Neuroticism intensifies the transfer of fear and negativity during associative learning

People who score high in neuroticism not only experience more intense emotional reactions to aversive images, but they also tend to transfer those negative feelings more strongly onto unrelated, neutral objects. This heightened capacity for emotional learning provides evidence for how specific personality traits contribute to generalized anxiety and emotional vulnerability in daily life. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Personality.

Our brains constantly scan the environment, learning which objects or situations are safe and which are dangerous. One of the primary ways we learn these associations is through a process called evaluative conditioning. This occurs when a completely neutral item, such as a random geometric shape, is repeatedly presented alongside an emotionally charged item, such as a disturbing photograph.

Over time, the neutral shape takes on the emotional flavor of the photograph. Associative learning of this kind is a fundamental building block of human emotion, as a study covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicates that repeatedly pairing specific personal attributes with negative social feedback leads individuals to develop heightened anxiety toward those attributes.

While the basic mechanism of evaluative conditioning is universal, individuals do not all experience it with the same intensity. A 2026 study suggests that personal psychological dispositions influence how strongly we form positive or negative feelings toward neutral objects through associative conditioning. One of the most prominent traits related to emotional reactivity is neuroticism.

People with high levels of neuroticism tend to experience negative emotions more frequently and intensely. A study covered by PsyPost in 2026 provides evidence that this trait is tied to heightened connectivity between the brain regions responsible for emotional processing during affective tasks.

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Another psychological factor related to emotional vulnerability is the looming cognitive style. This refers to a mental bias where an individual perceives potential threats not as static, but as rapidly approaching or escalating in space and time. A person with a high looming cognitive style might view a minor, distant problem as an incoming disaster that is quickly gaining momentum, which frequently leads to heightened anxiety.

The research was led by Darian Faur, an assistant professor at the West University of Timisoara in Romania. His team aimed to understand how neuroticism and the looming cognitive style interact to shape emotional learning.

“Tracking individual differences in conditioning was a preoccupation for behavioral scientists in the ’80s (see Levey & Martin, 1981), but slowly faded away due to developments in both fields that eventually established them as separate research traditions,” Faur told PsyPost. “The lab I am currently involved in (Social Cognition and Personality Assessment from the West University of Timisoara) revived this interest.”

“I was coming from a clinical background with a desire to study transdiagnostic models, and I found in this interdisciplinary approach an excellent experimental gateway to match my own research interests,” he explained.

Traditionally, studies on evaluative conditioning only measure whether a stimulus is perceived as generally positive or negative. The authors wanted to introduce a more specific measurement by asking participants to evaluate exactly how threatening an image felt, and then testing how that specific sense of threat transferred to a neutral object.

To investigate this, the researchers conducted an online experiment with 806 adult participants, primarily from the United Kingdom. The participants first completed standardized questionnaires to measure their levels of neuroticism and their looming cognitive style. The participants then viewed a series of twenty computer-generated grayscale fractals, which are complex, abstract geometric patterns. They rated how pleasant or unpleasant they found each fractal. The computer system then selected the six fractals that each participant rated as the most perfectly neutral, ensuring the conditioning process started from a blank slate.

During the conditioning phase, the participants viewed these neutral fractals paired with different photographs. The photographs had been pre-tested in a pilot study to fall into three distinct categories: positive images, negative but non-threatening images, and negative images that were highly threatening. Each neutral fractal was presented on the screen alongside one of the photographs. To mimic the psychological experience of a looming threat, the photographs were not static. Instead, they slowly expanded on the screen over a period of four seconds, growing by at least half their original size to simulate the feeling that the image was approaching the viewer.

After viewing all the pairings multiple times, the participants were asked to rate the original photographs based on how positive, negative, and threatening they were. Finally, they were asked to rate the initially neutral fractals again to see if their feelings toward the shapes had changed.

The scientists found that the evaluative conditioning procedure worked as expected. Fractals that had been paired with negative or threatening photographs were rated much more negatively than fractals paired with positive photographs. This shift in attitude was driven by how the participants individually appraised the original photographs. When a participant rated a photograph as highly negative or highly threatening, that intense rating directly predicted how negatively they would evaluate the paired fractal.

Personality traits played a major role in shaping these reactions. Participants with high levels of neuroticism evaluated the negative and threatening photographs much more harshly than participants with low neuroticism. Beyond just seeing the original images as worse, highly neurotic individuals also demonstrated a stronger learning effect. They transferred more of that negative emotion onto the neutral fractals.

“The findings from this study suggest that general emotional vulnerability (the trait everyone shares to a certain extent in the general population that makes us respond with anxiety or depression to certain life events) impacts not only how we perceive stimuli with a valence of their own, but also how that valence is further transferred to a neutral stimulus that happens to be in the same environment as the pleasant/unpleasant stimulus,” Faur said.

“In other words, if you are a highly emotionally-reactive person, you will most likely learn to dislike neutral stimuli that were associated with negative stimuli more than a person with lower reactivity,” he noted.

The researchers observed that this effect seemed to be driven mostly by the self-consciousness and vulnerability components of neuroticism, suggesting that an inward-focused cognitive awareness might heighten the associative learning process. “Moreover, for highly neurotic individuals, the study indicates that learning might not only be explained by the conscious evaluation of the valenced stimuli (i.e., I dislike this gray box because it was paired with a bunch of insects that I found unpleasant), but also by the general exposure to negative stimuli,” Faur added.

The results regarding the looming cognitive style were more complex. Generally, participants with a higher looming cognitive style tended to rate all the fractals more negatively overall. However, when the researchers isolated the specific transfer of threat from the photograph to the fractal, the looming cognitive style appeared to have a mild buffering effect. People with this trait transferred slightly less of the threat to the neutral object than expected.

“I did not anticipate the interesting interaction between the looming cognitive style and the evaluative conditioning process,” Faur said. “While this cognitive vulnerability was associated with contingency awareness (and contingency awareness was further associated with larger evaluative conditioning effects), it buffered the valence transfer from unconditioned stimuli to neutral stimuli instead of amplifying it.”

The researchers speculate that because the looming cognitive style causes people to focus so intensely on an approaching threat, they might fixate entirely on the threatening photograph and pay less attention to the neutral fractal beside it, weakening the associative link. But Faur added a note of caution regarding this finding: “It is important to note, however, that these results were uncertain and should be interpreted cautiously, as they require replication.”

Interestingly, this buffering effect disappeared when a person possessed both high neuroticism and a high looming cognitive style. When these two traits were elevated together, the individual’s heightened emotional reactivity overrode any attentional buffering, resulting in a massively amplified transfer of negative emotion to the neutral object.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study utilized a highly controlled digital environment with an artificial zooming effect to simulate looming threats. While this allowed for precise measurements, human emotional learning in real-world scenarios is often messier and more complex.

Another important consideration is the magnitude of these influences. “As per our experience with personality and conditioning models, the moderation effects, although replicable, are very small,” Faur pointed out. “Therefore, personality can be seen as impacting distally and broadly the learning process.”

However, the context of the sample matters. “Another study of ours (which is currently under review) returns much larger effects of the association between neuroticism and evaluative conditioning in the clinical population (anxiety disorders or related), so we further need to identify which mechanisms drive or which conditions amplify the effects of personality on learning,” Faur said.

Additionally, the researchers only measured how threatening the participants found the original photographs, not how threatening they found the neutral fractals after the conditioning was complete. Because of this, the study can only confirm that general negative feelings were transferred to the fractals, rather than a specific sense of physical threat.

Future studies could build on this work by testing these personality interactions in more ecological settings or by asking participants to rate the threat level of the conditioned objects. Exploring how different relational cues alter the way threats are learned could offer deeper insights into how anxiety disorders develop and how they might be treated.

“My intention is to use conditioning paradigms (and other learning frameworks) as experimental proxies for studying how personality and cognition interact to produce psychopathology,” Faur concluded.

The study, “Beyond the Moderating Role of Neuroticism on Evaluative Conditioning: Threat Appraisal,” was authored by Darian Faur and Florin Alin Sava.