Meta-Analysis of the Associations Between Big Five Personality Traits and Affective Variability

The current preregistered meta-analysis provided an empirical examination of the association between personality traits and variability in affective states. Using k = 88 independent samples of intensive longitudinal studies with N = 20,813 participants, we examined this association for personality traits at both the domain (Big Five) and meta-trait (Plasticity and Stability) levels. Additionally, emerging evidence suggested that the well-established association between Neuroticism and affective variability might be a statistical artifact due to the dependency between the mean and standard deviation in bounded affect scales. We confirmed the problematic association between the mean and standard deviation and employed Bayesian censored location-scale models to account for this dependency. We confirmed our central hypothesis at the meta-trait level, that affective variability was positively correlated with Plasticity and negatively correlated with Stability. However, results were weak and valence-specific at the domain-level for most traits, except for Neuroticism which maintained its theoretically supported association with both variability in negative and positive affect. This study has implications for understanding different levels of personality traits for everyday psychological processes and provides methodological recommendations for future research on intraindividual variability.