Neuroticism as the intensity, reactivity, and variability in day-to-day affect

Neuroticism and emotional risk during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Contrary to previous studies (Hisler et al, 2020), neuroticism was also uniquely related to higher affective variability. This suggests that during an immediate crisis situation, individuals high in neuroticism experience more negative affect on average and vary more in their negative affect.…”

“…Second, our results dovetail with existing work on neuroticism and stress reactivity, which has shown that persons high in neuroticism react more strongly to daily stressful events (Hisler et al, 2020;Howland et al, 2017;Suls & Martin, 2005), including internal, cognitive stressors such as worries (Segerstrom et al, 2020). The present study showed that individuals high in neuroticism also react more negatively to internal, cognitive stressors triggered by major health crises.…”

“…Notably, neuroticism predicted individual differences in negative affect better than all the control variables combined (neuroticism: R 2 = 0.26 vs. control variables: Table 2). The relationship between neuroticism and affective variability was robust to alternative modeling strategies such as controlling for mean levels (Hisler et al, 2020), suggesting that neuroticism was uniquely related to both affective characteristics (see Table 2). These findings highlight neuroticism's importance as a predictor of negative affect during major health crises.…”

“…In the second model, the random intercepts and residual variances were regressed onto neuroticism simultaneously to examine their unique associations with neuroticism. The results can be interpreted as the semi-partial or part correlations between neuroticism and negative affect level und variability, respectively (Hisler et al, 2020). All models were estimated in Mplus using the default, uninformed priors.…”

“…In previous experience sampling studies that repeatedly asked individuals about their everyday life experiences, individuals with high levels of neuroticism reported more negative affect on average (i.e., higher negative affect levels). In some studies, individuals with high levels of neuroticism also varied more in their in negative affect from moment to moment ( Geukes, Nestler, Hutteman, Küfner, & Back, 2017 ) – although the robustness of these findings is currently a subject of debate ( Hisler et al, 2020 , Kalokerinos et al, 2020 , Wendt et al, 2019 ). Please note that variability refers to fluctuations around a general tendency and does not consider temporal dependency ( Ebner-Priemer, Eid, Kleindienst, Stabenow, & Trull, 2009 ).…”