Chronic accessibility of academic stimuli: Conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism

Previous research on relationships between Big Five traits and how readily a concept comes to mind (chronic accessibility; CA) has produced inconsistent findings, which may be partly due to the use of concepts that are not relevant to participants. As such, this study used academic-related stimuli that would be personally relevant to the 85 first-year university participants. A lexical decision task was used to investigate the relationship between conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion for the CA of academic-approach, academic-avoidance, performance-evaluative, or academic-neutral words. Extraversion had a positive and neuroticism a negative correlation with CA of academic-approach words. Conscientiousness had a positive correlation with CA of academic-neutral words. There was no correlation between neuroticism and CA of academic-avoidance words, however week of the semester was a significant moderator, indicating that the relationship between neuroticism and CA of concepts may be sensitive to situational contexts.