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Out today in @PNASNews: "Neuroticism May Not Reflect Emotional Variability", a joint-first author effort from me and @seanchrismurphy, also including @drbrockbastian, @tomhollenstein (and others not on twitter): https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/15/1919934117.">https://www.pnas.org/content/e... Thread to follow (1/12)
The inverse of neuroticism is "emotional stability". Almost all neuroticism scales have items assessing emotional variability (e.g. "up and down mood swings"). So it& #39;s perhaps not surprising that many studies link neuroticism with emotional variability (2/12)
BUT these findings may be because of a measurement issue. There can be dependency between variability and mean levels, particularly when using bounded scales. For e.g. on a 0-100 scale, if my mean is 10, I can& #39;t show as much variability as somebody with a mean of 50 (3/12)
This issue is compounded for then neuroticism-emotional variability relationship, because 1) variability is calculated using emotion assessed in everyday life, where negative emotion is often at floor (at least, pre-COVID!) - this figure shows this skew in our datasets (5/12)
2) Low neuroticism is strongly linked with low mean levels of negative emotion, meaning that those low in neuroticism may be systematically precluded from demonstrating variability (6/12)
We tested this by meta-analyzing the neuroticism-negative emotional variability association in 11 experience-sampling datasets. We found the expected association. We tested whether it held across 2 analyses aiming to disentangle variability from mean levels (7/12)
1) To remove many of the scores at scale floor, we calculated variability in daily max negative emotion (in the 8 studies that had multiple measurements per day). Negative emotional variability was still associated with neuroticism, but the association was attenuated (8/12)
2) We used the relative variability index developed by @merijn_mestdagh, which calculates variability as a proportion of the max variability possible given the mean. When using this index, neuroticism was no longer associated with negative emotional variability (9/12)
That is, once we corrected dependency between variability and the mean, neuroticism wasn& #39;t characterized by emotional variability. Thus, the mean and variability reflect the same info, and given the mean is more parsimonious, we think there& #39;s no need to invoke variability (10/12)
This suggests we should understand what& #39;s going on with the mean-variability relationship before interpreting variability as meaningful. We also need to wrestle with emotion measurement: does the scale floor truly mean "no negative emotion" to Ps? (11/12)
If you want to know more, here& #39;s a link to a preprint of the paper: http://elisekalokerinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Kalokerinos-Murphy-et-al.-2020-PNAS-Neuroticism-variability.pdf,">https://elisekalokerinos.com/wp-conten... and here& #39;s a link to our data and code: https://osf.io/gvfdx/ ">https://osf.io/gvfdx/&qu... (12/12)
