Further Evidences of the role of Personality on Affective Forecasting

While personality is strongly related to experienced emotions, few studies examined the role of personality traits on affective forecasting. In the present study, we investigated the relationships between extraversion and neuroticism personality traits and affective predictions about academic performance. Participants were asked to predict their emotional reactions two months before they will get their results for one important exam. At the same time, personality was assessed with the Big Five Inventory. All the participants were contacted by a text message eight hours after that the results were available, and they were requested to rate their experienced affective state. Results show moderate negative correlations between neuroticism and both predicted and experienced feelings, and that extraversion exhibits a weak positive correlation with predicted feelings, but not with experienced feelings. Taken together, these findings confirm that extraversion and neuroticism shape emotional forecasts, and suggest that affective forecasting interventions based on personality could probably enhance their efficiencies.