Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) of Personality

The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) of personality is a theoretical account of the neural and psychological processes underlying the major dimensions of personality. Much of the theoretical and empirical basis of RST owes its existence to the outstanding work of Professor Jeffrey Gray, over a period of the last forty years. Th entire field of RST was summaried in the following book.

Corr, P. J. (2008, ed). The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Below you will find links for more detailed information on RST.

A Primer on RST

Below you will find an introduction to RST, taken from:

Corr, P. J. (2009). The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality. In P. J. Corr and G. Matthews (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 347-376). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Click here

Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory Personality Questionnaire (RST-PQ)

The RST-PQ paper is published (2016) in Psychological Assessment and can be downloaded here and you can also access the supplementary material where you will find the questionnaire by downloading here.

It is free to use in your research.

The Approach-Avoidance-Conflict (AVC) Behavioural Task (BT)

Here you will find the AVC-BT, which is an online behavioural task to measure basic approach, avoidance, and conflict, behaviour. This tasks can be freely used in your research.

To access this task, click here.

Please note that the login URL can be found by clicking, click here.

A lost classic from the early days of RST - Gray's (1967) disappointment in the rate. Download here