The application of an affective dimension of meaningfulness to personality-related verbal learning

Two experiments are presented which test the proposition that reinforcement value (RV) is an affective dimension of meaningfulness highly suited to the study of personality. The first study utilizes CVC trigrams which have been equated for association value (AV), but weighted for the meaning of masculinity-femininity, administered to masculine and feminine Ss in a free recall format. In the second study, actual words designating ascendant vs. submissive meanings are administered to Ss having these personality qualities in a paired associate task, with AV and RV dimensions confronted to see which exerts an influence on personality-related learning. In both studies, the RV dimension performed as a metric of meaningfulness might be expected to perform. Personality-to-learning regularities are isolated which would have been masked in the data without the RV metric. The AV dimension failed to bring out such regularities. HA