What's the use of neuroticism?☆
Section snippets
Preamble
The origins of this paper lie in discussions between the authors about neuroticism, prompted by our collaboration on various clinically based studies that reflect our interests in two research areas: eating disorders and schizotypy/schizophrenia. In all of these investigations we used a variety of personality scales, relevant to the particular problem of interest; but common to all of them was the inclusion in the test battery of a measure of neuroticism (N). In the course of analysing these
The ubiquity of N
Despite the continuing debate about what constitutes the optimal dimensional structure of personality, one point of agreement remains. It is the consensus that a significant part of personality variation can be ascribed to traits concerning an individual's emotional reactivity, tendency to worry, susceptibility to negative mood, proneness to psychopathology, or — as it is most often called — neuroticism. This cluster of traits reliably appears in factor analyses of personality data. It does so
Going beyond N
Because of the ubiquitous quality of N, it is generally necessary — in exploring individual differences further — to seek to specify some additional personality feature or features peculiar to the population of interest. This is true whether the aim is to explore personality structure or to explain the causes (‘aetiology’) of the differences observed. There are several ways to do this.
One is by ‘profiling’, which is the way most dimensional personality theories proceed. Here, N is simply
N as a moderator variable
The view of N promulgated so far in this paper has been relatively pessimistic: N relates to too many things of a deviant kind to be informative and usually fades into generality as a (frequently) significant, though rather uninteresting, correlate of abnormal behaviour. However, this does not mean that N can thereby be totally excluded from further consideration. N represents a major source of individual variation in emotionality and it is inconceivable that it does not enter into the
Conclusions
We indicated at the beginning of this paper that a single answer to the question posed in the title was not to be anticipated. Both of what we referred to as, respectively, the ‘pessimistic’ and the ‘optimistic’ views of N turn out to be partly true. Certainly, taken by itself N tells us very little about personality; and, crucially, given its label and content, it fails dismally to discriminate between different forms of abnormality, over a wide range of dysfunctions.
N fares better when used
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2022, Personality and Individual DifferencesNeuroticism, rumination, depression and suicidal ideation: A moderated serial mediation model across four countries
2022, International Journal of Clinical and Health PsychologyCitation Excerpt :In addition, research has also documented interactive effects of neuroticism with other psychological variables, such as cognitive strategies (Ng & Diener, 2009), mindfulness (e.g., Drake et al., 2017; Feltman et al., 2009), or ideal-self discrepancy (Hong et al., 2013; Wasylkiw et al., 2010) when predicting depression, psychological distress, and low well-being. Taken together, these findings would support that neuroticism may act as a moderator variable that would exacerbate the negative effect of other risk factors on depressed mood and related psychopathological conditions, in line with previous theoretical proposals (Barlow et al., 2014; Bolger & Zuckerman, 1995; Claridge & Davis, 2001). It is important to mention the limitations of the present study.
Neuroticism and Somatic Complaints: Concomitant Effects of Rumination and Worry
2019, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy
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This paper is based on a joint presentation of the same title at the 9th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences held in Vancouver, Canada, July 1999.