There has been a trend in the United States toward lowering thresholds for physical health indices such as blood pressure and cholesterol for the purpose of identifying more people in need of preventive treatment. Recent analyses suggest that this may have yielded little increase in health benefits, but may have caused increases in adverse side effects because more individuals are being treated, adverse consequences of labeling, and the diversion of funds from potentially more effective health programs (Kaplan & Ong, 2007). Much remains to be learned about this topic, but the same clearly could happen with neuroticism if the specificity of the screen was low and/or the screening threshold was set too low. Great caution should be exercised as we consider the potential utility and wisdom of screening on neuroticism to identify people in need of interventions. Nonetheless, because neuroticism is robustly related to so many different adverse outcomes, this approach to prevention should not be prematurely passed over just because it is challenging.
