Recent theoretical work has called for greater integration between personality and learning research, proposing that personality variables can serve as moderators of learning effects (De Houwer et al., 2023), while learning perspectives can highlight personality as a learned behaviour. This symposium advances this agenda by examining how individual differences shape evaluative conditioning (EC) and disgust conditioning processes across laboratory and real-world contexts. The opening presentation demonstrates that neuroticism amplifies negative valence transfer in EC, with highly neurotic individuals showing more severe evaluations of threatening stimuli and stronger conditioning effects. Unexpectedly, looming cognitive style appears to buffer rather than enhance these effects, suggesting complex interactions between vulnerability factors. Moving beyond broad personality dimensions, the second presentation investigates personality nuances, item-level characteristics with potentially greater predictive power than traditional trait models. Preliminary findings identify dozens of specific personality characteristics that may moderate the EC effects, offering a more granular understanding of individual differences. The third presentation extends EC research into social contexts, revealing that impression formation is not uniformly assimilative. While competence and warmth evaluations typically transfer from known individuals to associated targets, explicit relational information (friends versus enemies) can reverse this pattern, producing contrast rather than assimilation effects. Finally, the symposium examines real-world implications through ecological momentary assessment, linking laboratory-based disgust conditioning with daily emotional experiences. Results indicate that disgust-specific traits predict conditioning strength, while neuroticism relates to broader long-term emotional patterns.
Recent research has shown that individual differences in personality can influence Evaluative Conditioning (EC), that is the change in the evaluation of a neutral stimulus resulting from its previous pairings with another positively or negatively valenced stimulus. The focus specifically was on personality traits and facets assessed through the Big Five and HEXACO-PI measures, revealing that certain traits, like Neuroticism and Agreeableness, tend to increase EC effects. However, personality structure is not only defined by broad factors or facets. More specific item-level characteristics, called personality nuances, have been shown to have even greater predictive validity than broad-factor models. The present research aimed to investigate the relationship between personality nuances and EC, identifying specific personality characteristics that can moderate EC effects. The research includes an exploratory and a confirmatory study. In the exploratory study, participants (N=408) completed the 100NP questionnaire before performing the EC paradigm. Multilevel Bayesian analyses showed that 59 nuances potentially moderate the EC (i.e., 90% of the posterior density of the moderation is larger than 0). The confirmatory study is currently underway and will allow to identify nuances with reliable effects. Overall, the findings will shed light on how personality influences EC.
Impressions of individuals often extend to those they are associated with. Building on prior findings that competence-warmth evaluations transfer from known “source” individuals to novel “targets,” this study examined whether relational qualifiers moderate such impression propagation. Participants (N = 306) completed two evaluative conditioning (EC) tasks. In EC1, high-competence/low-warmth (HCLW) or low-competence/high-warmth (LCHW) sources were paired with neutral targets, replicating typical assimilation effects. In EC2, explicit relational information indicated that sources and targets were either friends or enemies. Participants then rated all stimuli across warmth, competence, and likeability. Personality (IPIP) and Need for Cognition were also measured.
Mixed-effects models confirmed robust assimilation in EC1. When relational qualifiers were added in EC2, evaluation patterns shifted: friend relationships tended to preserve assimilation, whereas enemy relationships yielded patterns consistent with contrast. Difference-score analyses similarly suggested that explicit relational context alters both the direction and magnitude of impression carryover. Personality traits and Need for Cognition further moderated some of these effects.
The results highlight the importance of relational context and individual cognitive and personality differences in shaping how impressions are extended from known individuals to novel others.
The current study employed an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to investigate the relationships between disgust learning mechanisms (acquisition and generalization), neuroticism, and heightened disgust proneness (sensitivity and propensity) in relation to long-term emotional experiences. We collected real-time data on participants’ emotions (N = 173) over seven days using an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) framework (4 assessments/day × 7 days = 28 assessments). The research included a laboratory session involving a disgust conditioning task, followed by a week-long EMA. Our findings show that individuals with higher neuroticism and increased disgust proneness experience greater long-term ecological disgust and negative emotions. Disgust-related traits enhance the acquisition and generalization of disgust responses, whereas broader traits, such as neuroticism, do not affect learning processes.
Reality perception is often altered by general dispositional factors that are associated with emotional vulnerability, both inherited and acquired, that emerge in a specific learning context. The current study examined whether neuroticism and looming cognitive style interact to influence emotional learning. To achieve this, we implemented an evaluative conditioning procedure (valence change in a conditioned stimulus due to pairing with an unconditioned stimulus) that paired positive stimuli, non-threatening negative stimuli, and threatening stimuli with neutral stimuli. Participants (N = 806) provided measures of valence and threat attributes for the unconditioned stimuli, and of neuroticism and looming cognitive style. The evaluative conditioning effect was mediated by threat and valence evaluations of unconditioned stimuli. Highly neurotic individuals evaluated negative and threatening unconditional stimuli more extremely compared to their normed attributes. Similarly, the evaluative conditioning effect was more pronounced in participants who scored higher in neuroticism, for both negative and threatening conditions. Surprisingly, looming cognitive style buffered the evaluative conditioning effect. Neuroticism explained not only the extremity in the perception of negative and threatening stimuli, but also the amplitude of negative valence transfer from threatening and negative evaluations. On the contrary, looming cognitive style seemed to reduce the valence transfer.