Learning
Does personality affect how we learn to stop expecting rewards?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People with higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism are less successful at learning when a stimulus signals that an expected reward will be withheld.
Key findings
The study confirmed that participants successfully learned conditioned inhibition, but individual differences in personality traits played a significant role. Higher neuroticism scores significantly correlated with weaker inhibitory learning, as did higher anxiety and fear scores. Interestingly, 18 participants failed the basic associative learning task and had to be excluded from the main analysis, and males generally performed better than females on excitatory and inhibitory learning.
Methodology
Researchers tested 194 healthy adult participants using a computer-based associative learning task where Lego blocks served as conditioned stimuli and pleasant images served as rewards. Participants also completed the 48-item Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised Short Scale and the 20-item Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Systems scales. The task evaluated how well participants learned simple associations and how effectively they learned conditioned inhibition, where a specific stimulus signaled that an expected reward would not appear.
Limitations
Initially, the study relies entirely on a correlational design, which prevents drawing causal conclusions about whether personality traits directly cause differences in learning. Furthermore, the observed effect sizes between personality traits and learning performance were relatively small, meaning other unmeasured factors likely influence these learning differences. Additionally, the sample was relatively young, with a mean age of 24.85, and used only positive images as rewards, which limits how well these findings generalize to older populations or negative emotional situations.
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