Neuroticism scores in our sample differ from those reported in the West: most strikingly, the mean score is much lower. Studies in European community acquired populations report mean neuroticism scores with a distribution approximating normality centered around a mean of 10 (Eaves et al., 1989; Martin et al., 2000); we find a mean of 3.6 in the community acquired sample of Chinese women, and a highly skewed distribution. The apparent lower levels of neuroticism in our sample are potentially important, as they may be related to the lower rates of MDD in China compared to the West: the 12-month prevalence of MD is approximately 7% in the US (Kessler et al., 2003) and 2% in China (Phillips et al., 2009).
