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 and emerge in a specific learning context. The current study examined whether neuroticism and looming cognitive style, factors that account for emotional vulnerability, interact to influence emotional learning.

We implemented an evaluative conditioning procedure that paired positive, negative and threatening stimuli with neutral stimuli. Participants provided measures of valence and threat attributes for the unconditioned stimuli, and of neuroticism and looming cognitive style.

The evaluative conditioning effect was mediated by valence evaluations of unconditioned stimuli, with partial evidence for threat ratings mediation. Highly neurotic individuals evaluated negative and threatening unconditioned stimuli more extremely compared to their normed attributes. Similarly, the evaluative conditioning effect was more pronounced in participants who scored higher in neuroticism, for both negative and threatening conditions. While neuroticism emerged as a significant moderator across different levels of analysis, looming cognitive style presented some buffering tendencies on the evaluative conditioning effect, but the effect was uncertain.

Neuroticism explained not only the extremity in the perception of negative and threatening stimuli, but also the amplitude of negative valence transfer from threatening and negative evaluations. Looming cognitive style seemed to attenuate the valence transfer, though greater uncertainty characterized its effects.