The Relationships among Momentary Emotion Experiences, Personality Descriptions, and Retrospective Ratings of Emotion

In psychological research, respondents often make retrospective ratings of their emotional experiences after an extended period of time. The present study sought to determine whether such memory-based ratings are influenced by respondents' descriptions of their own emotionality, over and above a summary of their momentary emotion ratings. Participants completed self-report measures of neuroticism and extraversion and made momentary ratings of their emotions across 90 days. At the end of the study, participants recalled what their emotions had been during the course of the study. Findings indicated that retrospective ratings of emotion contained accurate information about momentary emotion reports. Also, the retrospective ratings were influenced in the direction of respondents' personality descriptions. Individuals who described themselves as neurotic remembered experiencing more negative emotion than they reported on a momentary basis; individuals who described themselves as extraverted displayed a trend to remember more positive emotion than they reported on a momentary basis.