UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL REACTIVITY: GENDER DIFFERENCES AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS

Abstract

Emotional reactivity refers to the tendency to experience frequent and intense emotional arousal. Both the threshold and ease with which individuals become emotionally aroused and the intensity of emotional experiences are aspects of emotional reactivity. This study is to determine the level of emotional reactivity among males and females. Sample size is 98 males and 98 females. The Emotional Reactivity Questionnaire by Pers (Becerra et al., 2019) was used to measure the emotional reactivity level. The independent t-test shows that the t value is 1.092 and the p value is 0.276, which indicates that there is no significance between females and males. The factor analysis method was used to analyse the data. Both factor extraction and factor rotation methods were executed in this study. The PCA (Principal Component Analysis) suggests that the majority of the variability in the data can be explained by the first few principal components, particularly Components 1 and 2, which together capture 77.740% of the total variance. Varimax rotation aims to simplify the interpretation of the components by maximizing the variance of the squared loadings within each component and minimizing the cross-variable loadings.