A robust multivariate structure of interindividual covariation between psychosocial characteristics and arousal responses to visual narratives

People experience the same event but do not feel the same way. Such individual differences in emotion response are believed to be far greater than those in any other mental functions. Thus, to understand what makes people individuals, it is important to identify the systematic structures of individual differences in emotion response and elucidate how such structures relate to what aspects of psychological characteristics. Reflecting this importance, many studies have attempted to relate emotions to psychological characteristics such as personality traits, psychosocial states, and pathological symptoms across individuals. However, systematic and global structures that govern the across-individual covariation between the domain of emotion responses and that of psychological characteristics have been rarely explored previously, which limits our understanding of the relationship between individual differences in emotion response and psychological characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we acquired high-dimensional data sets in both emotion-response (8 measures) and psychological-characteristic (68 measures) domains from the same pool of individuals (86 undergraduate or graduate students) and carried out the canonical correlation analysis in conjunction with the principal component analysis on those data sets. For each participant, the emotion-response measures were quantified by regressing affective-rating responses to visual narrative stimuli onto the across-participant average responses to those stimuli, while the psychological-characteristic measures were acquired from 19 different psychometric questionnaires grounded in personality, psychosocial-factor, and clinical-problem taxonomies. We found a single robust mode of population covariation, particularly between the ’accuracy’ and ’sensitivity’ measures of arousal responses in the emotion domain and many ‘psychosocial’ measures in the psychological-characteristics domain. This mode of covariation suggests that individuals characterized with positive social assets tend to show polarized arousal responses to life events.