370 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
Cognitive approaches can also be used 
to reveal tendencies that are not necessarily 
captured by personality trait measures. As 
an example, biases to attend to threaten -
ing information are thought to play a role 
in the genesis of anxiety and fear (Beck & 
Clark, 1997). If so, we should be able to pre -
dict people’s vulnerability to such states on 
the basis of whether they attend to threats 
within attentional paradigms (MacLeod, 
1999). Furthermore, a number of theories 
converge on the idea that people have un -
conscious associations to the self that are 
likely to guide their choices and behaviors 
in profound, yet implicit, ways (Greenwald 
& Banaji, 1995). Such unconscious associa -
tions cannot be measured by self-  report, but 
they can be measured using other, more cog -
nitive techniques (Greenwald & Farnham, 
2000). In summary, it is plausible that there 
are implicit forms of personality that matter 
in everyday life despite weak or nonexistent 
correlations with explicit measures of per -
sonality (Robinson & Wilkowski, 2015).
This chapter focuses primarily on the util -
ity of cognitive approaches in understand -
ing how (self-  reported) personality traits 
operate. In this connection, I review some 
evidence for the idea that extraversion can 
be understood in terms of individual dif -
ferences in reward sensitivity and/or reac -
tivity. I then review more extensive lines of 
work seeking to understand the cognitive– 
affective processes that vary by neuroticism 
and agreeableness. Subsequently, the review 
touches on three classes of implicit personal -
ity measures. Altogether, my aim is to show 
how cognitive approaches can enrich our 
understanding of personality both in combi -
nation with, and sometimes independent of, 
self- reports about personality.
Extraversion as Reward Reactivity
The purported processing basis of extra -
version has shifted over the years. Whereas 
Eysenck’s arousal theory of extraversion 
once dominated the field, reward processing 
theories now do (Smillie, 2013). According 
to these theories, many of the correlates of 
extraversion—  such as excitement in goal 
pursuit—  can be understood in terms of 
greater levels of reward sensitivity or reac -tivity at higher levels of extraversion (Zelen -
ski & Larsen, 1999). This theory has gained 
some support in both emotion induction 
studies and neurocognitive studies. A fre -
quent finding in emotion induction studies 
is that extraversion predicts changes in posi -
tive affect in response to a positive induc -
tion, such that greater positive emotional 
reactivity is observed at higher levels of ex -
traversion (Zelenski & Larsen, 1999). Canli 
(2004) has observed similar results in neu -
rocognitive studies, such that extraversion 
predicts the extent of the brain’s reactivity 
to positive emotional stimuli.
Efforts to develop cognitive probes of re -
ward reactivity have comprised at least two 
types. In reinforcement sensitivity studies, 
people receive monetary or other rewards 
for good performance, and the question is 
the extent to which performance improves 
when rewards are present (Corr, 2004). Ex -
traversion tends to predict reward reactiv -
ity in such paradigms (Leue & Beauducel, 
2008), but a number of largely unknown 
task parameters appear to moderate this 
relationship (Matthews & Gilliland, 1999). 
In light of these complexities, simpler para -
digms may be desirable (Robinson, Boyd, & 
Liu, 2013).
A very simple task, the affective priming 
task, asks people to evaluate positive and 
negative stimuli while measuring reaction 
time in doing so. Although extraversion does 
not predict how quickly positive stimuli can 
be evaluated, independent of priming factors 
(Robinson, 2007), it does predict the extent 
to which one positive evaluation speeds the 
next one, a cognitive form of reward reactiv -
ity (Robinson, Moeller, & Ode, 2010). As 
Robinson et al. (2013) emphasized, results 
of this type can help explain why extraverts 
react more favorably to positive inductions, 
in that these inductions are likely to prime 
positive thoughts to a greater extent among 
extraverted individuals.
There is also some evidence for the idea 
that extraverts perform better when in a 
positive emotional state. Specifically, in four 
studies, Tamir, Robinson, and Clore (2002) 
showed that mood states interact with ex -
traversion to predict the speed with which 
people link their goals to relevant stimuli in 
a go/no-go task. Extraverts were faster to 
identify both desired (e.g., love ) and unde -