Personality traits and perception of emotional pictures
Creators: name: Ohmann, Hanno
name: Kuper, Niclas
name: Herzberg, Philipp
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Psychiatry and Psychology
subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Psychological Phenomena and Processes

description: Emotional pictures are common stimuli in psychological research and several standardized databases have been established to increase replicability and comparability (Lang et al., 2008; Marchewka et al., 2014; Dan-Glauser &amp; Scherer, 2011; Olszanowski et al., 2015). These datasets include ratings about the emotional properties of pictures, ranging from the valence and arousal elicited to ratings about the desire to avoid or approach the content of the picture. A vast range of research is based on the ratings of such pictures, and these emotional ratings are often considered stimulus-immanent properties. However, various studies indicate that personality traits predict the reaction to emotional stimuli, ranging from differences in stress reaction while watching emotional pictures (Mardaga et al., 2006) to emotional ratings of movies (Steenhaut et al., 2018) or brain activity while watching emotional pictures (Speed et al., 2015). Further support stems from studies using eye-tracking systems, indicating individual differences in the perception of stimuli. For instance, subjects high in neuroticism were found to focus on the eyes of fearful faces for longer time periods (Perlman et al., 2009) and made overall longer and fewer fixations while watching abstract pictures as compared to subjects high in extraversion, who made more and shorter fixations (Rauthmann et al., 2012). Furthermore, some studies have investigated effects of personality traits on the ratings of emotional pictures (e.g., Aluja et al., 2015; Finley &amp; Schmeichel, 2019; Peña-Gómez et al., 2011; Tok et al., 2010). For instance, Peña-Gómez et al. (2011) reported that subjects high in extraversion made more positive ratings of positive pictures and subjects high in neuroticism made more negative ratings of neutral pictures. However, this is only partly corroborated by other studies (e.g., Finley &amp; Schmeichel, 2019; Tok et al., 2010), and several inconsistencies between studies remain. Moreover, previous studies often insufficiently distinguished interaction effects between stimulus properties and personality traits (e.g., neuroticism × stimulus valence interaction: neuroticism predisposes to more negative ratings of negative as compared to positive stimuli) from potential main effects of personality traits on ratings (e.g., neuroticism main effect: neuroticism predisposes to more negative ratings in general). Lastly, stimuli from different valence categories (positive/neutral/negative) often contain unbalanced content (e.g., within the Geneva Picture Database, which contains more pictures of babies and landscapes within the positive valence category and more pictures of animal abuses or violations of human rights in the negative valence category; Dan-Glauser &amp; Scherer, 2011), potentially resulting in artificial, content-driven differences in image ratings. We aim to address these limitations in the present work. Here, we seek to investigate the effects of a wide range of personality traits on judgments of the valence and arousal elicited by emotional pictures as well as the desire to avoid or approach the content of emotional pictures. We will use pictures from the NAPS (Marchewka et al., 2014), which is a dataset of emotional pictures including content-balanced stimuli.