Newly Identified Personality Traits Show Clues About Negative Disposition

A recent study has helped to look at the dispositional attitude that seems to negatively affect personalities and their relationship with others.

For instance, researchers note that those with a positive attitude tend to have a strong tendency to like things while their counterparts may have a more negative disposition.

"The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator," wrote the authors, via a press release. "[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone's feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent."

Yet study authors note that a critical factor when assessing an individual's attitude is whether or not they will have certain traits in common with other individuals.  "Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features," Hepler said, via a press release.

Many discover whether people differ concerning various likes and dislikes with various unrelated stimuli. Yet the study notes the concluding results, via the release. "Upon knowing how much people (dis)like these specific things, the responses were then averaged together to calculate their dispositional attitude (i.e., to calculate how much they tend to like or dislike things in general). The theory is that if individuals differ in the general tendency to like versus dislike objects, attitudes toward independent objects may actually be related. Throughout the studies the researchers found that people with generally positive dispositional attitudes are more open than people with generally negative dispositional attitudes. In day-to-day practice, this means that people with positive dispositional attitudes may be more prone to actually buy new products, get vaccine shots, follow regular positive actions (recycling, driving carefully, etc.)"

"This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object's properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object," concluded Hepler and Albarracín. "Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude theory and research."

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More information regarding the findings can be seen via the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.