Revisiting the ego-syntonic assumption: Investigating neuroticism and harmony with thoughts of negative emotions.

Abstract

It has been assumed that personality disorders or constituent traits are ego-syntonic, but studies that have addressed this claim have revealed ego-dystonicity. Across three studies (two preregistered), we addressed some methodological weaknesses in these past studies that may conceal ego-syntonicity. Participants (total N = 1,331) completed measures of neuroticism and then imagined experiences that predominantly induced either fear, sadness, or anger (Studies 1 and 2) or recalled past experiences that predominantly elicited each emotion (Study 3). Subsequently, participants judged their emotional reactions on the two ego-syntonicity dimensions of (a) consonance with the self and (b) acceptance (evaluation). Across the studies, neuroticism generally had positive and about moderate-sized relations to consonance judgments and between trivial-sized and small-sized relations to acceptance judgments that were most often positive (Studies 1 and 2) but sometimes negative (Study 3); mean-level analyses suggested that people with relatively higher neuroticism indicated their emotional experiences were, most often, somewhat consonant with the self and acceptable. Regardless, in Study 3, the sample, including those relatively higher in neuroticism, indicated their recalled emotions were too extreme. Broadly, the data suggest that people relatively higher (vs. lower) in neuroticism may regard their contextualized negative emotion as more consonant with the self but not necessarily as more acceptable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).