Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Mental Noise Hypothesis: A Relation Between Neuroticism And P3 Latency Variance In A Stroop-Style Reaction Time Task, Jeremy Lawrence

All NMU Master's Theses

Neuroticism is a relatively stable personality dimension characterized by tendencies to experience negative thoughts and affect. Its empirically related outcome measures range from anxiety and mood disorders to increases in mortality. Traditional theories of neuroticism, link the construct to greater threat sensitivity, however, these conceptions fail to account for certain salient features of neuroticism, such as negative affect in threat benign environments. The mental noise hypothesis posits that neuroticism results from a more variable mental control system, with support coming from behavioral, psychometric, and neuroimaging paradigms. To assess whether this more chaotic mental control system would variably disrupt the stimulus …