Evaluative Conditioning and Neuroticism: Investigating the Evaluative Responses to a Composed Ambivalent Stimulus

Individuals high in neuroticism often display a negativity bias, giving more weight to negative information. This bias may contribute to the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. Ambivalence, the co-occurrence of positivity and negativity within the same stimulus or context, seems to highlight the presence of negativity bias associated with neuroticism. Recently, previous research revealed such a bias by creating ambivalent conditioning scenarios using Evaluative Conditioning. In our experiment, we conceptualized ambivalence within one composed ambivalent stimulus. The stimulus is compounded by one CS (i.e., conditioned stimulus) conditioned with a positive US (i.e., unconditioned stimulus) and one CS conditioned with a negative US during an EC procedure. Thus, we aimed that the composed ambivalent stimulus would receive negative evaluations from participants high on neuroticism. We conducted pre- and post-test evaluations to assess the change in likeability scores, revealing significant differences in evaluations based on the CS-US pairings. Our results confirm the EC effect, indicating that the likeability of CSs was aligned with the valence of the US. While our hypothesis was not confirmed, a positive correlation emerged between worry levels and positive evaluations of the ambivalent stimulus. Supplementary analyses reinforced these findings, revealing no significant associations between personality variables and the evaluations of the main CSs. Our experiment did not emphasize the negativity bias associated with neuroticism in an ambivalent conditioning scenario. Still, it revealed some other intriguing results that invite us to reflect on the various methodologies used to investigate the relation between personality and EC.