PERSONALITY TRAITS AND COGNITION 2

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the BSc Psychology degree, Reykjavik University, this thesis is presented in the style of an article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. PERSONALITY TRAITS AND COGNITION 3 Previous studies indicate that certain personality traits have an effect on cognitive performance. The aim of this study was to examine if positive and negative personality traits affects our memory and attention. Participants in the study (N=40) were divided into high and low positive groups and high and low negative groups using median split. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule questionnaire (PANAS) was used to measure positive and negative personality traits. Two cognitive tasks were used, a wordlist memory task where participants were asked to write down as many words as they could remember and a Stroop task, both original and emotional Stroop. The main hypotheses were that those who have more negative traits (low positive or high negative) would focus on and remember more negative words and those who have more positive trait (high positive or low negative) would focus on and remember more positive words. Results did not support the hypothesis, the expected difference between positive and negative traits was not found. The results however, revealed that high positive participants performed significantly worse on all the Stroop tasks compared to low positive participants. No main effects or interactions were found for the memory test. Útdráttur Fyrri rannsóknir gefa til kynna að ákveðnir persónuleikaeiginleikar hafa áhrif á hugræna frammistöðu. Tilgangur rannsóknarinnar var að skoða hvort jákvæðir og neikvæðir persónuleikaeiginleikar hafa áhrif á minni okkar og athygli. Þátttakendum í rannsókninni (N=40