The Study About The Relationship Between Neurotic Personality And Cognitive Processing Bias

In recent years,a large number of theories and experiments have studied cognitive processing,and personality traits have important influence on them.Neuroticism,the instability of the emotion,is one of the most concerned traits of personality study.Neuroticism plays an important role in people's physical health and mental health.A large number of studies have shown that neurotic individuals are more likely to develop affective disorders.In order to advance our understanding of the relationship between personality and emotion and to contribute to the therapy of affective disorders,this study attempts to systematically investigate the cognitive processing of emotional stimuli in neurotic individuals,including attentional bias,memory bias and interpretation bias.Study 1 investigated the attention processing characteristics of positive,negative and neutral words in high and low neurotic individuals,by employing an emotion Stroop task.We found that high neurotic group responsed significantly slower to negative emotional words than the low neurotic group,suggesting an attentional bias to negative emotional stimuli in high neurotic individuals.In contrast,the low neurotic group responded significantly slower to positive emotional words than the high neurotic group,suggesting an attentional bias to negative emotional stimuli in high neurotic individuals.Study 2 employed a free recall task to test whether high and low neurotic individuals have memory bias to different valence words.We found that high and low neurotic individuals were both likely to recall the emotional words than the neutral words.Specifically,the amount of recalled negative words was larger than positive words among high neurotic group,indicating that high neurotic group had memory bias to negative emotion words.Study 3 employed interpretation questionnaire to investigate whether high and low neurotic individuals have interpretation bias to ambiguous situations within social or nonsocial factors factors.We found that in the both social or nonsocial situations,the high neurotic individuals were more likely to interpret the ambiguous information as negative information,which means high neurotic individuals have interpretation bias to negative stimulus.Instead,the low neurotic individuals exist to the trend to interpret the ambiguous information as positive information.Study 4 employed reation time task to investigate whether high and low neuroticindividuals have on-line interpretation bias within self-referent or other referent factors.We found that in self-referent or other referent situations,high neurotic individuals are more likely to recognize more negative interpretations and less positive interpretations,indicating that the on-line negative interpretation bias exist in both situations.The conclusion of this study is that high neurotic individuals have attentional bias,memory bias and interpretation bias to negative emotion stimulus,however low neurotic individuals have attentional bias,memory bias and interpretation bias to positive emotion stimulus.