Curmudgeon personality: Seeing the positives and just not liking them

•Curmudgeons are defined by critical, negative dispositional attitudes.•Curmudgeons used positive/negative-emotion words to complete word fragments,•Attuning to emotion qualities broadly (emotion-quality bias)•Although they weight qualities to avoid higher than qualities to approach•An extension of their avoidance temperament

Curmudgeon personality is characterized by critical evaluation tendencies wherein both negative- and positive-normed stimuli are viewed negatively (negative dispositional attitudes). Curmudgeons are theorized to attune to emotional qualities of stimuli in general but give greater weight to negative aspects in stimulus valuation, a byproduct of their avoidance temperament. As predicted, curmudgeons freely formed high rates of both positive- and negative-emotion words (emotion-quality bias) in a word-fragment-completion task (Rusting & Larsen, 1998). This was independent of trait negative affect, which was associated with high rates of negative-emotion words only (negative-quality bias). Furthermore, the relationship between curmudgeon personality and emotion-word formation was mediated by behavioral inhibition sensitivity. Curmudgeons “see” positive- and negative-emotion qualities, and evidently in same attitude object, but they weight qualities to avoid higher than qualities to approach.