EMOTIONS
At first glance, you might wonder why a topic like emotions is included in a
chapter on personality traits. After all, traits are consistent characteristics, andcommon observation tells us that our moods fluctuate constantly. Each of us
goes through good days and bad —times when we are extremely happy, tre-
mendously sad, proud, ashamed, enthusiastic, and guilty. Common sense also
suggests that how we feel depends on the situation. We ’re happy when good
things happen to us, proud when we accomplish something, sad when unfortu-nate events occur. However, if I ask you to think of someone you know whoalways seems to be in a good mood, my guess is you will have little difficulty
coming up with an example. Similarly, I find people can easily think of indivi-
duals they would describe as “gloomy, ”“confident, ”or“grouchy. ”In other
words, after a little reflection it also is apparent that, although each of us ex-
periences a wide range of positive and negative emotions, we can also identify
relatively stable patterns in emotions that distinguish each person from the peo-ple around him or her.
What are some of these consistent patterns? Researchers identify at least
three ways our emotions can be examined as relatively stable personal charac-
teristics. First, each of us differs in the extent to which we typically experience
positive and negative emotions. Second, we differ in the typical strength of
the emotions we experience. Third, we differ in the way we express our emo-
tions. Personality psychologists refer to these three aspects of emotion as
affectivity, intensity, andexpressiveness.
Emotional Affectivity
Thumb through a dictionary, and you will find dozens and dozens of words that
describe human emotions. People can be happy, irritated, content, nervous, em-barrassed, and disgusted. We experience shame, joy, regret, rage, anxiety, and
pride. But it is reasonable to ask if these are all different emotions or, as research-
ers have found when examining personality traits, connected to one another
along a few major dimensions. Like psychologists studying the Big Five personal-
ity dimensions, researchers use factor analysis to examine the relation among
various emotions (Watson & Clark, 1991; Watson & Tellegen, 1985). These re-searchers look at emotions as measured by self-report inventories, use of words,
facial expressions, and evaluations from others. And like Big Five researchers,
they find that certain emotions indeed tend to go together. People who are happyalso tend to be enthusiastic, those who are irritable are also sad.
Eventually, these investigators discovered that affect could be organized
around two general dimensions. As shown in Table 8.3, researchers identifiedone of these dimensions simply as positive affect. At one extreme we find such
emotions as active, content, andsatisfied. At the other extreme we find sadand
lethargic. The other dimension that emerged in this research was identified, per-
haps predictably, as negative affect. At one extreme of this dimension we find
nervousness, anger, anddistress. At the other end we find calm andserene.
The same two dimensions can be used to identify our typical emotional
experiences. As with other traits, our general tendencies to experience positive
affect and negative affect are relatively stable over time. That is, if I know204 CHAPTER 8 The Trait Approach