Abstract:

Extraversion is closely linked with emotional activity: it not only affects people’s adaptive capacity and subjective well-being, but it’s also closely associated with emotional and behavioral disorders such as anxiety and impulsiveness. Prior studies focused on the influences of extraversion in sensitivity to emotional stimuli. Participants’ positive emotional responses to reward stimuli increase significantly with higher extraversion scoring. However, we hypothesize that the links between extraversion and emotion may also be manifested by the impacts of extraversion on the behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of emotion regulation. Therefore, we are going to manipulate two variables – extraversion and emotion regulation strategies – to test these hypotheses. Accordingly, it is theoretically and practically meaningful to address the following three scientific questions using behavioral/physiological, EEG, and fMRI measures: 1), developing an emotion regulation questionnaire inclusive of most of the common strategies, and comparing emotion regulation characteristics between extroverts and introverts; 2), exploring the impacts of extroversion on cognitive emotion regulation and the neurophysiologic underpinnings; 3) exploring brain mechanisms underlying interactive influences of emotional stability and extraversion. The ultimate goal of this series of studies is to unravel the brain mechanisms of emotion regulation differences in people with varying extraversion, to better understand the relationship between emotion and personality, and to lay theoretic and practical bases for clinical treatment of affective disturbances.

Key words: extraversion, emotion regulation, brain mechanisms, emotional stability