Emotional Health and the Big Five Personality Factors at the American State Level

Relations between the emotional health domain of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and the Big Five personality factors were determined at the American state level. State emotional health scores were based on the aggregated results of 353,039 phone interviews conducted throughout 2008 with a representative sample of US adults (Gallup 2009a). State z scores (Rentfrow et al. in Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 339–386, 2008) on neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness were based on 619,397 nationally representative respondents to an internet survey between 1999 and 2005. State socioeconomic status (SES), urban percent, and white percent based on 2000 and 2005 data served as demographic controls. Alaska and Hawaii were excluded. When the controls entered a hierarchical multiple regression equation as a block and were followed by the Big Five selected stepwise, the controls accounted for 27.5% of the emotional health variance and neuroticism accounted for another 35.3%. With stepwise selection of controls and then Big Five variables, SES entered first (24.1%) and neuroticism entered second (32.4%). With stepwise selection from the combined control and Big Five pool, neuroticism entered first (47.5%), SES entered second (9.1%), and urban percent entered third (4.9%). Clearly, neuroticism and SES are the key contributors to emotional health variance and neuroticism makes the largest contribution. States with higher proportions of neurotic individuals and lower SES tended to have populations with poorer emotional health. Theoretical foundations for the link between neuroticism and emotional health at the state level and implications for changes in state emotional health are discussed.