This claim may not appear to give higher order constructs their appropriate due. As L. A. Clark put it, “If you are advocating that we get rid of Neuroticism, that won't work. Neuroticism is both widely accepted and has been extremely useful” (personal communication, July 1, 2008). We agree. We are not advocating that we remove Neuroticism from the personality psychopathology discussion at all. Rather, we are advocating what we believe to be a more theoretically sound understanding of what Neuroticism represents. Using, for this purpose, the NEO PI-R five-factor model, in which Neuroticism is a higher order factor and there are six provisionally homogeneous traits within that umbrella (depression, anxiety, vulnerability, angry hostility, impulsiveness, and self-consciousness), we understand Neuroticism as denoting the finding that those six traits share substantial variance and have more in common than they have in common with other personality traits.
