Emotionality
A facet of openness to experience. Four items in the IPIP-NEO-120.
The third facet of openness is how strongly feelings are experienced and noticed: whether a person feels their emotions intensely, picks up other people's, and pays attention to their own inner weather. It belongs to openness because it is about receptiveness to experience, in this case the experience of feeling.
What it does not mean
It is not neuroticism. Emotionality is about the richness and intensity of feeling of every kind, including joy; neuroticism is about how readily bad feelings arise. A person can feel everything strongly and be perfectly stable, or feel little and still worry a great deal.
A low score is not coldness. Low scorers feel; they notice it less and talk about it less.
Four items make a short scale. A facet score moves more between attempts than the 24-item domain score, and it describes a tendency in ordinary life as the person reports it, not a diagnosis of anything.
High and low in daily life
High. People high on this facet say they experience their emotions intensely and feel others' emotions. In daily life that shows as being moved by music and news, knowing how a room feels on entering it, crying at films, and being affected by other people's moods whether they want to be or not.
Low. People low on this facet say they rarely notice their emotional reactions and do not understand people who get emotional. In daily life that shows as an even keel, decisions made on facts, and a certain bafflement at displays of feeling. Others sometimes read this as detachment.
Parent domain
- Openness to experience: the broad trait this facet belongs to, with five sibling facets.
What the research says it predicts
Emotionality belongs to the openness aspect, with imagination and artistic interests, rather than to the intellect aspect. (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007)
In the development sample for the IPIP-NEO-120 this facet has one of the lower reliabilities of the thirty, so its score moves more between attempts than most. (Johnson, 2014)
Women score a little higher than men on the openness aspect, which includes emotionality, in a large internet sample. (Weisberg, DeYoung and Hirsh, 2011)
Where people fall
The spread of scores
Curve height shows how common each score is; the darker middle holds half of all people. If you have taken a test on this device, your marker is drawn on.
IPIP-NEO-120, emotionality, 4 items
410,376 people
The other facets of openness to experience
Sources and licence
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003
Weisberg, Y. J., DeYoung, C. G., & Hirsh, J. B. (2011). Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 178. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
Instrument: IPIP-NEO-120. Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/30FacetNEO-PI-RItems.htm.
Norms: Johnson, J. A. IPIP-NEO-120 public dataset (IPIP120.dat), OSF component wxvth of osf.io/tbmh5, https://osf.io/wxvth/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm
Instrument: IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers. Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26-42. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/newBigFive5broadKey.htm.
Norms: Open-Source Psychometrics Project, IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers responses (IPIP-FFM-data-8Nov2018.zip), 1,015,342 responses collected 2016 to 2018, https://openpsychometrics.org/_rawdata/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm