Who You Are and How You Feel: The Moderating Role of Personality on Emotional Contexts in the Lab and in Real Life

Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on Research in Psychology

Year: 2026

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Who You Are and How You Feel: The Moderating Role of Personality on Emotional Contexts in the Lab and in Real Life

Dr. Ryan Lundell-Creagh

ABSTRACT:

Research on person-situation interactions shows that differential reactivity to emotional situations exists based on underlying Extraversion and Neuroticism. However, much less is known about how this might generalize to naturalistic manipulations or in response to very strong situations. In Study 1, we tested this during COVID-19. We showed that individuals did respond differently to the lockdown based on their underlying Extraversion and Neuroticism. Most notably, introverts decreased in negative emotions whereas extraverts increased during the first 8 weeks of lockdown. High neurotics also decreased, whereas low neurotics increased. In Studies 2a and 2b, we asked whether these results generalize to a more traditional in lab emotional situation manipulation, using a sad film clip. We capitalized on modern statistics, namely multilevel modeling, to advance the existing work in this area and showed that both our results from Study 1, as well as the findings from previous work, which made use of difference scores as dependent variables instead of multilevel models, both generalized well. Additional findings and implications of them for personality theory, emotion theory, and person by situation interactions are discussed.

Keywords: Person By Situation Interactions; Emotional Reactivity; Big Five Personality; Naturalistic Manipulation; COVID-19