Neurotic people aren't slower on average, just far more erratic
Neuroticism, one of the Big Five personality traits, describes how often and how intensely someone feels fear, anger, shame or gloom. Oddly, highly neurotic people match everyone else's average reaction time in lab tests; what gives them away is wild variation from one trial to the next.
Psychologists agree it involves negative emotion but disagree on the exact definition. One version stresses quick arousal and slow recovery, overlapping with Elaine Aron's idea of sensory processing sensitivity. Another frames it as emotional instability and poor stress management, and Barlow and colleagues see it as rooted in genes, biology and environment, marked by a belief that the world is unsafe and hard to cope with. Like other traits it runs along a continuum. Scoring low does not guarantee happiness, only calm and steadiness; positive feelings belong more to extraversion, so a neurotic extravert may ride an emotional roller coaster.
Measurement usually relies on self-report. Lexical tests use single adjectives such as moody or envious, and Thompson's International English Mini-Markers were revised to work better outside North America, where idioms like feeling blue can confuse non-native speakers. In Gray's model the trait correlates positively with the behavioural inhibition system, linked to sensitivity to punishment, and negatively with the reward-seeking activation system. Researchers also warn of bias, since many samples come from privileged, educated groups.
The trait has a striking physical signature in the startle reflex. High scorers startle more strongly under fearful conditions but less when shown something disgusting, which suggests heightened vigilance when escape is possible and emotional blunting when it is not; startle measures can predict the trait with good accuracy. On the cognitive side, the reaction-time variability may reflect mental noise from preoccupation, and a 2007 study found neuroticism correlated most strongly with attention slips triggered by unwanted associations, hinting that worries crowd the mind during tasks.
A 2013 meta-analysis linked high neuroticism to later anxiety disorders, depression and psychosis, with mood disorders showing the strongest ties, although the associations shrank after accounting for earlier symptoms, and overlapping questionnaire items make cause and effect hard to untangle. Culture shapes the expression too: one researcher found that among American teenage girls it tracked eating disorders, while among Ghanaian girls it tracked magical thinking and intense fear of enemies.
Source: Neuroticism
