Personality and the Two Ways of Regulating Emotion

Abstract

The dominant model of personality describes the whole person in terms of dispositional traits. The current study considered a different concept of personality in terms of human functioning in time and space, as a whole system of personality dynamics. The aim of the study was to explore this concept using psychophysiological methods to examine distinctions between personalities during emotion generation and regulation. Specifically, the study examined differences in the number of time lags of autocorrelation of cardiac interbeat intervals (IBI) from baseline to emotion generation and regulation to recovery. It was hypothesized that the number of time lags of autocorrelation of IBIs for each personality would change from baseline to be closer to a value that affect is functioning during emotion generation and regulation and then would return to be closer to the baseline value during recovery. Thirty-three Americans, born and raised in the U.S., were recruited and assigned to one or the other personality group primarily based on their descriptions of a short clip. Using statistics t-test, the findings revealed significant difference in the number of time lags between the two personality groups during the baseline period (p=0.039). The changes in the mean number of time lags in the M group from one period to another were as predicted and did not change significantly. The predicted change in the L group from the baseline period to the sad period was not statistically significant. ANOVA analysis showed an interaction effect that was statistically significant, F(1,21) = 5.322, p=0.031.