An Investigation into the Role of Personality and Situation in the Maintenance of Subjective Experience in a Laboratory

This study investigated the relationship between personality variables, task processing, and the self-report of subjective experience, including thought content, time perception, and awareness of task stimuli. In particular, this study was concerned with dis-entangling the role of environmental and dispositional influences on subjective experience. Thirty-eight participants were engaged in either a memory or a fluency task during which verbal reports of various aspects of subjective experience were recorded. Personality variables were measured using the Self-Consciousness Scale and the Thought Occurrence Questionnaire. The pattern of correlations between specific subjective aspects of attention and dispositional indices suggested that dispositional variables were important in determining subjective experience during the memory task, particularly in the encoding phase. In the fluency task, disposition made a smaller contribution to specific measures of attention, a finding consistent with a self-regulatory framework. Finally, the report of thoughts unrelated to the current situation were proportional to the number of false positives reported in the memory task, supporting the assertion that the quality of phenomenal experience is important in the process of source monitoring.