High emotional reactivity

What this means

Your most distinctive trait is high emotional reactivity, the trait psychologists call neuroticism. The name is unfortunate: it does not mean anything is wrong with you. It means your alarm system is sensitive. You notice threats early, you feel criticism sharply, and worry can run on its own.

Strengths

Vigilance and depth. You anticipate problems others miss, you prepare, and you take people's feelings seriously because you know how much they can weigh.

Blind spots

Rumination, catastrophising and taking on other people's moods. Under long stress this trait is tiring, for you first.

What helps

Sleep, exercise and writing worries down work better for this trait than for any other. If low mood or anxiety is affecting your daily life, talk to a professional; a quiz is not a diagnosis.

About the quiz: Big Five personality test

The Big Five is the model of personality with the most research behind it. It does not sort you into a type; it describes you on five independent traits, each as a point on a scale: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional reactivity and openness.

This version uses the Mini-IPIP, a 20-statement public-domain short form. Rate how accurately each statement describes you. It takes about five minutes, you get a 0–100 score on every trait straight away, and there is nothing to sign up for.

How this quiz works

This test uses the Mini-IPIP, a 20-item short form of the Big Five published by Donnellan, Oswald, Baird and Lucas in 2006. The items come from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), whose items are in the public domain and may be used, translated and published for any purpose.

Each trait is measured by four statements rated from 1 (very inaccurate) to 5 (very accurate). Ten statements are reverse-keyed, so a 1 counts as a 5. The four answers for a trait are averaged and rescaled to 0–100. A score of 40 or below is shown as “low”, 41–60 as “average” and above 60 as “high”. These cut-offs are simple descriptive bands, not population norms: they tell you where you placed yourself on the scale, not what percentage of people score lower than you. Your headline result is the trait on which your score is furthest from the middle; the other four traits are shown with it.

What this test does not do: it is not a clinical instrument and it cannot diagnose anything. A 20-item short form is less precise than the 50- or 120-item IPIP versions, so scores near a band boundary should be read loosely. Personality is also not fixed: scores shift with age, life events and mood on the day.

Reference: Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., & Lucas, R. E. (2006). The Mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 192–203. Items: ipip.ori.org.