Personality and Emotion

Personality is the coherent patterning of affect, behavior, cognition, and desires (goals) over time and space. Just as a full blown emotion represents an integration of feeling, action, appraisal and wants at a particular time and location so does personality represent integration over time and space of these components (Ortony et al., 2005). A helpful analogy is to consider that personality is to emotion as climate is to weather. That is, what one expects is personality, what one observes at any particular moment is emotion. To understand the personality-affect link it is necessary to consider the ways in which personality may be described. Since Theophrastus ’ discussion of characters and Galen’s theory of temperament (Stelmack & Stalikas, 1991), dimensional models of individual differences in personality have consistently identified three (the Giant Three, e.g., Eysenck & Eysenck (1985)) to five (the Big Five, e.g., Digman (1990)) broad dimensions of personality.