Negative affectivity
Neuroticism can plague an individual with severe mood swings, frequent sadness, worry, and being easily disturbed,[1][3] and predicts the development and onset of all "common" mental disorders.
[5] Research shows that negative affectivity relates to different classes of variables: Self-reported stress and (poor) coping skills,[1][6][7] health complaints, and frequency of unpleasant events.
The study quantified reactions from Mexican and Puerto Rican participants in response to the devaluation of speakers from other ethnic origins.
[11] The PANAS-X is an expanded version of PANAS that incorporates negative affect subscales for Fear, Sadness, Guilt, Hostility, and Shyness.
I-PANAS-SF – The International Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Short Form is an extensively validated brief, cross-culturally reliable 10-item version of the PANAS.
The I-PANAS-SF was developed to eliminate redundant and ambiguous items and thereby derive an efficient measure for general use in research situations where either time or space are limited, or where international populations are of interest but where English may not be the mother tongue.
[14] Benefits of negative affect are present in areas of cognition including perception, judgement, memory and interpersonal personal relations.
Evolutionary theories propose that negative affective states tend to increase skepticism and decrease reliance on preexisting knowledge.
[16] Consequently, judgmental accuracy is improved in areas such as impression formation, reducing fundamental attribution error, stereotyping, and gullibility.
Sadness correlates with feeling blue or the creation of tears, while excitement may cause a spike in blood pressure and one's pulse.
[13] One common judgment error is the halo effect, or the tendency to form unfounded impressions of people based on known but irrelevant information.
[17] A study involving undergraduate students demonstrated a halo effect in identifying a middle-aged man as more likely to be a philosopher than an unconventional, young woman.
[17] Then, participants read a philosophical essay by a fake academic who was identified as either a middle-aged, bespectacled man or as a young, unorthodox-looking woman.
[17] Their findings support theories that negative affect results in more elaborate processing based upon external, available information.
[18][19] The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is connected with positive affect since it occurs when people use top-down cognitive processing based on inferences.
[18] After being sorted into positive or negative affect groups, participants read one of two possible essays arguing for one side or another on a highly controversial topic.
[18] Still, the positive affect groups rated debaters who argued unpopular views as holding the same attitude expressed in the essay.
[13] Negative affect benefits judgment in diminishing the implicit use of stereotypes by promoting closer attention to stimuli.
[20] Researchers concluded that negative affect leads to less reliance on internal stereotypes, thus decreasing judgmental bias.
[13] Multiple studies have shown that negative affectivity has a beneficial role in increasing skepticism and decreasing gullibility.
Negative affect has been shown to decrease susceptibility of incorporating misleading information, which is related to the misinformation effect.
[13] The misinformation effect refers to the finding that misleading information presented between the encoding of an event and its subsequent recall influences a witness's memory.
Overall the study found that although participant response to the event outcome did not affect the quantity of remembered information, it did influence the likelihood of false memory.
In fact, emotions, including negative affect, are shown to reduce accuracy in identifying perpetrators from photographic lineups.
Researchers demonstrated this effect in an experiment in which participants watched a video that induced either negative emotion or a neutral mood.
[30] These findings are consistent with prior knowledge that stress and emotion greatly impair eyewitness ability to recognitive perpetrators.
People with low negative affectivity form overly-positive, potentially inaccurate impression of others that can lead to misplaced trust.
Afterwards, participants were exposed to a mood induction process, where they had to watch videotapes designed to elicit negative or positive affectivity.
It is viewed as a trait that could make selecting individuals for a team irrelevant, thus preventing knowledge from becoming known or predicted for current issues that may arise.
These findings complement evolutionary psychology theories that affective states serve adaptive functions in promoting suitable cognitive strategies to deal with environmental challenges.
