ABSTRACT
People differ in how they process affective information, but such differences are not necessarily captured by personality traits. Nevertheless, such differences (e.g., speed to recognize rewards or threats) have the potential to influence emotional behavior and experience. For these reasons, it is important to supplement personality self-report with evaluative processing paradigms in order to develop a more complete understanding of how and why people differ in their emotional reactions. In the present chapter, we will set an agenda for future evaluative processing research, one in which individual differences play a central role. We will argue that it may be mistaken to assume that self-reported traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism) will necessarily covary with evaluative processing tendencies. Despite these often meager relationships between traits and processing tendencies, both may predict emotional states and, equally important, may do so interactively. If this is the case, the emotional consequences of a given trait, as well as the emotional consequences of a given processing style, are not invariant, but depend on each other. A focus on individual differences in evaluative processing is likely to lead to a more differentiated understanding of both traits and processing tendencies on the one hand and appraisal and emotional states on the other. The present chapter discusses such issues and presents relevant findings from a number of recent studies.
