Personality and emotion regulation contributions to executive function

honors thesisCollege of Social & Behavioral SciencePsychologyYana SuchyA growing body of evidence suggests a relationship between personality characteristics and cognition. Additionally, coping styles, which themselves are related to personality traits, also appear to be related to cognition. Two coping styles are of particular relevance; these are (1) Cognitive Reappraisal (CR), which is a strategy that relies on active alteration of the experience of emotions and (2) Affect Suppression (AS), which is a strategy that relies on concealment of overt emotional responses. Importantly, CR is associated with good cognitive and psychological functioning (John & Gross, 2003), whereas the chronic overuse of AS is associated with poorer cognitive and psychological functioning. Additionally, greater use of CR is associated with higher trait extraversion (Li, Zhanbiao, & Huanhuan, 2009), whereas greater use of AS has been associated with higher trait neuroticism and active depletion of cognitive resources (Baumeister & Alquist, 2009). In sum, although coping style and personality each have established relationships with cognition, it is not clear whether they contribute uniquely to cognition, or whether they explain cognition through mutually shared variance. In this study (N=18), participants completed a measure of cognition and surveys assessing both coping style and personality. Controlling for age and education, hierarchical regressions were performed using EF as the criterion variable and the various emotion regulation styles and personality traits as predictors. Both AS and openness to experience had a significant relationship with EF above and beyond demographics, but did not contribute to the model above and beyond each other, showing considerable overlap with one another