament trait of persistence.

Emotions and personality.

A number of major personality theories, such as theories of temperament, identify dimensions or traits of personality in terms of emotions. For example, the German-born British psychologist Hans J. Eysenck has proposed three fundamental dimensions of personality: extroversion-introversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Extroversion-introversion includes the trait of sociability, which can also be related to emotion (e.g., interest, as expressed toward people, versus shyness). Neuroticism includes emotionality defined, as in temperament theory, as nonspecific negative emotional responsiveness. Psychoticism may represent emotions gone awry or the absence of emotions appropriate to the circumstances.

Several studies have shown that measures of positive emotionality and negative emotionality are independent, are not inversely related, and have stability over time. Further, it has been shown that positive and negative emotionality have different relations with symptoms of psychological disorders. For example, negative emotionality correlates positively with panic attack, panic-associated symptoms and obsessive-compulsive symptoms; that is, the higher the degree of negative emotion, the more likely that the attack or symptoms will occur. Conversely, positive emotionality correlates negatively with these phenomena. Although several of the same negative emotions characterize both the anxiety and depressive disorders, a lack of positive emotion experiences is more characteristic of depression than of anxiety.

Continuity of emotion expressiveness.

Some studies have shown that specific emotions, identified in terms of expressive behaviour and physiological functions, have stability. One study showed that a child’s expression of positive and negative emotion was consistent during the first two years of life. Other studies have shown stability of wariness or fear responses, indicating that a child who is fearful at one age is likely to be fearful in comparable situations at a later age. In a study of infants’ responses to the pain of DTP inoculation, it was found that the child’s anger expression indexes at ages two, four, and six months accurately predicted his or her anger expression in the inoculations at 19 months of age. Similar results were obtained for the sadness expression.

A study of mother-infant interaction and separation found that infants’ expression at three to six months of age were accurate predictors of infant emotion expressive patterns at nine to 12 months of age. Emotion expression patterns have also shown continuity from 13 to 18 months of age during brief mother-infant separation.

Source : http://universityofzafarana.freeservers.com/Directorio/Marraquex/bibliografia/brit_emo.htm