Personality and fear responses during conditioning: Beyond extraversion

The personality domain of introversion–extraversion has been theorized to be associated with the strength of fear conditioning, but the literature on this topic has been equivocal. Furthermore, except for extraversion and neuroticism, relationships of the other Big Five personality domains with fear response acquisition have not been explored. In the current study, multi-level modeling was used to examine the relationships of facets of the Big Five domains to fear response acquisition. Participants were 217 police and firefighter trainees who completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and a fear conditioning task as part of a larger study. Results indicated that several facets of extraversion have opposing associations with fear response acquisition of an electrodermal response – possibly contributing to the mixed results in the literature. Additionally, facets of other Big Five domains were found to be associated with fear response acquisition.