title: The role of scripts in personal consistency and individual differences.
abstract: This article examines the role of scripts in personal consistency and individual differences. Scripts are personally distinctive rules for understanding emotionally significant experiences. In 2 studies, scripts were identified from autobiographical memories of college students (Ns = 47 and 50) using standard categories of events and emotions to derive event-emotion compounds (e.g., Affiliation-Joy). In Study 1, scripts predicted responses to a reaction-time task 1 month later, such that participants responded more quickly to the event from their script when asked to indicate what emotion would be evoked by a series of events. In Study 2, individual differences in 5 common scripts were found to be systematically related to individual differences in traits of the Five-Factor Model. Distinct patterns of correlation revealed the importance of studying events and emotions in compound units, that is, in script form (e.g., Agreeableness was correlated with the script Affiliation-Joy but not with the scripts Fun-Joy or Affiliation-Love).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Amherst College, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002-5000, USA. apdemorest@amherst.edu
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Demorest
authors.forename: Ana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Popovska
authors.forename: Milena
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dabova
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010379:Peer Group; D010551:Personality; D012938:Social Perception; D013239:Stereotyped Behavior; D013334:Students; D055815:Young Adult