neuroticism
Psychology
(noun)
A personality trait manifested by characteristics of anxiety, moodiness, worry, envy and jealousy.
Management
Examples of neuroticism in the following topics:
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Trait Anxiety
- Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than the average to experience such feelings as anxiety, anger, envy, guilt, and depressed mood.
- Neuroticism is often marked by shyness and a lack of self-confidence, making tasks like public speaking seem like an insurmountable challenge.
- Trait anxiety refers to a long-term form of anxiety, often stemming from neuroticism.
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The Five-Factor Model
- Neuroticism also refers to an individual's degree of emotional stability and impulse control.
- People high in neuroticism tend to experience emotional instability and are characterized as angry, impulsive, and hostile.
- Watson and Clark (1984) found that people reporting high levels of neuroticism also tend to report feeling anxious and unhappy.
- In contrast, people who score low in neuroticism tend to be calm and even-tempered.
- Neuroticism and extroversion tend to decline slightly with age (Donnellan & Lucas; Terracciano et al.).
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The Big Five Personality Traits
- The Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
- Neuroticism - Neuroticism describes vulnerability to unpleasant emotions like anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.
- Neuroticism also refers to an individual's level of emotional stability and impulse control and is sometimes referred to as emotional stability.
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Other Important Trait Theories
- These traits are extroversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.
- Extroversion and neuroticism provide a two-dimensional space to describe individual differences in behavior.
- An individual could rate high on both neuroticism and extroversion, low on both traits, or somewhere in between.
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Allport's, Cattell's, and Eysenck's Trait Theories of Personality
- He believed personality is largely governed by biology, and he viewed people as having two specific personality dimensions: extroversion vs. introversion and neuroticism vs. stability.
- In the neuroticism/stability dimension, people high on neuroticism tend to be anxious; they tend to have an overactive sympathetic nervous system and even with low stress, their bodies and emotional state tend to go into a flight-or-fight reaction.
- He also hypothesized that neuroticism was determined by individual differences in the limbic system, the part of the human brain involved in emotion, motivation, and emotional association with memory.
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The Brain and Personality
- It was an investigation carried out in which identical and fraternal twins, ages 11 and 12, were tested for neuroticism.
- Eysenck developed a model of personality based on neuroticism and a second factor, extroversion.
- Eysenck also hypothesized that neuroticism was determined by individual differences in the limbic system, the part of the human brain involved in emotion, motivation, and emotional association with memory.
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Leadership Traits
- Some of the inherent leadership traits in Zaccaro's model include extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, honesty/integrity, charisma, intelligence, creativity, achievement motivation, need for power, oral/written communication, interpersonal skills, general problem-solving, decision making, technical knowledge, and management skills.
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Workplace
- The Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—have been linked to onboarding success.
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The Trait-Theory Approach
- This model contends the following traits are correlated with strong leadership potential: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, honesty, charisma, intelligence, creativity, achievement motivation, need for power, communication skills, interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills, decision-making skills, technical knowledge, and management skills.
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Overview of Personality Assessment
- According to the five factor model, the five dimensions of personality lies along a continuum of opposing poles and include Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
- Eysenck's inventory focuses on three dimensions: psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism.