Beyond the Moderating Role of Neuroticism on Evaluative Conditioning: Threat Appraisal

Reality perception is often altered by general dispositional factors that are associated with emotional vulnerability, both inherited and acquired, that emerge in a specific learning context. The current study will examine whether neuroticism and looming cognitive style, factors that account for emotional vulnerability, interact in a manner that influences the evaluative conditioning effect (the magnitude of valence change in a conditioned stimulus due to pairing with an unconditioned stimulus).

To achieve this, we will implement an evaluative conditioning procedure that pairs positive stimuli, nonthreatening negative stimuli, and threatening negative stimuli with neutral stimuli. Participants will also provide measures of valence and threat characteristics for the unconditioned stimuli, along with assessments of neuroticism and looming cognitive style.

We expect that the evaluative conditioning effect will be mediated by threat and valence evaluations of unconditioned stimuli. We also expect that neuroticism will moderate the valence and threat values of unconditioned stimuli, whereas cognitive looming will moderate the magnitude of valence transfer from unconditioned stimuli to conditioned stimuli.

We presume that neuroticism will explain the reactivity to valenced and threatening stimuli, while looming cognitive style will account for the negative bias in the conditioned stimuli evaluation.