Personality and emotional performance: extraversion, neuroticism, and self-monitoring

Using an experimental design, the authors linked personality to performance on two emotional regulation tasks requiring the expression of either anger or enthusiasm. Across tasks, self-monitoring was associated with effective emotional performance. High self-monitors reported less stress and more deep acting than low self-monitors and did not experience elevated heart rate during emotional performance. The authors also examined affective traits, positing that emotional regulation would be less stressful for individuals who were asked to perform personality congruent emotions. As expected, individuals high on extraversion experienced elevated heart rates when asked to express personality incongruent emotions (i.e., anger). However, the association between extraversion and emotional performance was not significantly different for the two types of emotional regulation (anger and enthusiasm). Neuroticism was associated with increased heart rate and poor performance in both tasks. Overall, these data provide partial support for our personality congruency hypotheses and suggest that personality plays an important role in effective emotional performance.