Evoked cardiac response correlates of cognitive processing and dimensions of personality: Eysenck's concept of psychoticism revisited

The effects of agreeableness (A) and conscientiousness (C), as defined in t he NEO-FFI scale, were examined in two components of the evoked cardiac res ponse (ECR) elicited in response to innocuous auditory stimuli presented un der IRRELEVANT and RELEVANT cognitive task conditions. The IRRELEVANT condi tion produced a simple cardiac deceleration, ECR1, while the RELEVANT condi tion produced a biphasic response dominated by a secondary cardiac accelera tion. The difference in response, ECR2, is associated with differential cog nitive processing. Our previous work noted differences as a function of Eys enck's P scale, and this was used as a criterion to evaluate the A and C ef fects. Differences in levels of A were found to affect ECR1, while differen ces in C affected ECR2. The finding that the physiological correlates of A and C were different from each other is interpreted in terms of different m echanisms underlying these two big factors. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.