Neuroticism is linked to numerous social, behavioral, and psychiatric traits4. We therefore calculated rg’s of the 12 items, the sum-score, and the two identified item clusters with 33 external traits (Supplementary Data 49) using cross-trait LD score regression16. In line with previous findings for neuroticism sum-scores3,4,21, all items correlated negatively with subjective well-being (−.67 to −.45, sum-score: −.65), and positively with major depressive disorder (.35−.66, sum-score: .65), depressive symptoms (.42−.83, sum-score: .79), and anxiety disorders (.51−.78, sum-score: .76; Fig. 3; Supplementary Data 50). These strong positive rg’s are presumably at least partly due to the substantial overlap in content between neuroticism items on the one hand and depression/anxiety items on the other (see Supplementary Table 1), which reduces the operational distinctness of these phenotypes.
