 17. Cognitive Approaches to Personality  371
sired (e.g., pain ) stimuli when in a positive 
mood state, but introverts were faster to do 
so when in a negative mood state. These re -
sults suggest that positive emotional states 
facilitate goal-  relevant processing at higher 
levels of extraversion. Even so, it is appar -
ent that more work needs to be done both to 
evaluate and to flesh out reward processing 
theories of extraversion (Corr, 2004; Smil -
lie, 2013).
Multiple Perspectives on Neuroticism
Neuroticism is the trait of the Big Five that 
best captures tendencies toward negative af -
fect, emotional reactivity, self-  esteem issues, 
and subjective health problems (John, Chap -
ter 2, this volume; Suls & Martin, 2005). 
Because neuroticism is problematic in mul -
tiple ways, it (and/or the closely related 
trait of anxiety) has received attention from 
both clinical and personality psychologists 
(Sauer-  Zavala, Wilner, & Barlow, 2017). 
Perhaps as a result, there are a number of 
promising cognitive perspectives on neuroti -
cism.
The Role of Attending to Threat in Neuroticism
People differ in their tendency to attend to 
threatening information relative to non -
threatening information (Bar-Haim, Lamy, 
Pergamin, Bakermans-  Kranenburg, & Van 
IJzendoorn, 2007). These individual dif -
ferences have been most clearly established 
with versions of the dot-probe task, which 
seeks to determine whether spatial attention 
favors threatening or nonthreatening stimuli 
when the two types of stimuli are presented 
concurrently (MacLeod, 1999). With low- 
intensity stimuli, people high in trait anxi -
ety (which is highly correlated with neuroti -
cism) tend to favor threatening information; 
by contrast, people low in trait anxiety often 
orient away from threatening information 
(Bar-Haim et al., 2007). Such attentional 
biases may contribute to, or reinforce, dis -
positional variations in anxiety.
Indeed, a growing body of work has sug -
gested a causal role for such attentional fac -
tors in emotional reactivity. An influential 
study along these lines was conducted by 
MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebswor -thy, and Holker (2002). By random assign -
ment, some participants were given a spatial 
probe task in which spatial probes neither 
favored nor disfavored threat stimulus loca -
tions. By contrast, others were assigned to 
an experimental condition in which spatial 
probes almost always (90% of the time) oc -
curred in a location previously occupied by 
a nonthreatening stimulus. Over the course 
of more than 500 trials, MacLeod et al. 
reasoned that participants in the second 
condition would learn to orient away from 
threatening information, which would pro -
duce hedonic benefits. Although the train -
ing manipulation did not affect mood, it did 
affect emotional reactivity to a laboratory 
stressor, an effect subsequently replicated by 
several research groups. Current researchers 
are exploring the therapeutic significance of 
such training regimens, particularly for in -
dividuals with anxiety disorders (MacLeod, 
Koster, & Fox, 2009).
As should be clear, this attention-  related 
work has primarily been conducted by 
clinical psychologists. Nonetheless, a meta- 
analysis suggests that this cognitive model of 
anxiety appears to apply somewhat equally 
well to both nonclinical and clinical popula -
tions (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). Accordingly, 
it is reasonable to think that attending to 
threat should both vary with the trait of 
neuroticism and potentially reduce neuroti -
cism levels when trained (Robinson & Gor -
don, 2011). Nonetheless, more personality- 
oriented work along these lines would be 
valuable.
Neuroticism as a Negative Memory Network
Neurotic people react more strongly to 
stressors (Suls & Martin, 2005), and they ru -
minate more frequently (Hervas & Vazquez, 
2011). Cognitively, both phenomena suggest 
a memory network that favors negative af -
fect at higher levels of neuroticism; that is, 
negative affective thoughts are likely to be 
more closely interconnected among neurotic 
individuals, perhaps accounting for their 
tendency to dwell on the negative features 
of their lives.
Hypotheses of this type can (also) be ex -
amined using the affective priming task. In 
this case, though, the prediction is that neg -
ative, rather than positive, priming effects 