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The relationship between personality and affect over the lifespan
Personality and Individual Dierences 27 (1999) 1141±1156
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The relationship between personality and aect over the lifespan Kay Wilson, Eleonora Gullone* Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3168, Australia Received 11 May 1998; received in revised form 7 January 1999; accepted 11 February 1999
Abstract This study compared the trait and emotion perspectives of personality development by examining relationships between extraversion, neuroticism, positive and negative aect across the lifespan. A total of 533 volunteers: 228 children and early adolescents (8 to 15 years), 163 late adolescents and young adults (16 to 29 years) and 142 adults (30 to 68 years) completed Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and the Positive and Negative Aect Schedule (PANAS). Extraversion correlated signi®cantly with positive aect and neuroticism with negative aect in each age group. As predicted by the emotion perspective, correlations were signi®cantly stronger for adults than children and early adolescents. In addition, extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect factors explained less variance for children and early adolescents compared to those of adults. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Neuroticism; Extraversion; Positive aect; Negative aect; Children; Adolescents; Adults
1. Introduction In the adult literature, research on the relationships between personality traits and positive and negative aect has been instrumental in re®ning understanding in both ®elds (Tellegen, 1985; Watson & Clark, 1992; Berry & Hansen, 1996; David, Green, Martin & Suls, 1997; Suh, Diener & Fujita, 1996). In particular, previous studies have demonstrated prominent correlations between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect with * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-3-905-3968; fax: +61-3-905-3948. E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Gullone) 0191-8869/99/$ - see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 8 8 6 9 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 5 8 - 6
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remarkable robustness, stability and generality (see Table 1 for summary). This pattern of correlations has appeared across diverse samples such as, older adults (Costa & McCrae, 1980), college students (Meyer & Shack, 1989) and new mothers (Izard, Libero, Putnam & Haynes, 1993). It has also withstood dierent measurement instruments including those with questionable psychometric properties (e.g. Bradburn aect scales, Costa & McCrae, 1980) and various methodologies including self-reports (e.g. Watson & Clark, 1992), spouse-ratings (McCrae & Costa, 1991) and daily mood reports (David et al., 1997). Recent experimental research has also con®rmed the pattern found by correlational studies. For example, extraverts report increased positive aect after imagining themselves experiencing a pleasant event, while neuroticism predicts greater responsiveness to negative mood induction (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991; Rusting & Larsen, 1997). It is hardly surprising, then, that factoranalytic studies have revealed a common underlying two-factor structure between personality and aect in adults made up of (1) the neuroticism-negative aect and (2) the extraversionpositive aect (Meyer & Shack, 1989; Berry & Hansen, 1996). The relationship between the personality and aect domains, demonstrated empirically in
Table 1 Patterns and magnitude of correlations between neuroticism (N) and negative aect (NA) and extraversion (E) and positive aect (PA) across studies using adult samples. EPI: Eysenck's Personality Inventory; Bradburn's ABS: Aect Balance Scale; EPQ: Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire; NEO-PI: the NEO Personality Inventory; DES: Dierential Emotion Scale; PANAS: Positive and Negative Aect Schedule; NEO-FFI: NEO Five Factor Inventory Research study
Variables
Correlation coecient
Aect instrument
Measurement
Costa and McCrae (1980) (N = 566=903)
N and NA E and PA
0.35±0.43 0.16±0.27
state state
EPI Bradburn's ABS
Meyer and Shack (1989) (N = 231)
N and NA N and NA E and PA E and PA
0.55 0.38 0.69 0.51
trait state trait state
EPQ aect scale based on research by Watson and Tellegen (1985)
McCrae and Costa (1991) (N's=349±419)
N and NA E and PA
0.40±0.42 0.24±0.32
state state
NEO-PI Bradburn's AS
Watson and Clark (1992) (N = 225±532)
N and NA E and PA N and NA E and PA
0.52±0.65 0.48±0.64 0.33 0.42
trait trait trait trait
NEO-PI PANAS
Izard et al. (1993) (N = 88)
N and NA E and PA
0.32±0.46 0.21±0.35
state and trait state and trait
EPQ and DES
Suh et al. (1996) (N = 222)
N and NA E and PA
0.47±0.69 0.33±0.54
trait
NEO-FFI own aect scales
Correlations `corrected' for item overlap.
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adult studies, has generated contentious theoretical debate regarding the developmental origins and direction of the relationship. Are the personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism responsible for regulating positive and negative aect? Or, do positive and negative emotions, via their relations with cognition and behaviour, contribute to forming personality traits? In order to understand such complex issues about personality processes two competing theoretical models have emerged: the trait and emotion perspectives. The trait perspective holds that neuroticism and extraversion are directly responsible for regulating individual dierences in the experience of negative aect and positive aect, respectively (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Watson & Clark, 1984, 1992). This perspective is based on the `temperamental view' (McCrae & Costa, 1991) that neuroticism and extraversion, which correspond to neurophysiological dierences in emotional reactivity (Eysenck, 1967; Gray, 1987), predispose individuals to emotionally respond in a characteristically distressed or cheerful way. An alternative pathway is that personality traits indirectly in¯uence long term aect, by predisposing a person to participate in activities that induce positive and negative aect (McCrae & Costa, 1991). Thus, the trait perspective is essentially a `top-down' approach, as the focus is on the way the person responds to what happens to them (Diener, 1984; Avia, 1997). The emotion perspective is in agreement that ``traits of personality, once they have developed, in¯uence emotion activation and emotion regulation'' (Izard et al., 1993 p. 848). However, the in¯uence of personality traits on emotionality is only half the equation. For, Izard et al. (1993) it is the `unique motivational properties' of discrete emotions such as, interest and fear, (which compose the global dimensions of positive and negative aect)1 that are the `engines' which organise perception, cognition and action, and in so doing also organise the development of personality traits. From this perspective, each person is born with dierent emotion thresholds, that is, level of emotion re-activity. It is the interaction between these genetically predetermined emotion thresholds and actual experience and learning that produces personality traits (e.g. neuroticism and extraversion). The crucial dierence between the trait and emotion perspectives is that the latter perspective explains the relationship between personality and emotion as bidirectional because emotions are both a cause and eect of personality traits. As a consequence, both theories make dierent predictions about the pattern and strength of the relationship between personality and aect over development. It must be assumed from the trait perspective that emotion is inherently related to personality, since it is a direct outcome of it. This relationship would be expected to be of similar magnitude across the lifespan, despite developmental period. For example, as long as there is neuroticism (at whatever level), there will be a corresponding level of negative aect 1
Most theorists agree that positive and negative aect can be thought of as `higher order' factors consisting of a combination of individual `basic' emotions which share the same hedonic tone, but at a lower level remain independent and distinguishable from each other (Watson & Clark, 1992; Izard, 1993; Diener, Smith & Fujita, 1995). Positive aect, in its narrowest form, refers to pleasant feelings such as happiness and joy (Diener et al., 1995), whereas broader de®nitions emphasise high arousal and pleasurable engagement with life such as alertness, excitement and inspiration (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). Negative aect, is for some theorists a dimension of unpleasant emotion, such as sadness (Diener et al., 1995), but for others it signi®es intense feelings of subjective distress ranging from anger to guilt and fear (Watson & Clark, 1984).
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induced by it. In contrast, the emotion perspective would predict that whilst aect is present throughout development, its relationship with personality (i.e. incorporating cognition and behaviour) will become stronger as the individual develops a more stable constellation of personality traits. That is, cumulative emotional experiences over development will increasingly and more tightly de®ne and dictate behaviour and cognition as well as corresponding aect (hence personality). In light of the theoretical debate involving developmental issues, the focus of research to date on the relationship between personality and aect in adults and the corresponding neglect of children and adolescents is almost startling. Thus, the purpose of this study was to begin by empirically con®rming the relationships between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect in children and adolescents. More importantly, this study compared the pattern and strength of the relationship between personality traits and aect in three age groups, de®ned as (1) children and early adolescents aged 8 to 15 years, (2) late adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 29 years and (3) adults over 30 years. Based on the trait perspective, the magnitude of relationship between personality and aect should not dier signi®cantly over the lifespan. Conversely, signi®cant dierences in the strength of the relationship between the three age groups, indicating that the two constructs become increasingly entangled with experience and maturity, would support the emotion perspective.
2. Method 2.1. Participants Participants consisted of a total of 555 volunteers, for which 533 responses were analysed, divided into three dierent age ranges. Participants were ®rst separated into two age groups based on whether the junior (valid for 8 to 15 years) or adult (valid for 16 years and over) set of personality and aect questionnaires was completed. Longitudinal and twin studies have indicated that neuroticism and extraversion do not show their adult levels of stability until the age of 30 years (McCrae & Costa, 1991; Viken, Rose, Kapiro & Koskenvuo, 1994). Consequently, participants over 16 years, who completed the adult form, were further divided according to whether they had reached 30 years. Therefore, the lifespan was broken into three samples: children and early adolescents (ages 8 to 15), late adolescents and young adults (ages 16 to 29) and adults (ages 30 to 68). 2.2. Children and early adolescents (8 to 15 years) Children and early adolescents were recruited from three primary and two secondary schools situated in suburban Melbourne, encompassing diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Informed consent was obtained from the Directorate of Education, principals and parents. While the initial sample consisted of 240 youths, 12 were excluded for failing to complete demographic information. Thus, data were analysed for 228 children and early adolescents, 112 males and 116 females, ranging from 8 to 15, with an average age of 12.63 years.
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2.3. Late adolescents and young adults (16 to 29 years) Data were originally collected for 170 late adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 29 years. Three were excluded as only one questionnaire was completed and ®ve were discarded for being below the valid age range of the adult questionnaires. Thus, the ®nal sample consisted of 167 late adolescents and young adults, including 65 males and 102 females, with an average age of 18.97 years. Participants were senior students from two secondary schools (n = 107) and undergraduate psychology students at Monash University (n = 60). 2.4. Adults (ages 30 to 68 years) The adult sample comprised 144 participants from which two were excluded for failing to complete demographic information. There were 31 males and 111 females, with an average age of 43.42 years. Participants consisted of a diverse group of adults recruited from the general adult population in metropolitan Melbourne. The adult sample included 13 mature age Monash University students, 60 casual telephonist clerks, 25 administrative sta and 18 teachers. The remainder professed a variety of occupations such as managers, solicitors and accountants, housewives, landscape gardeners, hairdressers and factory hands. 2.5. Measures 2.5.1. Personality Personality was assessed using the neuroticism and extraversion scales of the junior and adult forms of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975). Psychoticism items were excluded. The EPQ was chosen over other widely used instruments such as the NEO-PI-R, as it is valid for children and adolescents as well as adults. The adult form is suitable for persons 16 years and above and consists of 45 questions about feelings, thoughts and behaviour to which participants answer `yes' or `no'. The junior form is appropriate for youths aged 7 to 15 years and contains 44 neuroticism and extraversion items which are conceptually similar to the adult questionnaire. Research has established that the EPQ is a reliable, valid and widely used measure of personality (e.g. Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975; White & Nias, 1994; Avia et al., 1995; McKenzie, Tindell & French, 1997). 2.6. Aect The Positive and Negative Aect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988) contains two selfreport scales consisting of ten words describing emotions which have been selected as `pure' markers of positive and negative aect. Positive aect refers to feelings of arousal and pleasantness. Negative aect is an indicator of subjective distress, anger, fear, guilt and nervousness. The `extent' response format, favoured by Watson et al. (1988) was used to obtain a measure of the `average' level of each aect taking into account frequency and intensity. Participants made a global rating of the extent to which they generally felt each emotion on a ®ve point scale ranging from `very slightly' (=1) to `extremely' (=5). We used
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the trait form. The PANAS has been reported to have sound psychometric properties (Watson et al., 1988; Watson & Walker, 1996). The PANAS has also been modi®ed for children and adolescents aged 8 to 15 years (i.e. PANAS-C; Joiner, Catanzaro & Laurent, 1996) by simplifying items to make them more accessible to youth (i.e. `distressed' was changed to `stressed out'). The PANAS-C has been reported to have good psychometric properties as a measure of state aect in child and adolescent psychiatric in-patients (Joiner et al.) and is a reliable and valid test of trait aect in youth (Wilson, Gullone & Moss, 1998). 2.7. Procedure Data were collected by the ®rst named author. Participants were administered the junior and adult forms of the EPQ and PANAS as appropriate. Children and adolescents, in classes nominated by principals, completed the questionnaires on a group basis within school hours. University students and adults completed questionnaires within their own time under the supervision of the researcher. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. Order of questionnaire administration was counterbalanced to control for order eects. It was emphasised to participants that there were no right or wrong answers and no trick questions. Children and adolescents were encouraged to ask questions about items they did not understand (Joiner et al., 1996). In accordance with the recommendations of Eysenck and Eysenck (1975) each item was read aloud for the youngest children. Time of administration varied depending on the age of participants, but averaged around 10 min for adults and 20 min for children.
3. Results Statistical analyses were conducted separately for each of the age-groups in order to investigate the relationships between neuroticism, extraversion, positive and negative aect. Fisher's Z-tests were computed to compare the magnitude of these correlations between age groups. In order to examine the structure of personality and aect over the lifespan, principal components analyses were conducted. 3.1. The relationship between personality and aect Neuroticism and extraversion were signi®cantly correlated in each of the three age groups with negative aect and positive aect, respectively. For the children and early adolescents, extraversion was moderately correlated with positive aect (r = 0.32, p < 0.0001), as was neuroticism with negative aect (r = 0.44, p < 0.0001). The correlation between extraversion and negative aect was not statistically signi®cant, nor was the correlation between neuroticism and positive aect. In the late adolescent and young adult sample, neuroticism was strongly related to negative aect (r = 0.62, p < 0.0001), but was not related to positive aect. There was also a moderate
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correlation between extraversion and positive aect (r = 0.48, p < 0.0001). Extraversion was also weakly, but inversely, signi®cantly correlated with negative aect (r=ÿ0.25, p < 0.05). Neuroticism and negative aect were strongly correlated in adults over 30 years (r = 0.64, p < 0.0001). Adults also showed a moderate to strong correlation between extraversion and positive aect (r = 0.54, p < 0.0001). Neuroticism and positive aect exhibited a weak to moderate, inverse correlation (r=ÿ0.30, p < 0.01). In addition, extraversion and positive aect were also weakly, but signi®cantly, correlated (r=ÿ0.12, p < 0.05). In each age group, there was no signi®cant correlation between negative and positive aect. 3.2. Personality and aect over the lifespan In order to ascertain whether the magnitude of the correlations between personality and aect diered signi®cantly between the three age groups, four Fisher's Z-tests for multiple independent samples were conducted (Hays, 1963). The Fisher's Z-test for multiple independent samples is an omnibus test which is distributed on the w 2 distribution. This was followed by individual comparisons of correlation coecients using the Fisher's Z transformation where appropriate. Results revealed that the strength of the correlation between extraversion and positive aect for early adolescents (z = 0.33), young adults (z = 0.52) and adults (z = 0.60) diered signi®cantly (w 2(2)=7.10, p < 0.05). In particular, the correlation between extraversion and positive aect was signi®cantly smaller for early adolescents compared to adults (Z = 2.50). However, the dierence between young adults and adults did not reach statistical signi®cance. Further, results showed that the magnitude of the correlation between neuroticism and negative aect was signi®cantly greater for both young adults (z = 0.74) and adults (z = 0.76), than for early adolescents (z = 0.47) (w 2(2)=10.12, p < 0.01). Interestingly, the relationship between neuroticism and positive aect was signi®cantly larger in adults (z=ÿ0.32), than for young adults (z = 0.01) and early adolescents (z=ÿ0.10) (w 2(2)=9.37, p < 0.01). The correlations between extraversion and negative aect did not signi®cantly dier over the lifespan. 3.3. Factor analyses To determine whether items from the extraversion and neuroticism scales of the EPQ and the positive and negative aect scales of the PANAS, respectively, loaded together (i.e. whether they revealed a similar underlying structure in each age group) principal components analyses (PCA) with varimax rotation were performed, separately for each age group. To be consistent with the `yes/no' response format of the EPQ, the ®ve point scale of the PANAS was converted into a binary format. The ®rst three responses from the PANAS ranging from `very slightly' to `moderately' were collapsed together, as were the last two responses `quite a bit' and `extremely'. Examination of factor scree plots suggested that, in all age groups, the items loaded onto four factors. However, given that the purpose of these analyses was to test whether two factors (i.e. neuroticism-negative aect, extraversion-positive aect) could be derived across the agegroups, a two factor solution was initially extracted. Extracting a two factor solution was also
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Table 2 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two factors for the children and early adolescent sample (N = 228). (1) Pre-rotation variance explained by each factor; factor I: 11.7%, factor II: 7.9%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 7.48, factor II: 5.08 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.86) N: Do you often feel lonely? NA: Stressed out N: Are your feelings rather easily hurt? N: Do you often feel fed up? NA: Upset NA: Scared N: Do you ®nd it hard to get to sleep at night because you a worrying about things? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd things wrong with you or the work you do? N: Are you moody? N: Do you sometimes feel life is just not worth living? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? N: Do you ever feel just miserable for no good reason? NA: Nervous NA: Angry N: Do ideas run through your head so that you cannot sleep? N: Do lots of things annoy you? N: Do you always worry for a long while if you feel you have made a fool of yourself? N: Do you sometimes feel specially cheerful and at other times sad without any good reason? NA: Ashamed NA: Guilty NA: Afraid N: Do you often feel tired for no reason? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? NA: Irritable N: Do you often need kind friends to cheer you up? N: Do you very easily feel bored? N: Does your mind wander o when you are doing some work? PA: Paying good attention
0.66 0.59 0.59 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.51 0.51 0.50 0.49 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.47 0.46 0.46 0.45 0.43 0.41 0.41 0.41 0.41 0.40 0.36 0.35 0.21 ÿ0.05
ÿ0.11 ÿ0.04 0.03 0.00 0.00 ÿ0.05 0.04 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.15 0.10 ÿ0.11 0.00 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.06 0.15 0.04 ÿ0.14 0.18 ÿ0.02 0.02 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.04 0.01 ÿ0.17 0.20 0.03
Factor II: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.83) PA: Active E: Are you rather lively? PA: Lively E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Do you like mixing with other children? PA: Alert E: Do you like doing things that are a bit frightening? E: Would you like parachute jumping? PA: Eager
ÿ0.13 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.04 0.03 0.04
0.61 0.58 0.56 0.56 0.54 0.52 0.47 0.45 0.44
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Table 2 (continued ) Item
E: Do you like plenty of excitement going on around you? PA: Strong E: Can you get a party going? E: Can you let yourself go and enjoy yourself at a lively party? E: Would you rather sit and watch than play at parties? E: Have you many dierent hobbies and interests? E: Do you often make up your mind to do things suddenly? E: Do you think that water skiing would be fun? E: Have you got lots of friends? E: Do you like doing things where you have to act quickly? E: Would you like to explore an old haunted castle? E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Would you like to ride a fast motor bike? E: Do you enjoy diving or jumping into the sea or a pool? E: Would you rather be alone instead of meeting other children? E: Do you ®nd it hard to really enjoy yourself at a lively party? NA: Jumpy PA: Proud E: Do you nearly always have a quick answer when people talk to you? E: Do you sometimes get so restless that you cannot sit still in a chair for long? E: Do you like telling jokes or funny stories to your friends? PA: Interested E: When you make new friends do you usually make the ®rst move? PA: Satis®ed E: Do you like going out a lot? PA: Excited
Factor I
II
ÿ0.07 ÿ0.27 0.03 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.21 ÿ0.09 0.04 0.01 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.01 0.09 ÿ0.29 0.09 0.13 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.14 0.02 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.08 0.20 0.07 ÿ0.02 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.02
0.43 0.41 0.40 0.40 ÿ0.40 0.39 0.38 0.38 0.35 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.32 ÿ0.32 ÿ0.31 0.31 0.30 0.30 0.29 0.28 0.28 0.28 0.26 0.25 0.21
supported by the fact that the ®rst two factors were the most clearly de®ned and explained the most variance. The two-factor solution for children and early adolescents explained 19.6% of the variance (Table 2). The ®rst factor to emerge for this age group was a clearly de®ned neuroticismnegative aect factor. Items such as loneliness, stress, easily hurt feelings and feeling upset loaded highly on this dimension. Factor two included extraversion and positive aect items, with activity, liveliness, alertness and venturesomeness forming the highest loadings. A single negative aect item `jumpy' loaded positively on the extraversion-positive aect factor. Related to this, the researchers noted that when endorsing the PANAS-C items, some of the children and young adolescents interpreted the item `jumpy' as `hyperactivity' or `excitement', rather than as `nervous' or `jittery'. Nevertheless, both factors had good internal consistency with coecient alphas exceeding 0.8. For the late adolescent and young adult sample, two pure factors emerged, namely, extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect. The two factor solution explained 24.7% of the variance and both factors had good internal consistency. Items suggesting fear,
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Table 3 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two factors for the young adult sample (N = 167). (1) Prerotation variance explained by each factor: factor I: 14.7%, factor II: 10.1%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 9.39, factor II: 6.44 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.87) N: Are you a worrier? NA: Scared N: Have you often felt listless and tired for no reason? NA: Nervous N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? NA: Upset N: Do you suer from nerves? N: Do you often feel lonely? N: Are you often troubled by feelings of guilt? N: Would you call yourself tense or highly strung? N: Do you often feel fed up? N: Are you an irritable person? NA: Irritable N: Do you ever feel `just miserable' for no good reason? N: Does your mood often go up and down? N: Do you worry too long after an embarrassing experience? NA: Afraid N: Are your feelings easily hurt? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd fault with you or the work you do? NA: Ashamed N: Do you worry about things you should not have done or said? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? NA: Jittery N: Would you call yourself a nervous person? NA: Distressed NA: Guilty N: Are you sometimes bubbling over with energy and sometimes very sluggish? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Do you worry a lot about your looks? N: Do you suer from sleeplessness? NA: Hostile N: Have you ever wished you were dead? N: Do you worry about your health? E: Do you nearly always have a ready answer when people talk to you?
0.66 0.60 0.60 0.59 0.57 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.50 0.50 0.48 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.46 0.45 0.44 0.43 0.36 0.36 0.32 0.32 0.31 0.28 0.25 ÿ0.22
0.00 ÿ0.09 0.10 ÿ0.23 0.03 ÿ0.11 0.02 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.00 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.09 0.01 ÿ0.01 0.01 ÿ0.05 0.01 ÿ0.16 0.07 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.26 ÿ0.29 0.01 0.30 0.17 0.21 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.13 0.21 0.18
Factor II: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.87) E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Are you rather lively? E: Are you a talkative person? PA: Active
ÿ0.11 ÿ0.06 0.08 ÿ0.04
0.71 0.70 0.63 0.61
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Table 3 (continued ) Item
E: Do you like plenty of bustle and excitement around you? E: Do you tend to keep in the background on social occasions? E: Can you usually let yourself go and enjoy yourself at a lively party? E: Do you like mixing with people? E: Do you usually take the initiative in making new friends? E: Are you mostly quiet when you are with other people? E: Do you like going out a lot? PA: Enthusiastic E: Do you enjoy meeting new people? E: Do you have many friends? PA: Determined PA: Strong PA: Excited E: Can you get a party going? PA: Alert E: Can you easily get some life into a rather dull party? E: Do you like doing things in which you have to act quickly? PA: Inspired E: Do you like telling jokes and funny stories to your friends? E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Do you often take on more activities than you have time for? E: Do you have many dierent hobbies? PA: Proud E: Do you prefer reading to meeting people? PA: Attentive
Factor I
II
0.09 ÿ0.25 ÿ0.21 0.05 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.06 0.02 0.01 ÿ0.16 0.05 ÿ0.04 0.23 ÿ0.30 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.21 ÿ0.03 0.02 0.01 ÿ0.27 0.09 ÿ0.11 0.07 ÿ0.09 0.03
0.60 ÿ0.57 0.56 0.55 0.55 ÿ0.55 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.50 0.49 0.47 0.46 0.44 0.43 0.42 0.39 0.33 0.33 0.33 0.32 0.32 0.27 ÿ0.26 0.23
nervousness, lethargy and worry loaded highly on the neuroticism-negative aect factor, emphasising the aective component of this dimension. The highest loading items on the extraversion-positive aect factor were indicative of liveliness, activity and excitement (Table 3). For adults, a clear two factor structure made up of extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect emerged from the analysis, accounting for 24% of the variance. Factor I contained extraversion and positive aect items, with the highest loading items denoting liveliness, talkativeness, enthusiasm and excitement. The second factor was composed of items from the neuroticism and negative aect scales, especially indicative of negative cognition, worry, apprehension, guilt and nervousness. Internal consistency of both factors was good, exceeding 0.8 (Table 4). Based on the scree plots for each age group, four factor solutions were also extracted for rotation. In each age group the analysis produced four relatively distinct factors: extraversion, negative aect, neuroticism and positive aect. The four factor solution for children and early adolescents accounted for 28.1% of the variance. In the case of the young adults and adults
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Table 4 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two-factors for the adult sample (N = 142). (1) Pre-rotation variance explained by each factor: factor I: 15.2%, factor II: 8.8%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 9.71, factor II: 5.65 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.89) E: Are you rather lively? E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Are you a talkative person? PA: Enthusiastic E: Are you mostly quiet when you are with other people? E: Do you usually take the initiative when making new friends? E: Do you tend to keep in the background on social occasions? E: Can you usually let yourself go and enjoy a lively party? E: Can you easily get some life into a very dull party? E: Can you get a party going? E: Do you like mixing with people? E: Do you like plenty of bustle and excitement around you? PA: Excited E: Do you enjoy meeting new people? PA: Active PA: Proud E: Do you prefer reading to meeting people? E: Do you have many friends? PA: Inspired E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Do you like going out a lot? E: Do you nearly always have a ready answer when people talk to you? E: Do you like telling jokes and funny stories to your friends? PA: Alert E: Do you like doing things in which you have to act quickly? PA: Strong PA: Attentive E: Do you often take on more activities than you have time for? PA: Interested
0.77 0.75 0.64 0.63 ÿ0.63 0.63 ÿ0.61 0.60 0.57 0.57 0.54 0.54 0.51 0.50 0.50 0.47 ÿ0.46 0.46 0.43 0.42 0.38 0.35 0.34 0.33 0.32 0.28 0.28 0.26 0.25
0.00 0.08 0.10 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.12 0.04 ÿ0.02 ÿ0.04 0.04 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.13 ÿ0.25 0.09 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.18 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.19 0.05 ÿ0.16
Factor II: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.86) N: Do you suer from nerves? N: Do you often feel fed up? N: Would you call yourself tense or highly strung? N: Are you a worrier? N: Would you call yourself a nervous person? N: Are you often troubled by feelings of guilt? N: Do you often worry about things you should not have done or said? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd fault with you or the work you do? NA: Nervous
ÿ0.14 ÿ0.10 0.00 ÿ0.17 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.04
0.65 0.62 0.62 0.58 0.54 0.54 0.54 0.53 0.52
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Table 4 (continued ) Item
N: Do you ever feel just miserable for no good reason? N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? N: Do you worry about your looks? NA: Jittery N: Do you worry too long after an embarrassing experience? NA: Upset N: Do worry about your health? NA: Irritable N: Are you an irritable person? N: Do you feel lonely? N: Have you often felt listless and tired for no reason? N: Does your mood often go up and down? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? N: Do you suer from sleeplessness? NA: Distressed N: Are your feelings easily hurt? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Are you sometimes bubbling with energy and sometimes very sluggish? NA: Hostile NA: Afraid NA: Guilty NA: Determined E: Do you have many dierent hobbies? N: Have you ever wished you were dead? NA: Ashamed NA: Scared
Factor I
II
ÿ0.14 0.02 0.04 0.07 ÿ0.20 ÿ0.08 0.03 ÿ0.17 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.14 ÿ0.24 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.29 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.24 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.04 0.20 0.05 ÿ0.01 0.09 0.25 0.19 0.02 0.06 ÿ0.03
0.51 0.51 0.49 0.49 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.47 0.46 0.46 0.43 0.43 0.40 0.40 0.39 0.38 0.31 0.30 0.26 0.25 0.25 ÿ0.24 0.20 0.20 0.17
over 30 the four factor solution explained 34 and 33% of the variance, respectively (details of these analyses are available from the authors upon request).
4. Discussion The results of the present study have provided additional evidence supporting the stability and robustness of the relationship between personality and aect in adults, using a sample drawn from the general population and a combination of dierent measurement instruments (i.e. EPQ and PANAS). The strong correlations between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect are highly consistent with the ®ndings of most recent studies (see Table 1). Importantly, the magnitude of these respective relationships in adults (aged 30 to 68 years) was not signi®cantly dierent from those found for late adolescents and young adults (aged 16 to 29 years). The strong association between personality and aect in both samples, is further supported
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by the emergence of a two factor structure made up of extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect. Each factor demonstrated good internal consistency, indicating that item content was homogenous, without suggesting the presence of redundant items (Boyle, 1991; Cortina, 1993). While the two factor solution found in the present study explained less variance than that of Meyer and Shack (1989), it nevertheless con®rms that the two main personality and aect dimensions share a common structural basis. Whilst the results of the present study have supported the ®ndings of previous research in adults (e.g. Watson & Clark, 1992; Suh et al., 1996), these ®ndings break new ground by comparing personality and aect across the lifespan. In particular, the results have demonstrated that although neuroticism was signi®cantly correlated with negative aect and extraversion with positive aect in youth, the magnitude of these relationships was signi®cantly stronger for adults than for children and early adolescents. In contrast to the strong relationships found in adults, extraversion and positive aect and neuroticism and negative aect were weakly to moderately related in children and early adolescents, accounting for 10 and 18% of the shared variance, respectively. While a two factor structure composed of neuroticism-negative aect and extraversion-positive aect was found for all three age groups, this structure also explained less variance for children and young adolescents. Taken together, both sets of results indicate that even though neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect were related in children and adolescents, these constructs merged to a much greater extent in adults. Despite the importance of our ®ndings, there are factors that limit our conclusions. Reliance on a single method of measurement (i.e. self-reports), without corroboration from other external sources of information (e.g. observer-ratings) limits conclusions that may be made since social desirability may have in¯uenced responses to some degree. Whether such in¯uence varied across the dierent age groups remains a possibility. It must be noted, however, that aect research does face the particular diculty of eliciting information about internal states that are not easily observed by others. Indeed, Gross and John (1997) found that self-reported positive and negative aect were only weakly correlated with facial expressions of emotion, indicating that people do not always express their experience of emotion, but instead behave in accord with `display rules' learnt through socialisation. Given the cross-sectional design adopted in this investigation the present ®ndings cannot provide direct nor conclusive support for the role of aect in organising personality traits, or speci®c processes such as the formation of aective-cognitive structures that are claimed to underlie personality development (Izard et al., 1993). Nevertheless they do demonstrate that personality and aect become more strongly related and more tightly de®ned with increasing age. Thus the present results provide preliminary support for a core premise underlying the emotion perspective which proposes that the interaction between emotion thresholds together with experience over time contribute to the development of personality throughout childhood and early adolescence. The results suggest that the relationship between aect and personality present in children and early adolescents becomes consolidated by late adolescence and early adulthood. Therefore, it could be speculated that in late adolescence and young adulthood not only does the relationship between personality and aect become signi®cantly stronger but possibly also increasingly bi-directional. The relationships between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive
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aect, when examined in the context of the lifespan, are considerably more complex than the single direct relationships proposed by the trait perspective. Indeed, within the trait perspective extraversion and neuroticism are directly responsible for regulating positive and negative aect irrespective of developmental period. While this is a convincing proposal for late adolescence and adulthood, it is a less adequate explanation for childhood and early adolescence since the relationships are signi®cantly weaker at this stage. In conclusion, the present study is the ®rst to examine relationships between personality traits and aect experiences in children and adolescents. Additionally, it is the ®rst investigation to have compared these relationships across dierent developmental periods. Our ®ndings are illuminating in that they point to dierences in the magnitude of these associations depending on age. Future research of a longitudinal nature is required to better understand the factors underlying these dierences. Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Adriana Wilson, Krystina Herszlikowicz, Sally Luste, Brett and Robert Huggan and others who played an invaluable role in organising data collection. References Avia, M. D. (1997). Personality and positive emotions. European Journal of Personality, 11(1), 33±56. Avia, M. D., Sanz, J., Sanchez-Bernados, M. L., Martinez-Arias, M. R., Silva, F., & Grana, J. L. (1995). The ®vefactor model. II. Relations of the NEO-PI with other personality variables. Personality and Individual Dierences, 19(1), 81±97. Berry, D. S., & Hansen, J. S. (1996). Positive aect, negative aect and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(4), 796±809. Boyle, T. (1991). Does item homogeneity indicate internal consistency or item redundancy in psychometric scales? Personality and Individual Dierences, 12, 291±294. Cortina, L. (1993). What is coecient alpha? An examination of theory and applications. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 98±104. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980). In¯uence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(4), 668±678. David, J. P., Green, P. J., Martin, R., & Suls, J. (1997). Dierential roles of neuroticism, extraversion, and event desirability for mood in daily life: an integrative model of top-down and bottom-up in¯uences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 149±159. Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542±575. Diener, E., Smith, H., & Fujita, F. (1995). The personality structure of aect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(1), 47±66. Eysenck, H. J. (1967). The biological basis of personality. Illinois: C.C. Thomas. Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1975). Manual of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (junior and adult). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Gray, J. A. (1987). Perspectives on anxiety and impulsivity: a commentary. Journal of Research in Personality, 21, 493±509. Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (1997). Revealing feelings: facets of emotional expressivity in self-reports, peer ratings and behaviour. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 435±448.
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Hays, W. L. (1963). Statistics for psychologists. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Izard, C. E. (1993). Organizational and motivational functions of discrete emotions. In M. Lewis, & J. Haviland, Handbook of emotions (pp. 631±643). New York: The Guilford Press. Izard, C. E., Libero, D. Z., Putnam, P., & Haynes, O. M. (1993). Stability of emotion experiences and their relations to traits of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 847±860. Joiner, T. E., Catanzaro, S. J., & Laurent, J. (1996). Tripartite structure of positive and negative aect, depression, and anxiety in child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 405±409. Larsen, R. J., & Ketelaar, T. (1991). Personality susceptibility to positive and negative emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 132±140. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1991). Adding liebe und arbeit: the full ®ve-factor model and well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(2), 227±232. McKenzie, J., Tindell, G., & French, J. (1997). The great triumvirate: agreement between lexically and psychophysiologically based models of personality. Personality and Individual Dierences, 22(2), 269±277. Meyer, G. J., & Shack, J. R. (1989). Structural convergence of mood and personality: evidence for old and new directions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 691±706. Rusting, C. L., & Larsen, R. J. (1997). Extraversion, neuroticism, and susceptibility to positive and negative aect: a test of two theoretical models. Personality and Individual Dierences, 22(5), 607±612. Suh, E., Diener, E., & Fujita, F. (1996). Events and subjective well-being: only recent events matter. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5), 1091±1102. Tellegen, A. (1985). Structures of mood and personality and their relevance to assessing anxiety, with an emphasis on self-report. In A. Hussian Tum, & J. D. Maser (Eds), Anxiety and the anxiety disorders (pp. 681±706). Viken, R. J., Rose, R. J., Kapiro, J., & Koskenvuo, M. (1994). A developmental genetic analysis of adult personality: extraversion and neuroticism from 18 to 59 years of age. Journal of Social Psychology, 66, 722±730. Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1984). Negative aectivity: the disposition to experience aversive emotional states. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 465±490. Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1992). On traits and temperament: general and speci®c factors of emotional experience and their relations to the ®ve factor model. Journal of Personality, 60, 441±476. Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative aect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063±1070. Watson, D., & Tellegen, A. (1985). Toward a consensual structure of mood. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 219±235. Watson, D., & Walker (1996). The long-term stability and predictive validity of trait measures of aect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 567±577. White, P. D., & Nias, D. K. B. (1994). A comparison of self-report and relative ratings of personality. Personality and Individual Dierences, 16(5), 801±803. Wilson, K., Gullone, E., & Moss, S. (1998). The youth version of the positive and negative aect schedule: a psychometric validation. Behaviour Change, 15(3), 187±193.
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The relationship between personality and aect over the lifespan Kay Wilson, Eleonora Gullone* Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3168, Australia Received 11 May 1998; received in revised form 7 January 1999; accepted 11 February 1999
Abstract This study compared the trait and emotion perspectives of personality development by examining relationships between extraversion, neuroticism, positive and negative aect across the lifespan. A total of 533 volunteers: 228 children and early adolescents (8 to 15 years), 163 late adolescents and young adults (16 to 29 years) and 142 adults (30 to 68 years) completed Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and the Positive and Negative Aect Schedule (PANAS). Extraversion correlated signi®cantly with positive aect and neuroticism with negative aect in each age group. As predicted by the emotion perspective, correlations were signi®cantly stronger for adults than children and early adolescents. In addition, extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect factors explained less variance for children and early adolescents compared to those of adults. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Neuroticism; Extraversion; Positive aect; Negative aect; Children; Adolescents; Adults
1. Introduction In the adult literature, research on the relationships between personality traits and positive and negative aect has been instrumental in re®ning understanding in both ®elds (Tellegen, 1985; Watson & Clark, 1992; Berry & Hansen, 1996; David, Green, Martin & Suls, 1997; Suh, Diener & Fujita, 1996). In particular, previous studies have demonstrated prominent correlations between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect with * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-3-905-3968; fax: +61-3-905-3948. E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Gullone) 0191-8869/99/$ - see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 8 8 6 9 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 5 8 - 6
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remarkable robustness, stability and generality (see Table 1 for summary). This pattern of correlations has appeared across diverse samples such as, older adults (Costa & McCrae, 1980), college students (Meyer & Shack, 1989) and new mothers (Izard, Libero, Putnam & Haynes, 1993). It has also withstood dierent measurement instruments including those with questionable psychometric properties (e.g. Bradburn aect scales, Costa & McCrae, 1980) and various methodologies including self-reports (e.g. Watson & Clark, 1992), spouse-ratings (McCrae & Costa, 1991) and daily mood reports (David et al., 1997). Recent experimental research has also con®rmed the pattern found by correlational studies. For example, extraverts report increased positive aect after imagining themselves experiencing a pleasant event, while neuroticism predicts greater responsiveness to negative mood induction (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991; Rusting & Larsen, 1997). It is hardly surprising, then, that factoranalytic studies have revealed a common underlying two-factor structure between personality and aect in adults made up of (1) the neuroticism-negative aect and (2) the extraversionpositive aect (Meyer & Shack, 1989; Berry & Hansen, 1996). The relationship between the personality and aect domains, demonstrated empirically in
Table 1 Patterns and magnitude of correlations between neuroticism (N) and negative aect (NA) and extraversion (E) and positive aect (PA) across studies using adult samples. EPI: Eysenck's Personality Inventory; Bradburn's ABS: Aect Balance Scale; EPQ: Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire; NEO-PI: the NEO Personality Inventory; DES: Dierential Emotion Scale; PANAS: Positive and Negative Aect Schedule; NEO-FFI: NEO Five Factor Inventory Research study
Variables
Correlation coecient
Aect instrument
Measurement
Costa and McCrae (1980) (N = 566=903)
N and NA E and PA
0.35±0.43 0.16±0.27
state state
EPI Bradburn's ABS
Meyer and Shack (1989) (N = 231)
N and NA N and NA E and PA E and PA
0.55 0.38 0.69 0.51
trait state trait state
EPQ aect scale based on research by Watson and Tellegen (1985)
McCrae and Costa (1991) (N's=349±419)
N and NA E and PA
0.40±0.42 0.24±0.32
state state
NEO-PI Bradburn's AS
Watson and Clark (1992) (N = 225±532)
N and NA E and PA N and NA E and PA
0.52±0.65 0.48±0.64 0.33 0.42
trait trait trait trait
NEO-PI PANAS
Izard et al. (1993) (N = 88)
N and NA E and PA
0.32±0.46 0.21±0.35
state and trait state and trait
EPQ and DES
Suh et al. (1996) (N = 222)
N and NA E and PA
0.47±0.69 0.33±0.54
trait
NEO-FFI own aect scales
Correlations `corrected' for item overlap.
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adult studies, has generated contentious theoretical debate regarding the developmental origins and direction of the relationship. Are the personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism responsible for regulating positive and negative aect? Or, do positive and negative emotions, via their relations with cognition and behaviour, contribute to forming personality traits? In order to understand such complex issues about personality processes two competing theoretical models have emerged: the trait and emotion perspectives. The trait perspective holds that neuroticism and extraversion are directly responsible for regulating individual dierences in the experience of negative aect and positive aect, respectively (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Watson & Clark, 1984, 1992). This perspective is based on the `temperamental view' (McCrae & Costa, 1991) that neuroticism and extraversion, which correspond to neurophysiological dierences in emotional reactivity (Eysenck, 1967; Gray, 1987), predispose individuals to emotionally respond in a characteristically distressed or cheerful way. An alternative pathway is that personality traits indirectly in¯uence long term aect, by predisposing a person to participate in activities that induce positive and negative aect (McCrae & Costa, 1991). Thus, the trait perspective is essentially a `top-down' approach, as the focus is on the way the person responds to what happens to them (Diener, 1984; Avia, 1997). The emotion perspective is in agreement that ``traits of personality, once they have developed, in¯uence emotion activation and emotion regulation'' (Izard et al., 1993 p. 848). However, the in¯uence of personality traits on emotionality is only half the equation. For, Izard et al. (1993) it is the `unique motivational properties' of discrete emotions such as, interest and fear, (which compose the global dimensions of positive and negative aect)1 that are the `engines' which organise perception, cognition and action, and in so doing also organise the development of personality traits. From this perspective, each person is born with dierent emotion thresholds, that is, level of emotion re-activity. It is the interaction between these genetically predetermined emotion thresholds and actual experience and learning that produces personality traits (e.g. neuroticism and extraversion). The crucial dierence between the trait and emotion perspectives is that the latter perspective explains the relationship between personality and emotion as bidirectional because emotions are both a cause and eect of personality traits. As a consequence, both theories make dierent predictions about the pattern and strength of the relationship between personality and aect over development. It must be assumed from the trait perspective that emotion is inherently related to personality, since it is a direct outcome of it. This relationship would be expected to be of similar magnitude across the lifespan, despite developmental period. For example, as long as there is neuroticism (at whatever level), there will be a corresponding level of negative aect 1
Most theorists agree that positive and negative aect can be thought of as `higher order' factors consisting of a combination of individual `basic' emotions which share the same hedonic tone, but at a lower level remain independent and distinguishable from each other (Watson & Clark, 1992; Izard, 1993; Diener, Smith & Fujita, 1995). Positive aect, in its narrowest form, refers to pleasant feelings such as happiness and joy (Diener et al., 1995), whereas broader de®nitions emphasise high arousal and pleasurable engagement with life such as alertness, excitement and inspiration (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). Negative aect, is for some theorists a dimension of unpleasant emotion, such as sadness (Diener et al., 1995), but for others it signi®es intense feelings of subjective distress ranging from anger to guilt and fear (Watson & Clark, 1984).
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induced by it. In contrast, the emotion perspective would predict that whilst aect is present throughout development, its relationship with personality (i.e. incorporating cognition and behaviour) will become stronger as the individual develops a more stable constellation of personality traits. That is, cumulative emotional experiences over development will increasingly and more tightly de®ne and dictate behaviour and cognition as well as corresponding aect (hence personality). In light of the theoretical debate involving developmental issues, the focus of research to date on the relationship between personality and aect in adults and the corresponding neglect of children and adolescents is almost startling. Thus, the purpose of this study was to begin by empirically con®rming the relationships between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect in children and adolescents. More importantly, this study compared the pattern and strength of the relationship between personality traits and aect in three age groups, de®ned as (1) children and early adolescents aged 8 to 15 years, (2) late adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 29 years and (3) adults over 30 years. Based on the trait perspective, the magnitude of relationship between personality and aect should not dier signi®cantly over the lifespan. Conversely, signi®cant dierences in the strength of the relationship between the three age groups, indicating that the two constructs become increasingly entangled with experience and maturity, would support the emotion perspective.
2. Method 2.1. Participants Participants consisted of a total of 555 volunteers, for which 533 responses were analysed, divided into three dierent age ranges. Participants were ®rst separated into two age groups based on whether the junior (valid for 8 to 15 years) or adult (valid for 16 years and over) set of personality and aect questionnaires was completed. Longitudinal and twin studies have indicated that neuroticism and extraversion do not show their adult levels of stability until the age of 30 years (McCrae & Costa, 1991; Viken, Rose, Kapiro & Koskenvuo, 1994). Consequently, participants over 16 years, who completed the adult form, were further divided according to whether they had reached 30 years. Therefore, the lifespan was broken into three samples: children and early adolescents (ages 8 to 15), late adolescents and young adults (ages 16 to 29) and adults (ages 30 to 68). 2.2. Children and early adolescents (8 to 15 years) Children and early adolescents were recruited from three primary and two secondary schools situated in suburban Melbourne, encompassing diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Informed consent was obtained from the Directorate of Education, principals and parents. While the initial sample consisted of 240 youths, 12 were excluded for failing to complete demographic information. Thus, data were analysed for 228 children and early adolescents, 112 males and 116 females, ranging from 8 to 15, with an average age of 12.63 years.
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2.3. Late adolescents and young adults (16 to 29 years) Data were originally collected for 170 late adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 29 years. Three were excluded as only one questionnaire was completed and ®ve were discarded for being below the valid age range of the adult questionnaires. Thus, the ®nal sample consisted of 167 late adolescents and young adults, including 65 males and 102 females, with an average age of 18.97 years. Participants were senior students from two secondary schools (n = 107) and undergraduate psychology students at Monash University (n = 60). 2.4. Adults (ages 30 to 68 years) The adult sample comprised 144 participants from which two were excluded for failing to complete demographic information. There were 31 males and 111 females, with an average age of 43.42 years. Participants consisted of a diverse group of adults recruited from the general adult population in metropolitan Melbourne. The adult sample included 13 mature age Monash University students, 60 casual telephonist clerks, 25 administrative sta and 18 teachers. The remainder professed a variety of occupations such as managers, solicitors and accountants, housewives, landscape gardeners, hairdressers and factory hands. 2.5. Measures 2.5.1. Personality Personality was assessed using the neuroticism and extraversion scales of the junior and adult forms of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975). Psychoticism items were excluded. The EPQ was chosen over other widely used instruments such as the NEO-PI-R, as it is valid for children and adolescents as well as adults. The adult form is suitable for persons 16 years and above and consists of 45 questions about feelings, thoughts and behaviour to which participants answer `yes' or `no'. The junior form is appropriate for youths aged 7 to 15 years and contains 44 neuroticism and extraversion items which are conceptually similar to the adult questionnaire. Research has established that the EPQ is a reliable, valid and widely used measure of personality (e.g. Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975; White & Nias, 1994; Avia et al., 1995; McKenzie, Tindell & French, 1997). 2.6. Aect The Positive and Negative Aect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988) contains two selfreport scales consisting of ten words describing emotions which have been selected as `pure' markers of positive and negative aect. Positive aect refers to feelings of arousal and pleasantness. Negative aect is an indicator of subjective distress, anger, fear, guilt and nervousness. The `extent' response format, favoured by Watson et al. (1988) was used to obtain a measure of the `average' level of each aect taking into account frequency and intensity. Participants made a global rating of the extent to which they generally felt each emotion on a ®ve point scale ranging from `very slightly' (=1) to `extremely' (=5). We used
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the trait form. The PANAS has been reported to have sound psychometric properties (Watson et al., 1988; Watson & Walker, 1996). The PANAS has also been modi®ed for children and adolescents aged 8 to 15 years (i.e. PANAS-C; Joiner, Catanzaro & Laurent, 1996) by simplifying items to make them more accessible to youth (i.e. `distressed' was changed to `stressed out'). The PANAS-C has been reported to have good psychometric properties as a measure of state aect in child and adolescent psychiatric in-patients (Joiner et al.) and is a reliable and valid test of trait aect in youth (Wilson, Gullone & Moss, 1998). 2.7. Procedure Data were collected by the ®rst named author. Participants were administered the junior and adult forms of the EPQ and PANAS as appropriate. Children and adolescents, in classes nominated by principals, completed the questionnaires on a group basis within school hours. University students and adults completed questionnaires within their own time under the supervision of the researcher. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. Order of questionnaire administration was counterbalanced to control for order eects. It was emphasised to participants that there were no right or wrong answers and no trick questions. Children and adolescents were encouraged to ask questions about items they did not understand (Joiner et al., 1996). In accordance with the recommendations of Eysenck and Eysenck (1975) each item was read aloud for the youngest children. Time of administration varied depending on the age of participants, but averaged around 10 min for adults and 20 min for children.
3. Results Statistical analyses were conducted separately for each of the age-groups in order to investigate the relationships between neuroticism, extraversion, positive and negative aect. Fisher's Z-tests were computed to compare the magnitude of these correlations between age groups. In order to examine the structure of personality and aect over the lifespan, principal components analyses were conducted. 3.1. The relationship between personality and aect Neuroticism and extraversion were signi®cantly correlated in each of the three age groups with negative aect and positive aect, respectively. For the children and early adolescents, extraversion was moderately correlated with positive aect (r = 0.32, p < 0.0001), as was neuroticism with negative aect (r = 0.44, p < 0.0001). The correlation between extraversion and negative aect was not statistically signi®cant, nor was the correlation between neuroticism and positive aect. In the late adolescent and young adult sample, neuroticism was strongly related to negative aect (r = 0.62, p < 0.0001), but was not related to positive aect. There was also a moderate
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correlation between extraversion and positive aect (r = 0.48, p < 0.0001). Extraversion was also weakly, but inversely, signi®cantly correlated with negative aect (r=ÿ0.25, p < 0.05). Neuroticism and negative aect were strongly correlated in adults over 30 years (r = 0.64, p < 0.0001). Adults also showed a moderate to strong correlation between extraversion and positive aect (r = 0.54, p < 0.0001). Neuroticism and positive aect exhibited a weak to moderate, inverse correlation (r=ÿ0.30, p < 0.01). In addition, extraversion and positive aect were also weakly, but signi®cantly, correlated (r=ÿ0.12, p < 0.05). In each age group, there was no signi®cant correlation between negative and positive aect. 3.2. Personality and aect over the lifespan In order to ascertain whether the magnitude of the correlations between personality and aect diered signi®cantly between the three age groups, four Fisher's Z-tests for multiple independent samples were conducted (Hays, 1963). The Fisher's Z-test for multiple independent samples is an omnibus test which is distributed on the w 2 distribution. This was followed by individual comparisons of correlation coecients using the Fisher's Z transformation where appropriate. Results revealed that the strength of the correlation between extraversion and positive aect for early adolescents (z = 0.33), young adults (z = 0.52) and adults (z = 0.60) diered signi®cantly (w 2(2)=7.10, p < 0.05). In particular, the correlation between extraversion and positive aect was signi®cantly smaller for early adolescents compared to adults (Z = 2.50). However, the dierence between young adults and adults did not reach statistical signi®cance. Further, results showed that the magnitude of the correlation between neuroticism and negative aect was signi®cantly greater for both young adults (z = 0.74) and adults (z = 0.76), than for early adolescents (z = 0.47) (w 2(2)=10.12, p < 0.01). Interestingly, the relationship between neuroticism and positive aect was signi®cantly larger in adults (z=ÿ0.32), than for young adults (z = 0.01) and early adolescents (z=ÿ0.10) (w 2(2)=9.37, p < 0.01). The correlations between extraversion and negative aect did not signi®cantly dier over the lifespan. 3.3. Factor analyses To determine whether items from the extraversion and neuroticism scales of the EPQ and the positive and negative aect scales of the PANAS, respectively, loaded together (i.e. whether they revealed a similar underlying structure in each age group) principal components analyses (PCA) with varimax rotation were performed, separately for each age group. To be consistent with the `yes/no' response format of the EPQ, the ®ve point scale of the PANAS was converted into a binary format. The ®rst three responses from the PANAS ranging from `very slightly' to `moderately' were collapsed together, as were the last two responses `quite a bit' and `extremely'. Examination of factor scree plots suggested that, in all age groups, the items loaded onto four factors. However, given that the purpose of these analyses was to test whether two factors (i.e. neuroticism-negative aect, extraversion-positive aect) could be derived across the agegroups, a two factor solution was initially extracted. Extracting a two factor solution was also
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Table 2 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two factors for the children and early adolescent sample (N = 228). (1) Pre-rotation variance explained by each factor; factor I: 11.7%, factor II: 7.9%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 7.48, factor II: 5.08 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.86) N: Do you often feel lonely? NA: Stressed out N: Are your feelings rather easily hurt? N: Do you often feel fed up? NA: Upset NA: Scared N: Do you ®nd it hard to get to sleep at night because you a worrying about things? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd things wrong with you or the work you do? N: Are you moody? N: Do you sometimes feel life is just not worth living? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? N: Do you ever feel just miserable for no good reason? NA: Nervous NA: Angry N: Do ideas run through your head so that you cannot sleep? N: Do lots of things annoy you? N: Do you always worry for a long while if you feel you have made a fool of yourself? N: Do you sometimes feel specially cheerful and at other times sad without any good reason? NA: Ashamed NA: Guilty NA: Afraid N: Do you often feel tired for no reason? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? NA: Irritable N: Do you often need kind friends to cheer you up? N: Do you very easily feel bored? N: Does your mind wander o when you are doing some work? PA: Paying good attention
0.66 0.59 0.59 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.51 0.51 0.50 0.49 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.47 0.46 0.46 0.45 0.43 0.41 0.41 0.41 0.41 0.40 0.36 0.35 0.21 ÿ0.05
ÿ0.11 ÿ0.04 0.03 0.00 0.00 ÿ0.05 0.04 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.15 0.10 ÿ0.11 0.00 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.06 0.15 0.04 ÿ0.14 0.18 ÿ0.02 0.02 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.04 0.01 ÿ0.17 0.20 0.03
Factor II: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.83) PA: Active E: Are you rather lively? PA: Lively E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Do you like mixing with other children? PA: Alert E: Do you like doing things that are a bit frightening? E: Would you like parachute jumping? PA: Eager
ÿ0.13 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.04 0.03 0.04
0.61 0.58 0.56 0.56 0.54 0.52 0.47 0.45 0.44
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Table 2 (continued ) Item
E: Do you like plenty of excitement going on around you? PA: Strong E: Can you get a party going? E: Can you let yourself go and enjoy yourself at a lively party? E: Would you rather sit and watch than play at parties? E: Have you many dierent hobbies and interests? E: Do you often make up your mind to do things suddenly? E: Do you think that water skiing would be fun? E: Have you got lots of friends? E: Do you like doing things where you have to act quickly? E: Would you like to explore an old haunted castle? E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Would you like to ride a fast motor bike? E: Do you enjoy diving or jumping into the sea or a pool? E: Would you rather be alone instead of meeting other children? E: Do you ®nd it hard to really enjoy yourself at a lively party? NA: Jumpy PA: Proud E: Do you nearly always have a quick answer when people talk to you? E: Do you sometimes get so restless that you cannot sit still in a chair for long? E: Do you like telling jokes or funny stories to your friends? PA: Interested E: When you make new friends do you usually make the ®rst move? PA: Satis®ed E: Do you like going out a lot? PA: Excited
Factor I
II
ÿ0.07 ÿ0.27 0.03 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.21 ÿ0.09 0.04 0.01 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.01 0.09 ÿ0.29 0.09 0.13 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.14 0.02 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.08 0.20 0.07 ÿ0.02 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.02
0.43 0.41 0.40 0.40 ÿ0.40 0.39 0.38 0.38 0.35 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.32 ÿ0.32 ÿ0.31 0.31 0.30 0.30 0.29 0.28 0.28 0.28 0.26 0.25 0.21
supported by the fact that the ®rst two factors were the most clearly de®ned and explained the most variance. The two-factor solution for children and early adolescents explained 19.6% of the variance (Table 2). The ®rst factor to emerge for this age group was a clearly de®ned neuroticismnegative aect factor. Items such as loneliness, stress, easily hurt feelings and feeling upset loaded highly on this dimension. Factor two included extraversion and positive aect items, with activity, liveliness, alertness and venturesomeness forming the highest loadings. A single negative aect item `jumpy' loaded positively on the extraversion-positive aect factor. Related to this, the researchers noted that when endorsing the PANAS-C items, some of the children and young adolescents interpreted the item `jumpy' as `hyperactivity' or `excitement', rather than as `nervous' or `jittery'. Nevertheless, both factors had good internal consistency with coecient alphas exceeding 0.8. For the late adolescent and young adult sample, two pure factors emerged, namely, extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect. The two factor solution explained 24.7% of the variance and both factors had good internal consistency. Items suggesting fear,
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Table 3 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two factors for the young adult sample (N = 167). (1) Prerotation variance explained by each factor: factor I: 14.7%, factor II: 10.1%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 9.39, factor II: 6.44 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.87) N: Are you a worrier? NA: Scared N: Have you often felt listless and tired for no reason? NA: Nervous N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? NA: Upset N: Do you suer from nerves? N: Do you often feel lonely? N: Are you often troubled by feelings of guilt? N: Would you call yourself tense or highly strung? N: Do you often feel fed up? N: Are you an irritable person? NA: Irritable N: Do you ever feel `just miserable' for no good reason? N: Does your mood often go up and down? N: Do you worry too long after an embarrassing experience? NA: Afraid N: Are your feelings easily hurt? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd fault with you or the work you do? NA: Ashamed N: Do you worry about things you should not have done or said? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? NA: Jittery N: Would you call yourself a nervous person? NA: Distressed NA: Guilty N: Are you sometimes bubbling over with energy and sometimes very sluggish? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Do you worry a lot about your looks? N: Do you suer from sleeplessness? NA: Hostile N: Have you ever wished you were dead? N: Do you worry about your health? E: Do you nearly always have a ready answer when people talk to you?
0.66 0.60 0.60 0.59 0.57 0.56 0.54 0.53 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.50 0.50 0.48 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.46 0.45 0.44 0.43 0.36 0.36 0.32 0.32 0.31 0.28 0.25 ÿ0.22
0.00 ÿ0.09 0.10 ÿ0.23 0.03 ÿ0.11 0.02 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.00 ÿ0.12 ÿ0.09 0.01 ÿ0.01 0.01 ÿ0.05 0.01 ÿ0.16 0.07 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.26 ÿ0.29 0.01 0.30 0.17 0.21 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.13 0.21 0.18
Factor II: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.87) E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Are you rather lively? E: Are you a talkative person? PA: Active
ÿ0.11 ÿ0.06 0.08 ÿ0.04
0.71 0.70 0.63 0.61
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Table 3 (continued ) Item
E: Do you like plenty of bustle and excitement around you? E: Do you tend to keep in the background on social occasions? E: Can you usually let yourself go and enjoy yourself at a lively party? E: Do you like mixing with people? E: Do you usually take the initiative in making new friends? E: Are you mostly quiet when you are with other people? E: Do you like going out a lot? PA: Enthusiastic E: Do you enjoy meeting new people? E: Do you have many friends? PA: Determined PA: Strong PA: Excited E: Can you get a party going? PA: Alert E: Can you easily get some life into a rather dull party? E: Do you like doing things in which you have to act quickly? PA: Inspired E: Do you like telling jokes and funny stories to your friends? E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Do you often take on more activities than you have time for? E: Do you have many dierent hobbies? PA: Proud E: Do you prefer reading to meeting people? PA: Attentive
Factor I
II
0.09 ÿ0.25 ÿ0.21 0.05 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.23 ÿ0.06 0.02 0.01 ÿ0.16 0.05 ÿ0.04 0.23 ÿ0.30 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.21 ÿ0.03 0.02 0.01 ÿ0.27 0.09 ÿ0.11 0.07 ÿ0.09 0.03
0.60 ÿ0.57 0.56 0.55 0.55 ÿ0.55 0.53 0.52 0.52 0.50 0.49 0.47 0.46 0.44 0.43 0.42 0.39 0.33 0.33 0.33 0.32 0.32 0.27 ÿ0.26 0.23
nervousness, lethargy and worry loaded highly on the neuroticism-negative aect factor, emphasising the aective component of this dimension. The highest loading items on the extraversion-positive aect factor were indicative of liveliness, activity and excitement (Table 3). For adults, a clear two factor structure made up of extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect emerged from the analysis, accounting for 24% of the variance. Factor I contained extraversion and positive aect items, with the highest loading items denoting liveliness, talkativeness, enthusiasm and excitement. The second factor was composed of items from the neuroticism and negative aect scales, especially indicative of negative cognition, worry, apprehension, guilt and nervousness. Internal consistency of both factors was good, exceeding 0.8 (Table 4). Based on the scree plots for each age group, four factor solutions were also extracted for rotation. In each age group the analysis produced four relatively distinct factors: extraversion, negative aect, neuroticism and positive aect. The four factor solution for children and early adolescents accounted for 28.1% of the variance. In the case of the young adults and adults
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Table 4 Principal components analysis with varimax rotation of two-factors for the adult sample (N = 142). (1) Pre-rotation variance explained by each factor: factor I: 15.2%, factor II: 8.8%; (2) factor eigenvalues were as follows: factor I: 9.71, factor II: 5.65 Item
Factor I
II
Factor I: extraversion-positive aect (a=0.89) E: Are you rather lively? E: Do other people think of you as being very lively? E: Are you a talkative person? PA: Enthusiastic E: Are you mostly quiet when you are with other people? E: Do you usually take the initiative when making new friends? E: Do you tend to keep in the background on social occasions? E: Can you usually let yourself go and enjoy a lively party? E: Can you easily get some life into a very dull party? E: Can you get a party going? E: Do you like mixing with people? E: Do you like plenty of bustle and excitement around you? PA: Excited E: Do you enjoy meeting new people? PA: Active PA: Proud E: Do you prefer reading to meeting people? E: Do you have many friends? PA: Inspired E: Would you call yourself happy-go-lucky? E: Do you like going out a lot? E: Do you nearly always have a ready answer when people talk to you? E: Do you like telling jokes and funny stories to your friends? PA: Alert E: Do you like doing things in which you have to act quickly? PA: Strong PA: Attentive E: Do you often take on more activities than you have time for? PA: Interested
0.77 0.75 0.64 0.63 ÿ0.63 0.63 ÿ0.61 0.60 0.57 0.57 0.54 0.54 0.51 0.50 0.50 0.47 ÿ0.46 0.46 0.43 0.42 0.38 0.35 0.34 0.33 0.32 0.28 0.28 0.26 0.25
0.00 0.08 0.10 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.04 ÿ0.01 ÿ0.08 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.12 0.04 ÿ0.02 ÿ0.04 0.04 ÿ0.03 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.13 ÿ0.25 0.09 ÿ0.11 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.18 ÿ0.05 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.19 0.05 ÿ0.16
Factor II: neuroticism-negative aect (a=0.86) N: Do you suer from nerves? N: Do you often feel fed up? N: Would you call yourself tense or highly strung? N: Are you a worrier? N: Would you call yourself a nervous person? N: Are you often troubled by feelings of guilt? N: Do you often worry about things you should not have done or said? N: Are you easily hurt when people ®nd fault with you or the work you do? NA: Nervous
ÿ0.14 ÿ0.10 0.00 ÿ0.17 ÿ0.09 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.07 ÿ0.04
0.65 0.62 0.62 0.58 0.54 0.54 0.54 0.53 0.52
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Table 4 (continued ) Item
N: Do you ever feel just miserable for no good reason? N: Do you worry about awful things that might happen? N: Do you worry about your looks? NA: Jittery N: Do you worry too long after an embarrassing experience? NA: Upset N: Do worry about your health? NA: Irritable N: Are you an irritable person? N: Do you feel lonely? N: Have you often felt listless and tired for no reason? N: Does your mood often go up and down? N: Do you often feel life is very dull? N: Do you suer from sleeplessness? NA: Distressed N: Are your feelings easily hurt? N: Are you touchy about some things? N: Are you sometimes bubbling with energy and sometimes very sluggish? NA: Hostile NA: Afraid NA: Guilty NA: Determined E: Do you have many dierent hobbies? N: Have you ever wished you were dead? NA: Ashamed NA: Scared
Factor I
II
ÿ0.14 0.02 0.04 0.07 ÿ0.20 ÿ0.08 0.03 ÿ0.17 ÿ0.10 ÿ0.14 ÿ0.24 ÿ0.15 ÿ0.29 ÿ0.16 ÿ0.24 ÿ0.06 ÿ0.04 0.20 0.05 ÿ0.01 0.09 0.25 0.19 0.02 0.06 ÿ0.03
0.51 0.51 0.49 0.49 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.47 0.46 0.46 0.43 0.43 0.40 0.40 0.39 0.38 0.31 0.30 0.26 0.25 0.25 ÿ0.24 0.20 0.20 0.17
over 30 the four factor solution explained 34 and 33% of the variance, respectively (details of these analyses are available from the authors upon request).
4. Discussion The results of the present study have provided additional evidence supporting the stability and robustness of the relationship between personality and aect in adults, using a sample drawn from the general population and a combination of dierent measurement instruments (i.e. EPQ and PANAS). The strong correlations between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect are highly consistent with the ®ndings of most recent studies (see Table 1). Importantly, the magnitude of these respective relationships in adults (aged 30 to 68 years) was not signi®cantly dierent from those found for late adolescents and young adults (aged 16 to 29 years). The strong association between personality and aect in both samples, is further supported
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by the emergence of a two factor structure made up of extraversion-positive aect and neuroticism-negative aect. Each factor demonstrated good internal consistency, indicating that item content was homogenous, without suggesting the presence of redundant items (Boyle, 1991; Cortina, 1993). While the two factor solution found in the present study explained less variance than that of Meyer and Shack (1989), it nevertheless con®rms that the two main personality and aect dimensions share a common structural basis. Whilst the results of the present study have supported the ®ndings of previous research in adults (e.g. Watson & Clark, 1992; Suh et al., 1996), these ®ndings break new ground by comparing personality and aect across the lifespan. In particular, the results have demonstrated that although neuroticism was signi®cantly correlated with negative aect and extraversion with positive aect in youth, the magnitude of these relationships was signi®cantly stronger for adults than for children and early adolescents. In contrast to the strong relationships found in adults, extraversion and positive aect and neuroticism and negative aect were weakly to moderately related in children and early adolescents, accounting for 10 and 18% of the shared variance, respectively. While a two factor structure composed of neuroticism-negative aect and extraversion-positive aect was found for all three age groups, this structure also explained less variance for children and young adolescents. Taken together, both sets of results indicate that even though neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive aect were related in children and adolescents, these constructs merged to a much greater extent in adults. Despite the importance of our ®ndings, there are factors that limit our conclusions. Reliance on a single method of measurement (i.e. self-reports), without corroboration from other external sources of information (e.g. observer-ratings) limits conclusions that may be made since social desirability may have in¯uenced responses to some degree. Whether such in¯uence varied across the dierent age groups remains a possibility. It must be noted, however, that aect research does face the particular diculty of eliciting information about internal states that are not easily observed by others. Indeed, Gross and John (1997) found that self-reported positive and negative aect were only weakly correlated with facial expressions of emotion, indicating that people do not always express their experience of emotion, but instead behave in accord with `display rules' learnt through socialisation. Given the cross-sectional design adopted in this investigation the present ®ndings cannot provide direct nor conclusive support for the role of aect in organising personality traits, or speci®c processes such as the formation of aective-cognitive structures that are claimed to underlie personality development (Izard et al., 1993). Nevertheless they do demonstrate that personality and aect become more strongly related and more tightly de®ned with increasing age. Thus the present results provide preliminary support for a core premise underlying the emotion perspective which proposes that the interaction between emotion thresholds together with experience over time contribute to the development of personality throughout childhood and early adolescence. The results suggest that the relationship between aect and personality present in children and early adolescents becomes consolidated by late adolescence and early adulthood. Therefore, it could be speculated that in late adolescence and young adulthood not only does the relationship between personality and aect become signi®cantly stronger but possibly also increasingly bi-directional. The relationships between neuroticism and negative aect and extraversion and positive
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aect, when examined in the context of the lifespan, are considerably more complex than the single direct relationships proposed by the trait perspective. Indeed, within the trait perspective extraversion and neuroticism are directly responsible for regulating positive and negative aect irrespective of developmental period. While this is a convincing proposal for late adolescence and adulthood, it is a less adequate explanation for childhood and early adolescence since the relationships are signi®cantly weaker at this stage. In conclusion, the present study is the ®rst to examine relationships between personality traits and aect experiences in children and adolescents. Additionally, it is the ®rst investigation to have compared these relationships across dierent developmental periods. Our ®ndings are illuminating in that they point to dierences in the magnitude of these associations depending on age. Future research of a longitudinal nature is required to better understand the factors underlying these dierences. Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Adriana Wilson, Krystina Herszlikowicz, Sally Luste, Brett and Robert Huggan and others who played an invaluable role in organising data collection. References Avia, M. D. (1997). Personality and positive emotions. European Journal of Personality, 11(1), 33±56. Avia, M. D., Sanz, J., Sanchez-Bernados, M. L., Martinez-Arias, M. R., Silva, F., & Grana, J. L. (1995). The ®vefactor model. II. Relations of the NEO-PI with other personality variables. Personality and Individual Dierences, 19(1), 81±97. Berry, D. S., & Hansen, J. S. (1996). Positive aect, negative aect and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(4), 796±809. Boyle, T. (1991). Does item homogeneity indicate internal consistency or item redundancy in psychometric scales? Personality and Individual Dierences, 12, 291±294. Cortina, L. (1993). What is coecient alpha? An examination of theory and applications. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 98±104. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980). In¯uence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(4), 668±678. David, J. P., Green, P. J., Martin, R., & Suls, J. (1997). Dierential roles of neuroticism, extraversion, and event desirability for mood in daily life: an integrative model of top-down and bottom-up in¯uences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 149±159. Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542±575. Diener, E., Smith, H., & Fujita, F. (1995). The personality structure of aect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(1), 47±66. Eysenck, H. J. (1967). The biological basis of personality. Illinois: C.C. Thomas. Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1975). Manual of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (junior and adult). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Gray, J. A. (1987). Perspectives on anxiety and impulsivity: a commentary. Journal of Research in Personality, 21, 493±509. Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (1997). Revealing feelings: facets of emotional expressivity in self-reports, peer ratings and behaviour. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 435±448.
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