Be Yourself and Behave Appropriately: Exploring Associations Between Incongruent Personality States and Positive Affect, Tiredness, and Cognitive Performance

Personality traits describe how people typically think, feel, and behave. Personality states describe how people think, feel, and behave in a given moment. In their daily lives, people often behave the way they typically do (they enact trait-congruent personality states), but occasionally behave differently from how they typically do (trait-incongruent personality states). Several theories propose that such incongruent personality states should be associated with undesirable outcomes such as less positive affect or more tiredness, but the current state of evidence is inconclusive and mostly based on one personality dimension: extraversion. In this study, we contribute to filling important gaps in the literature by examining congruence of personality dimensions other than extraversion, considering characteristics of the situation, and modeling congruence with state-of-the-art response surface analyses. We aimed to manipulate state honesty-humility and state agreeableness as well as perceived adversity and deception of the situation in a prisoner’s dilemma paradigm. The manipulations mostly had the intended effects but they also had additional unspecific effects on other personality states and situation characteristics. The study thus emphasized the difficulty of manipulating personality states, situation characteristics, and trait–state and state–situation congruence. In pre-registered analyses of variance, response surface analyses, and specification curve analyses, we then examined how trait–state congruence and state–situation congruence were associated with positive affect, tiredness, and performance in a numerical Stroop task. Neither trait–state congruence nor state–situation congruence were associated with positive affect, tiredness, or cognitive performance. However, in light of this study’s limitations, more studies that are carefully designed, carefully operationalized, and well-powered are needed to examine trait–state and state–situation congruence. Because experimental research can advance the understanding of personality dynamics substantially, future research should additionally further aim to develop valid and reliable manipulations of personality states and situation characteristics.

Evidence for a visuospatial bias in decimal number comparison in adolescents and in adults

There is a close relation between spatial and numerical representations which can lead to interference as in Piaget’s number conservation task or in the numerical Stroop task. Using a negative priming (NP) paradigm, we investigated whether the interference between spatial and numerical processing extends to more complex arithmetic processing by asking 12 year olds and adults to compare the magnitude of decimal numbers (i.e., the prime) and, subsequently, the length of two lines or the luminance of two circles (i.e., the probe). We found NP effects when participants compare length but not luminance. Our finding suggests that decimal comparison is impacted by a visuospatial bias due to the interference between the magnitude of the numbers to be compared and their physical length. We discuss the educational implications of these findings.

Analisis Perbedaan Pola Sinyal EEG Berdasarkan Jenis Kelamin Yang Berbeda Saat Numerical Stroop Task

Cognitive process show how brain work from stimulus reception until stimuls reaction. With electroencephalogram (EEG) device, cognate process can be observerd in brain signal or EEG signal form. In cognitive process different kind of stimulus could affect generated brain signal. Also, given interference in cognitive prcess could affect brain signal. In this research, conducted observation whether gender difference has effect in cognitive process. Numerical stroop task with three kinds of conditions (congruence, incongruence, and neutral) are used as reference in signal observation process which is generated when the cognitive process in difference genders are done. The resulting EEG signal then conducted three kinds of analysis that is ERP analysis, reaction time, and energy analysis. The result of ERP analysis show both subject class have difference in response time that indicated with P3 peak time. On average, respons time in female (kongruent = 623,34 ms; inkongruent = 645,18 ms ; neutral = 614,91 ms)subject class is faster than male (kongruent = 709,67 ms; inkongruent = 745,00 ms; neutral =715,37 ms) subject class. Energy analysis show when numerical stroop task takes place, left side of the brain (51,36%) and cetral side of the brain (50,65%) more dominant than others parts of the brain.