The Misattributing Personality: The Relationship between Affect Misattribution, Need for Closure and Body Awareness

We hypothesized that aversion to ambiguous situations and overreliance on bodily cues are positively related to people’s tendency to make erroneous attributions of internal experiences. To test this prediction, we examined the relationship between misattribution and two personality traits: need for closure (NFC) and body awareness (BA). Across four studies (total Ns = 1394, 1498), misattribution was weakly but reliably related to NFC and BA. Further, we found that the extremity of one's reactions to affective stimuli was positively related to NFC and BA, and might partially explain the relation between the personality traits and misattribution. The results advance knowledge about misattribution and the personality traits related to it. The misattributing individual is characterized by unjustified reliance on bodily cues and fear of vague situations, which might account for a distorted understanding of the relationship between the environment and one's internal states.