ISU professor receives grant to study personality traits and emotions

If a person is happy when talking about a particular subject, could that possibly indicate a deeper personal characteristic?

That’s what one Idaho State University professor is researching.

Psychology professor Tera Letzring recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study personality traits and emotions.

The grant was for $406,358. Letzring said she wants to see if there’s a direct correlation between personality traits and emotions.

Letzring is partnering with a professor from Northwestern University to complete the study.

The study will look at whether emotions and traits cause each other. This means if someone can more accurately judge one, could that person more accurately judge the other?

“It seems like you would have to know what someone is like in the moment, that would be the state emotion judgment, to have any chance of figuring out what they’re like long-term,” Letzring said.

The study will involved volunteers from both ISU and the community. Participants will watch short three to four-minute videos. The videos are of various people given the same seven situations.

Based on the emotional reactions to these situations, both verbal and non-verbal, it can indicate the differences in personality types.

Those watching the videos will rate the emotions and traits of each person in the videos to see if there’s a visual connection.

For example, when asked about goals, someone who is driven and goal-oriented will have a positive response. Someone to whom goals are less important would have a different emotional reaction.

“They might actually express a lot more negative emotion, even in that same situation,” Letzring said. “So we’re trying to create these situations where emotions and traits would actually go together.”

So if someone can accurately read people’s initial emotions, that could help them more accurately determine what a person will be like down the road.

“If we can figure out how trait judgments are made, especially how they’re made accurately, maybe we can come up with some kind of an intervention or a training program to increase people’s level of accuracy,” Letzring said.

Researchers for this study will be using the STAM model, or the state and trait accuracy model.

Data collection will be done through four separate studies over the next three years.

Letzring said she’s just excited to get the grant and have the chance to do the research.

“I am super excited,” she said. “I really never thought I would get a grant like this.”

Letzring said while a lot of research has been done on both personality traits and emotions separately, not much has been done with them together.

“People who look at traits sort of don’t really talk to people who look at emotions and so we decided, ‘Well, let’s put these ideas together and see what we can learn,'” Letzring said.

Data collection and research will be done through four different studies over the next three years.