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High Trait Cheerfulness Individuals are More Sensitive to the Emotional Environment

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Abstract

The aim of this paper was to study whether trait cheerfulness modulates changes in state cheerfulness as a result of exposing participants to affective stimuli. Two studies with a within-participant experimental design were carried out. Forty-eight (33 women) and sixty-four (45 women) undergraduate psychology students were selected as Sample 1 and Sample 2, respectively, for scoring high or low on the Trait Form of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI-T; Ruch et al. in Humor Int J Humor Res 9:303–339, 1996; Ruch et al. in Personal Individ Differ 22:477–491, 1997). Participants watched amusing, neutral, and sad film clips and reported their affective states before and after viewing them. In the second study, heart rate and skin conductance level were also recorded. Results showed that people with high trait cheerfulness reported greater changes in state cheerfulness when exposed to both amusing and sad film clips, showing larger increases and decreases in state cheerfulness, respectively, than participants with low trait cheerfulness. Effects were not mediated by social desirability. Furthermore, people with low trait cheerfulness showed a greater heart rate deceleration during the visioning of the clips compared to high trait cheerfulness participants, especially in an amusing scene with high emotional load. No modulation on trait cheerfulness was found for skin conductance level. Data with self-report and electrophysiological measures are discussed, highlighting that high trait cheerfulness people are more permeable to affective events, perhaps showing a better understanding and management of them.

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Notes

  1. As our main aim was to assess affective changes experienced by participants exposed to different affective inductions and the possible modulation of trait cheerfulness over these changes, we did not consider or analyze data from this task.

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Acknowledgements

This research is part of the doctoral dissertation by Raúl López-Benítez, and it was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura, y Deporte with a predoctoral grant (FPU-AP2012-1806), Spanish grants PSI2014-52764-P from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and PSI2013-45567P from DGICYT-MEC. The authors would like to thank Pedro Guerra and Miguel Ángel Muñoz from the University of Granada for their comments and help recording and analyzing the data.

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  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Centro de Investigación Mente, Cerebro, y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Raúl López-Benítez, Alberto Acosta & Juan Lupiáñez

  2. Department of Methodology of Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Psychology, Centro de Investigación Mente, Cerebro, y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Hugo Carretero-Dios

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  1. Raúl López-Benítez
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Correspondence to Raúl López-Benítez.

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López-Benítez, R., Acosta, A., Lupiáñez, J. et al. High Trait Cheerfulness Individuals are More Sensitive to the Emotional Environment. J Happiness Stud 19, 1589–1612 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9871-0

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