Keeping Calm and Carrying On: Relating Affect Spin and Pulse to Complex Skill Acquisition and Adaptive Performance

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Personality Psychology

Background:

• Dynamic personality constructs, like affect variability, are under-researched.
• Affect variability, encompassing spin (fluctuations in pleasantness/activation) and pulse (fluctuations in intensity), is linked to emotional reactivity and adjustment.
• Traditional personality measures have limited predictive power for skill acquisition and performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how affect variability (spin and pulse) explains variance in skill acquisition and adaptive performance.
• To determine if spin and pulse incrementally explain performance beyond Big Five personality traits.
• To examine the mechanisms through which affect variability might undermine effort and the effort-performance relationship.

Main Methods:

• Laboratory study with 214 undergraduates learning a complex video game.
• Repeated measures of emotion and performance.
• Discontinuous growth modeling and a task-change paradigm to differentiate acquisition and adaptation.

Main Results:

• Affect variability (spin and pulse) negatively impacted skill acquisition and adaptive performance, independent of the Big Five.
• Higher affect spin and pulse were associated with reduced sustained effort and lower performance.
• Affect variability's detrimental effects were more pronounced during adaptation than acquisition.

Conclusions:

• Affect variability is a significant predictor of skill acquisition and performance, operating through effort and effort-performance dynamics.
• The findings challenge the universal applicability of "keep calm and carry on" for individuals with high affect variability.
• Further research is needed to understand the mediating processes by which affect variability influences success in learning and performance contexts.