Authors have identified three forms of person-environment transactions: evocative, reactive, and selective. First, individuals of different temperaments tend to evoke different reactions from others. Friendly individuals tend to elicit friendly responses, and hostile individuals tend to elicit hostile responses (Ghaed & Gallo, 2006). In either case, one's initial temperament or personality bias tends to be confirmed by what one elicits from others: friendly responses from others reinforce one's friendliness, and hostile responses from others seem to confirm the basis for one's hostility. Second, individuals of different temperaments react to the same event differently from each other, and in fact appear to learn different things, even when they experience the same event (Caspi, 1993; Smith et al., 2006). Individuals high in negative affectivity are likely to perceive more events as stressful and anxiety-provoking than are even-tempered individuals, and are thus more likely to come to anticipate stressful events in the future. Again, one's initial bias appears to be confirmed by what one perceives.
