Mental toughness, reinforcement sensitivity theory, and the five-factor model: Personality and directed forgetting

• We examined correlations between personality and memory in directed forgetting.
• Personality factors affected memory after a forget cue but not after a remember cue.
• Mental toughness positively correlated with memory after a forget instruction.
• Conscientiousness explained the relationship between memory and mental toughness.
• Dysphoric mood was also found to predict memory after a forget cue.

A recent study (Dewhurst, Anderson, Cotter, Crust, & Clough, 2012) proposed that mental toughness – a personality construct from sports psychology that predicts many outcomes in sports and elsewhere – reflected ability at inhibitory control. Specifically, they found that mental toughness predicted directed forgetting, which measures peoples’ ability to forget things on purpose. We explored the relationships between the short form of the mental toughness scale (the MT-18), other personality traits (the Big Five and BIS/BAS), and directed forgetting. The correlation between mental toughness and directed forgetting replicated. Including a control group with no forget instruction ruled out sustained effort on memory tasks as an explanation; it was specific to directed forgetting. However, mental toughness was shown to correlate with many other personality characteristics, and its effects on directed forgetting were largely due to conscientiousness. We concluded that the basis of mental toughness was probably not inhibitory control as the original authors had proposed.