Neuroticism, Anxiety, and Depression: Shared Vulnerability and What It Does Not Prove
Updated: Oct 1
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 30, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Neuroticism is associated with both anxiety and depression, and this overlap is one reason personality researchers describe neuroticism as a broad transdiagnostic vulnerability marker. The important word is vulnerability. A higher level of neuroticism can be associated with a greater probability of distress, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and some anxiety or depressive disorders at the group level, but it does not diagnose a disorder, establish a single cause, or show that the same pathway explains every person’s symptoms.
Large meta-analytic and longitudinal literatures support the association. A meta-analysis of 59 prospective studies involving 443,313 participants found that neuroticism predicted later anxiety, depression, and nonspecific mental distress; after adjustment for baseline symptoms and psychiatric history, the associations were substantially smaller but remained detectable over time. Jeronimus and colleagues’ meta-analysis is especially important because it shows both sides of the evidence: neuroticism contains prospective risk information, yet a substantial part of the raw association reflects preexisting symptoms and psychiatric history.
The same distinction applies clinically. Neuroticism is a dimensional personality construct. Anxiety can be a temporary emotional state, a symptom, a trait-like tendency, or part of an anxiety disorder. Depression can refer to depressive affect or symptoms, while major depressive disorder is a clinical diagnosis. The National Institute of Mental Health describes anxiety disorders as more than occasional worry or fear, and its depression overview describes major depression as a disorder involving persistent symptoms and impairment. A personality score cannot substitute for condition-specific assessment.
The Short Answer
Neuroticism, anxiety, and depression overlap because they all involve negative emotional experience, and because some of the genetic, developmental, cognitive, and environmental liabilities that increase one can also increase the others. In research on psychopathology, anxiety and depressive disorders are often grouped within a broader internalizing domain because they co-occur and share risk factors. Neuroticism is closely related to that broad liability, but it remains a personality trait rather than a clinical disorder.
A classic meta-analysis covering 175 studies and 851 effect sizes found that anxiety and depressive diagnostic groups were consistently elevated on neuroticism, with neuroticism emerging as the strongest broad personality correlate across the disorders examined. See Kotov, Gamez, Schmidt, and Watson. That is strong evidence for association. It is not evidence that neuroticism alone causes anxiety disorders or depression.
Shared vulnerability therefore means that the same broad trait can be related to multiple forms of psychopathology and may index part of their common liability. It does not mean that anxiety and depression are the same condition, that everyone high in neuroticism will develop either disorder, or that everyone with anxiety or depression is high in neuroticism.
What “Shared Vulnerability” Means in Personality Science
A vulnerability factor is a characteristic associated with greater probability of an outcome under some conditions or across a population. It can precede the outcome and contribute useful information about risk without being either necessary or sufficient for the outcome. Neuroticism fits this description better than a simple disease-cause model.
The influential review by Ormel and colleagues examined several competing explanations for the neuroticism–common mental disorder relationship. It concluded that no single model explains the whole pattern. Shared causes appear important; prospective evidence is compatible with vulnerability; symptom overlap matters; and episodes of anxiety or depression can also influence measured neuroticism. See Ormel et al. (2013).
This is why “shared vulnerability” should be read as a probabilistic research concept. It summarizes a network of partially overlapping liabilities rather than naming one mechanism. Two people with equally high neuroticism can reach very different outcomes because their stress exposure, coping resources, social context, developmental history, other personality traits, physical health, and disorder-specific vulnerabilities differ.
Why Neuroticism Is Related to Both Anxiety and Depression
Broad negative emotionality
At the broad trait level, neuroticism describes a relatively enduring tendency toward negative emotionality and distress. People higher on the trait tend, on average, to experience worry, tension, sadness, irritability, self-consciousness, frustration, and feeling overwhelmed more readily or intensely. Because both anxiety and depression contain substantial negative-affect components, each can correlate strongly with a broad trait that captures susceptibility to negative emotion.
This overlap is visible even in classic symptom models. The tripartite model of anxiety and depression proposed a broad general-distress or negative-affect component shared across the two, while also identifying features that help distinguish them, such as anhedonia/low positive affect on the depressive side and physiological hyperarousal in some forms of anxiety. Empirical tests by Watson and colleagues supported a shared general-distress dimension alongside more specific components.
The existence of a shared negative-emotionality component is therefore one reason neuroticism relates to both domains. But conceptual overlap does not make the constructs interchangeable. Neuroticism concerns characteristic tendencies over time; anxiety and depressive symptoms describe experiences within a time frame; clinical disorders require additional diagnostic information about symptom patterns, duration, severity, impairment, exclusions, and context.
Stress sensitivity and persistence of distress
Higher neuroticism is also associated with stronger perceived stress and a greater tendency for negative emotion to persist after adversity. Those processes can plausibly raise vulnerability to both anxious and depressive outcomes. Yet the exact mechanisms vary across people and studies. A trait may influence what situations are perceived as threatening, how long attention remains captured by negative material, how often worry or rumination recurs, and how stress is interpreted. Each pathway is a hypothesis requiring its own evidence; none should be treated as a universal mechanism simply because neuroticism is elevated.
Longitudinal work from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety is useful here. A review of 62 NESDA studies found that neuroticism, low self-esteem, and repetitive negative thinking showed prominent transdiagnostic relationships with the development and chronicity of depression and anxiety, while some factors were more disorder-specific. See Struijs et al. (2021). This supports a layered model in which broad vulnerabilities coexist with more specific processes.
Comorbidity and shared liability
Anxiety and depressive disorders often co-occur. Shared vulnerability helps explain why: if some liabilities increase risk for both domains, the same person is more likely to show symptoms from both. Neuroticism is one such broad liability marker, alongside other shared genetic, developmental, cognitive, and environmental influences.
In a population-based National Comorbidity Survey sample of 5,847 people, Weinstock and Whisman found high neuroticism across depressive and anxiety disorders and particularly high levels among people with comorbid depression and anxiety. The result supports a common-feature model, but because the study is observational it does not establish that neuroticism itself produced the comorbidity.
What Longitudinal Research Adds
Cross-sectional studies answer whether neuroticism and current anxiety or depression are associated at the same time. Prospective and longitudinal studies are more informative about temporal ordering because neuroticism can be measured before later symptoms or diagnoses. Even then, temporal precedence alone does not prove causation: an unmeasured common cause can influence both the trait and the later disorder.
The 2016 meta-analysis by Jeronimus et al. is central. Before adjustment, prospective associations with anxiety, depression, and nonspecific distress were large, around d = 0.50–0.70. Controlling baseline symptoms and psychiatric history reduced those estimates by roughly half, to about d = 0.10–0.40. The adjusted association remained comparatively stable across follow-up intervals.
That pattern matters. If the entire association were merely a snapshot of current symptoms, adjustment for baseline symptoms and history should erase it. It did not. If the raw association were interpreted as a pure causal effect of personality, however, the large attenuation after adjustment would also be hard to ignore. The best-supported conclusion is that neuroticism indexes enduring vulnerability while also sharing variance with prior and current psychopathology.
A six-year study of 489 young adults found that baseline neuroticism predicted first onset of panic disorder, agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder. The same study also detected increases in neuroticism when disorders were current at follow-up and a possible residual increase after major depression. See Prince et al. (2021). The study illustrates why a one-direction model is incomplete: trait differences can precede disorders, and disorder episodes can also affect measured trait levels.
For depressive symptoms specifically, an individual-participant meta-analysis of 10 cohort studies including 117,899 people found that higher neuroticism was associated with depressive symptoms cross-sectionally and predicted later depressive symptoms even after baseline symptoms were taken into account. See Hakulinen et al. (2015). Again, the adjusted longitudinal effect was much smaller than the cross-sectional association.
Five Models That Can Explain the Association
The most useful way to understand the evidence is to keep several models in view at once. Ormel and colleagues reviewed five major explanations.
1. Vulnerability model
Neuroticism may precede and contribute to processes that raise risk for later anxiety or depression. Prospective prediction after baseline adjustment supports some vulnerability interpretation, especially when the trait is assessed before first onset. The vulnerability model does not imply inevitability or a single pathway.
2. Common-cause model
Neuroticism and internalizing disorders may partly arise from the same underlying causes. Shared genetic influences, temperamental tendencies, early environmental exposures, and recurrent stress processes can generate correlation even when the personality trait is not a direct cause of a later disorder. This model is strongly compatible with genetically informed research.
3. Spectrum or continuity model
Some neuroticism content and some internalizing symptoms may lie on a broader continuum of negative emotionality. This can create genuine substantive overlap and also measurement overlap. It helps explain why trait questionnaires that ask about worry, sadness, or emotional reactivity can correlate strongly with anxiety or depression symptom scales. Continuity does not erase clinically meaningful distinctions.
4. State-effect model
Current anxiety or depression can temporarily raise self-reported neuroticism because people answer trait items through the lens of current distress. That means a neuroticism score obtained during an acute episode may reflect both enduring disposition and some state-related variance.
In NESDA, Karsten et al. (2012) found small state effects of depressive and anxiety disorders on neuroticism. Their results support taking current disorder status into account when interpreting personality scores without reducing neuroticism to a symptom measure.
5. Scar model
A severe or recurrent episode may produce more enduring change in personality measurement or behavior. Evidence for lasting scar effects is less straightforward than evidence for state effects and prospective vulnerability, and estimates depend on design, timing, instrument, and disorder. Longitudinal studies that measure personality before onset, during illness, and after remission are the strongest way to separate these possibilities.
Neuroticism, Anxiety, and Depression Are Related Constructs—not Synonyms
Neuroticism
Neuroticism is a broad dimensional personality trait. Everyone can be located somewhere along the dimension. Higher scores indicate a stronger characteristic tendency toward negative emotionality and distress relative to the scale and reference group used. For the broader Big Five construct, see Neuroticism: What It Is in the Big Five Personality Model.
Negative emotionality
Negative Emotionality is the label used for the corresponding Big Five domain in the BFI-2. It overlaps strongly with what many traditions call neuroticism, but labels and facet structures vary across instruments. A BFI-2 Negative Emotionality score should not be treated as numerically interchangeable with a NEO, Eysenck, or IPIP neuroticism score.
Negative affect
Negative affect usually refers to a broad dimension of unpleasant emotional experience or mood, often measured over a specified time frame. It is conceptually related to neuroticism but differs in temporal framing: neuroticism is generally intended as a more enduring disposition, whereas negative affect can be assessed as a current or recent state, a typical tendency, or both depending on the instrument.
Anxiety and trait anxiety
Anxiety can describe a current emotion or symptom state involving apprehension, tension, and anticipation of threat. Trait anxiety describes a relatively stable tendency to experience anxiety across situations. Trait anxiety is narrower than broad neuroticism even though the constructs are strongly related. An anxiety disorder is a clinical condition defined by its own symptom pattern and impairment, not by a personality score.
Depressive symptoms and depressive disorders
Depressive symptoms include experiences such as low mood, reduced interest or pleasure, hopelessness, sleep or appetite changes, cognitive difficulty, fatigue, and other features depending on the measure. Major depressive disorder requires a clinically defined syndrome rather than simply a high score on a personality dimension. A person can have high neuroticism without depression and depression without unusually high neuroticism.
Measurement Matters More Than It First Appears
The phrase “high neuroticism” has no universal numerical meaning. Every statement about a score should identify the instrument, scoring method, reference sample, population, and metric. A raw score of 30 on one questionnaire cannot be interpreted by importing a cutoff or percentile from another.
The BFI-2, for example, uses the broad domain label Negative Emotionality and assesses narrower facets within it. The NEO family uses Neuroticism and historically includes facets named Anxiety, Angry Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, and Vulnerability. Eysenck measures and IPIP scales use different item sets and scoring systems. The BFI-2’s hierarchical structure was developed and validated by Soto and John.
Those facet names can be clinically misleading when read outside their measurement context. A NEO “Depression” facet is a personality-facet score; it is not a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. A NEO “Anxiety” facet is not a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, or another anxiety disorder. The same principle is explained in our Neuroticism Facets guide.
If your question is how to interpret a test result, the relevant owner page is Neuroticism Test: What It Measures and How to Interpret Results. The present article addresses the relationship between the trait and anxiety/depression, not universal score cutoffs.
Shared Genetics: Important Evidence, Limited Individual Prediction
Twin, family, and genome-wide studies indicate that neuroticism, anxiety, and depression share part of their genetic liability. “Shared genetic liability” means that some genetic influences contributing to variation in one phenotype also contribute to variation in the others at the population level. It does not mean that there is a single neuroticism gene, an anxiety gene, or a depression gene.
A population-based study of more than 9,000 twins found high genetic correlations between neuroticism and seven internalizing disorders. Genetic factors shared with neuroticism accounted for roughly one-third to one-half of the genetic risk across the disorders, while additional neuroticism-independent genetic factors also contributed to major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. See Hettema et al. (2006).
Modern genomic analyses reinforce the picture of both overlap and specificity. Thorp et al. (2021) modeled depression, anxiety, and neuroticism items and found distinct but highly genetically correlated depression and anxiety factors, with neuroticism items distributed across them. A 2024 genome-wide meta-analysis of Big Five traits also documented extensive genetic overlap between neuroticism and psychiatric phenotypes.
The evidence base continues to grow. A 2026 genome-wide meta-analysis of generalized anxiety symptoms in 693,869 individuals of European ancestry reported strong genetic correlations with case-control anxiety, neuroticism, and depression. The ancestry restriction matters: genetic estimates, polygenic scores, and discovery loci do not automatically generalize with equal accuracy across populations.
None of this turns a polygenic association into an individual diagnosis. Heritability and genetic correlation describe variation in populations under particular conditions. They do not tell a single person whether they will develop anxiety or depression, and they do not establish one inevitable biological pathway.
For the broader causal architecture of the personality trait—including genetics, temperament, environment, and life experience—see What Causes Neuroticism?.
Why Anxiety and Depression Remain Distinct
Shared vulnerability is meaningful precisely because the outcomes are not identical. Anxiety and depression can share general distress, neuroticism, genetic liability, repetitive negative thinking, and environmental risks while differing in symptom profiles, temporal course, triggers, physiological features, motivational changes, and disorder-specific mechanisms.
The tripartite literature demonstrates this logic: Watson et al. found a common general-distress factor but also dimensions that differentiated anxiety and depression. More recent dimensional psychopathology frameworks reach a similar high-level conclusion. The HiTOP emotional dysfunction review places anxiety and depressive phenomena within broader internalizing structures while retaining lower-level distinctions among symptom dimensions and syndromes.
This matters clinically and scientifically. If a broad trait predicted every internalizing outcome through exactly the same pathway, condition-specific assessment would add little. In reality, the broad trait captures shared liability while narrower symptoms and mechanisms carry additional information.
Trait, State, Symptom, Screening Result, and Diagnosis
These five forms of information answer different questions. A trait asks what a person is generally like across time and situations. A state asks what they are experiencing now or over a short interval. A symptom is a particular psychological or behavioral feature. A screening result estimates whether further evaluation may be warranted. A diagnosis is a clinical classification based on a defined syndrome, course, impairment, exclusions, and professional assessment context.
This distinction is not merely semantic. Work on dimensional psychopathology explicitly notes that traits and symptoms can share content while differing in time frame and persistence; see DeYoung et al. (2022). A high personality score can therefore coexist with no current disorder, while a severe clinical episode can occur in someone whose premorbid personality was not exceptionally high on neuroticism.
Screening scales deserve the same caution. A depression or anxiety screening score is not a neuroticism score, and a neuroticism score is not a depression or anxiety screen. Each instrument has its own construct, reference period, scoring rules, thresholds, validation sample, and intended use.
What the Association Does Not Prove
It does not prove that neuroticism causes anxiety and depression in every individual
Population-level prediction and individual causation are different claims. Prospective associations strengthen a vulnerability interpretation, but shared causes, symptom overlap, stress exposure, state effects, and measurement properties also contribute.
It does not prove that anxiety and depression are manifestations of one disorder
The two domains share distress and many liabilities, but they also show distinct symptom patterns and disorder-specific features. Shared covariance can coexist with clinically meaningful differentiation.
It does not prove that a high neuroticism score is a psychiatric diagnosis
Neuroticism is a personality dimension. There is no DSM or ICD diagnosis called “high neuroticism,” and no universal neuroticism cutoff establishes an anxiety or depressive disorder.
It does not prove that neuroticism is merely hidden anxiety or depression
Current symptoms can influence trait scores, and some questionnaire content overlaps. Yet prospective studies show that neuroticism predicts later internalizing outcomes even after baseline symptoms and psychiatric history are considered. The trait cannot be reduced to a disguised symptom count.
It does not prove that all shared risk is genetic
Genetic overlap is substantial, but environmental exposures, developmental processes, learning history, stress generation, relationships, physical health, and other contextual factors also matter. Genetic covariance explains only part of the architecture.
It does not prove that a brain correlate is a biomarker for an individual
Group-level neural associations can help study mechanisms, but they do not transform neuroticism into a biological diagnosis. Brain, genetic, hormonal, and psychophysiological correlates require separate evidence for reliability, specificity, and individual-level prediction.
It does not prove that reducing neuroticism is the same as treating anxiety or depression
Trait change, symptom improvement, remission from a disorder, and short-term state fluctuation are different outcomes. A treatment can reduce anxiety or depressive symptoms without producing equivalent personality change, and measured neuroticism can change partly because symptoms have changed. Intervention questions belong to their own evidence base.
Can Neuroticism Predict Who Will Develop Anxiety or Depression?
At the population level, neuroticism is one of the strongest broad personality predictors of later internalizing problems. At the individual level, prediction is much less decisive. Most people with a high score cannot be classified into “will develop a disorder” versus “will not” from neuroticism alone.
The reduction in effect size after baseline symptom and psychiatric-history adjustment is a useful reminder. Part of what a neuroticism score captures may already reflect subthreshold distress, prior episodes, stable vulnerability, and correlated life circumstances. Predictive models become more informative when they combine multiple domains—history, current symptoms, functioning, stress exposure, family history, comorbidity, and context—rather than treating one trait as destiny.
Individual prediction also depends on base rates. Even a factor associated with a substantial relative increase in risk may have limited positive predictive value when an outcome is uncommon in a particular population or time window. That is another reason broad personality scores are best used descriptively and probabilistically.
Does Current Anxiety or Depression Raise Neuroticism Scores?
It can. Personality measures ask people to summarize characteristic patterns, and current distress can influence those judgments. This is called a state effect when the elevation is temporary and linked to an active episode. A scar effect refers to a more enduring change following psychopathology.
The NESDA study by Karsten and colleagues found small state effects of both depressive and anxiety disorders on neuroticism. Prince and colleagues also reported state-related increases and some evidence compatible with a residual scar after major depression in young adults. These findings argue for cautious interpretation when personality is measured during acute distress.
The practical implication is not that a score obtained during distress is invalid. It is that timing is part of interpretation. If a clinical or research decision depends heavily on personality measurement, repeated assessment after symptom change can help separate stable disposition from episode-related elevation.
Where Development and Life Experience Fit
Shared vulnerability emerges over development rather than arriving as a fixed package. Temperamental differences, genetic predispositions, family and peer environments, stress exposure, learning, health, relationships, and life events can shape both trait development and internalizing risk. Some experiences may influence neuroticism and psychopathology through common pathways; others may affect one more strongly than the other.
Two neighboring articles examine evidence-sensitive parts of this developmental picture: Neuroticism and Childhood Adversity: Associations, Limits, and Causality and Neuroticism and Trauma: Trait Vulnerability, Exposure, and Post-Trauma Outcomes. Neither adversity nor trauma makes a later outcome inevitable, and neither should be used retrospectively to infer a single cause from a current personality profile.
How to Interpret a High Neuroticism Score When Anxiety or Depression Is a Concern
Start with the measure. Identify the instrument, scoring direction, normative reference group, population, and whether the result is a raw score, standardized score, percentile, or categorical label created by a particular test provider. A percentile is a rank relative to a reference distribution; it is not a diagnostic probability.
Then separate the trait score from current clinical questions. If the concern is persistent worry, panic, avoidance, depressed mood, loss of interest, functional impairment, sleep change, hopelessness, or another symptom pattern, evaluate those experiences directly rather than inferring them from neuroticism.
Finally, treat the score as one piece of a broader profile. Neuroticism can contextualize why distress may be experienced frequently or intensely, but it does not specify the disorder, cause, prognosis, or treatment. For score interpretation, use the Neuroticism Test guide; for the construct itself, return to the Big Five neuroticism pillar.
When Anxiety or Depression Needs Direct Assessment
If someone is asking whether they have an anxiety disorder or depression, a personality article is not the right diagnostic tool. The NIMH anxiety disorders page explains how persistent, difficult-to-control fear or worry can become clinically significant, while the NIMH depression page describes depressive symptoms, duration, and functional impact. A clinician can assess symptom pattern, severity, duration, impairment, medical contributors, substance effects, differential diagnoses, and safety concerns.
A high neuroticism score can be relevant background information in that assessment. It cannot confirm or rule out generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, depression, persistent depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or any other condition. The linked pages address the trait-specific associations; disorder diagnosis and treatment remain condition-specific.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is neuroticism linked to both anxiety and depression?
Yes. Meta-analytic, longitudinal, twin, and genomic studies consistently show that higher neuroticism is associated with both anxiety and depressive symptoms and disorders at the group level. The association is broad and transdiagnostic, but it is probabilistic rather than deterministic.
Does neuroticism cause anxiety and depression?
The evidence supports neuroticism as a vulnerability marker and possible contributor, but a simple one-way causal claim is too strong. Shared causes, measurement overlap, state effects, prior psychiatric history, stress processes, and reciprocal influences also help explain the association.
Is neuroticism the same as anxiety?
No. Anxiety can be a state, symptom, narrower trait, or clinical disorder. Neuroticism is a broader personality dimension encompassing susceptibility to multiple negative emotions, including anxiety, sadness, anger, embarrassment, and distress.
Is the NEO Neuroticism “Depression” facet the same as major depressive disorder?
No. The NEO facet is a personality-scale component. Its name does not make it a clinical diagnosis. Major depressive disorder requires condition-specific assessment of symptoms, duration, impairment, and differential considerations.
Does high neuroticism mean I have a mental disorder?
No. High neuroticism describes a relative position on a personality dimension. It is associated with higher average risk for internalizing problems, but many people with high scores do not meet criteria for a mental disorder.
Can someone have depression with low neuroticism?
Yes. Neuroticism changes probability, not possibility. Depression can arise through multiple combinations of genetic, biological, psychological, social, environmental, and medical factors.
Can someone have an anxiety disorder with average neuroticism?
Yes. Anxiety disorders are not defined by a neuroticism threshold. A person can meet criteria for an anxiety disorder without scoring unusually high on a broad personality measure.
Why do anxiety and depression often occur together?
They share broad internalizing liability, negative affect, some genetic and environmental risk factors, and several cognitive and behavioral vulnerabilities. They can also influence one another over time. Shared neuroticism-related vulnerability is one part of that larger explanation.
Are the links between neuroticism, anxiety, and depression genetic?
Partly. Twin and genomic studies show substantial shared genetic influences, alongside trait- and disorder-specific genetic influences. Environmental and developmental factors also contribute. Genetic correlation is a population statistic, not an individual diagnosis or destiny.
Can anxiety or depression make neuroticism scores higher?
Yes, current distress can modestly elevate self-reported neuroticism, and some longitudinal studies suggest more persistent changes after certain episodes. That is why assessment timing and repeated measurement can matter.
Can a neuroticism test diagnose anxiety or depression?
No. Personality inventories measure trait dimensions. Anxiety and depression require condition-specific symptom assessment, and clinical diagnosis depends on more than a personality score or screening result.
What is the strongest conclusion from the research?
Neuroticism is a robust broad marker of shared vulnerability to anxiety and depression, but the relationship is multi-causal, partly reciprocal, measurement-dependent, and insufficient for individual diagnosis or deterministic prediction.
Related Articles
Neuroticism and Mental Health: Why the Trait Is a Transdiagnostic Risk Factor — the broad authority page for neuroticism as a transdiagnostic personality risk factor.
Neuroticism and Depression: What Research Shows — the depression-specific trait-association page.
Neuroticism and OCD: Trait Associations, Risk, and What Is Not the Same — distinguishes neuroticism–OCD association from OCD diagnosis.
Neuroticism: What It Is in the Big Five Personality Model — the core authority page for the modern dimensional personality construct.
Neuroticism Facets: Anxiety, Anger, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, and Vulnerability — explains why facet labels such as anxiety and depression are not clinical diagnoses.