Chunk #31 — Evidence for the Existence of Positive and Negative Urgency — Urgency in Relation to Comprehensive Models of Personality — Relations of the urgency traits to facets of neuroticism and conscientiousness
To address this possibility, we conducted a series of multiple regression analyses (on the Peterson & Smith, 2007 data) to test whether each of the urgency traits had reliable variance unexplained by the sums and interactions of the facets of neuroticism and conscientiousness from the NEO-PI-R. As concurrent predictors, we used five facets of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, vulnerability, self-consciousness, and angry hostility) and all six facets of conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation). We did not include the impulsiveness facet of neuroticism, because it is analogous to negative urgency, For each analysis, we compared estimates of the total, reliable variance for the urgency traits to the total variance in the traits that can be explained by linear combinations of the 11 facets and by interactions of each neuroticism facet with each conscientiousness facet. Coefficient alpha estimates of reliability were .89 for negative urgency and .94 for positive urgency; these values estimate the total, reliable variance of the two trait measures.
