The relevance/significance of stimuli appraisals for personality traits in an academic context

Abstract

Though appraisals are recognised as an important cognitive-affective process linking traits to emotions, motivations, and behaviours, previous research on the relationship between personality traits and appraisals has been limited by not considering relevance/significance-appraisals. This study used 120 university students to investigate the relationship between conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism, and pleasantness- and relevance/significance appraisals of academic-related words (in the categories of academic-approach, academic-avoidance, performance-evaluative, and academic-neutral). The results suggested that both pleasantness- and relevance/significance-appraisals were important for explaining the variation in personality traits. Overall, stimuli-appraisals accounted for 35% of the variance in conscientiousness, and 49% of the variance in an aspect of conscientiousness related to approach/achievement.