| Neuroticism(N)is a dimension of personality,which means the propensity to stress and negative emotions.N has a close relationship with mental problems and unhealthy behaviors of individuals,such as anxiety,depression and substance abuse.However,the unclear definition of N remain some problems.Firstly,the mechanism behind the neurotic behaviors is not clear,we cannot figure out why people high in N are emotionally unstable,why they have higher possibility to have mental disorders.Secondly,the measurement of N have content overlap with scales of some emotion disorders,like anxiety and depression.Therefore,to explore the nature of N and develop its measurement is urgent.This study has three parts,including the proposition on mechanism of N,the development of the N-scale and the main characteristics of N in university students.For part one,we presented our understanding on the mechanism of N.Based on the basic mental process and experiences from clinical psychological consulting,we deconstruct N into two components,high sensitivity and negative perception.In addition,there may exist two aspects of N,which could be named as trait N and state N,according to the extent of the sensory and the condition of mental stress.One with high level of trait N is sensitive to all the information around,and perceive them negatively.So one with trait N is easy to feel stressful.And one with high level of state N is under a specific adversity(e.g.earthquake,traffic accident),he/she is sensitive to the information related to this specific stressor.For part two,we developed a measurement of N.In this part four dimensions of N-scale were put forward,which includes physical sensitivity,event sensitivity,environment sensibility and interpersonal sensitivity.The dimension division was based on the category of individual sensory in daily life.A total of 790 individuals were asked to complete the N-scale and related measurements.512 of them were put into exploratory factor analysis(EFA)and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA).The other 273 were analyzed for criterion validity.According to EFA,this N-scale has four dimensions as we hypothesized.After 15 EFA runs,23 items were remained,which could explain variance 57.08%.The Cronbach a of N-scale is 0.917,the a of four factors ranged from 0.751 to 0.896.The correlation coefficients between four factors are within the range from 0.53 to 0.66 which indicated that N-scale is fine in construction.In addition,the CFA demonstrated that χ2/df=1.41,p<0.001,GFI=0.91,AGFI=0.88,RMSEA=0.04,NFI=0.89,TLI=0.96,CFI=0.97,PGFI=0.70,PNFI=0.75.All the above goodness-of-fit indices showed that the model of N-scale is acceptable.According to analysis of criterion validity,N-scale revealed significant correlation with N-scale from BFI and EPQ,the quality of sleeping,as well as Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire,indicating that N-scale is qualified in criterion validity.For part three,we investigate the characteristics of N within students of Southwest University.Collected N scores and several demographics,we found there is no N level difference between male and female students and N scores is irrelevant with age.We could infer that N may be a kind of pervasive mental character in university students. |
