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Neuroticism (N) is perceived to be socially undesirable and the items measuring it in the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) are all positively keyed. To investigate whether N is contaminated by social desirability or acquiescence response bias, undergraduates completed the EPI Form A or B [measuring N, extraversion (E) and lie (L)] in its original version, or in a balanced version where items were positively or negatively keyed. A measure of self-deceptive enhancement (SDE) and various criterion measures for N and E were also administered. Reliability, convergent validity and discriminative validity of the original and balanced EPIs were similar, indicating that acquiescence was not a problem. N and SDE were negatively related, but convergent validity coefficients corrected for SDE were lower than the raw ones, indicating that SDE represented content not error variance. In contrast, some L-corrected validity coefficients increased, indicating that N may be distorted by faking. Finally, some psychometric properties were weaker for Form B than for Form A.

Hans Eysenck's inventories have been widely employed to measure the major dimensions of personality, one of which is neuroticism (N). N means emotional lability, and high scorers are worriers who exhibit overly strong emotional reactions that do not dissipate quickly (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1968). N is scored by awarding one point for each item that is endorsed. Scores on self-report inventories may be contaminated by response biases, particularly acquiescence (the tendency to agree or disagree), and social desirability (the tendency to convey favourable or unfavourable impressions) (Webster, 1958). Although Eysenck's N has good psychometric properties, it is open to both distortions (Ferrando, 2001). First, all items are worded in the neurotic direction (e.g. “My feelings are easily hurt”), so that a yeasayer will score high and appear neurotic, whereas a naysayer will score low and appear stable. Second, neuroticism is perceived as socially undesirable (Dunnett et al., 1981, Edwards & Walsh, 1964 and Francis, 1993), so that a person who paints themselves positively will score low and appear stable, whereas a person who paints themselves negatively will score high and appear neurotic. Because acquiescence and social desirability are independent (Greenwald & Clausen, 1970), a naysayer could also answer in the socially desirable direction, and appear extremely stable. Similarly, a yeasayer answering in the socially undesirable direction would appear extremely neurotic.