'The moderating role of Neuroticism on the EC effect' (AsPredicted #70729)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 3 authors.
Pre-registered on 07/15/2021 04:33 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? We aim at investigating whether the personality trait of Neuroticism would moderate the effect of two dimensions of affect (i.e., valence and arousal) in the EC paradigm. In particular, we expect the moderating effect of Neuroticism to be greater when CSs are paired with high arousing USs compared to when they are paired with low arousing CSs. We also expect to confirm previous studies (Sava et al., personal communication, June, 2021; Vogel et al., 2019), by finding a stronger moderating effect of Neuroticism for pairings involving negative valence.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Participants will rate the valence of four CSs, for exploring the specificity of the interaction effects of Neuroticism and both emotional valence and arousal, on a 7-point rating scale (-3 = "very negative", to +3 = "very positive").
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Participants will firstly complete the EC paradigm. We will use four pictures of faces, differing simultaneously as a function of their valence (i.e., positive or negative) and arousal (i.e., high or low), as USs. The USs pictures have been selected from the international Pictures Affective System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2005). We will use four neutral pictures of computer-generated greyscale fractals as CSs, based on participant's pre-evaluation (i.e., pre-conditioning phase). Each participant will be exposed to 4 US-CS pairs (i.e., conditioning phase) one for each US type (i.e., positive-high arousing, positive-low arousing, negative-high arousing, and negative-low arousing). The US and CS stimuli within each pair will be simultaneously presented (presentation for 3.000ms). The inter-trial interval between the pairs will be 1.000ms. Each US-CS pair will be presented 8 times, resulting in 32 trials per participant. After the EC paradigm, we will measure individual differences in the personality trait of Neuroticism, through a battery of questionnaires, as moderator of the EC effect. Participants will complete the study on the Prolific Academic website.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will test for the main question (i.e., the EC effects) by means of multilevel mixed models with US valence and arousal as predictors and Neuroticism as moderator. In a second time, we will explore the role played by additional variables that are contingency awareness and participants' USs evaluation.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. During data collection, participants who will not rate any of the pictures of greyscale fractals as neutral during the pre-conditioning phase will be automatically excluded from the rest of the experiment. After data collection, we will exclude participants who will select the same response 100% of the time on the dependent variable.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. A power sensitivity analysis (Perugini, Gallucci, & Costantini, 2018) showed that, given α = .05 and power= .80 for a unidirectional hypothesis, the minimum effect size detectable with a sample size of N = 300 for a moderating effect of Neuroticism on EC is r = .143 (equivalent to Cohen's d = 0.289). We thus aim at collecting a sample of 300 participants.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will ask participants to report their US-CS pair memory (i.e., contingency awareness) and to rate the USs on valence and arousal. We will also ask participants their demand awareness (i.e., what the participants think the study was about).
