Neuroticism · Facet N3
Depression as a Big Five facet describes the floor your mood returns to, not an illness. It covers how often discouragement, flatness and self-blame turn up, and how long they stay once the reason for them has gone. People low on this scale dip and climb back within hours.
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This facet reads how readily your mood settles low and how long it stays there. The statements cover discouragement after things go wrong, the sense of having little to feel pleased about, and the habit of turning a bad result into a verdict on yourself.
The scale sits inside Neuroticism, the domain that gathers negative feeling of every kind, and it is the backward looking member of that family. Anxiety fires ahead of an event; this one arrives afterwards and argues about what the event proved. The two correlate 0.67, close enough to be mistaken for one scale and far enough apart to come apart in practice.
A score describes a disposition, not a season. Grief, illness and a bad year move anyone down the scale for a while, and the reading from a hard month is not the reading you would get half a year later. The trait is what remains when nothing has gone wrong.
Research writing keeps the name Depression for this scale, and the same territory turns up as dejection or as low positive affect. The items come from the public domain pool published by Johnson, part of a personality inventory and of no clinical instrument.
Three lines get crossed here, and the first one matters more than anything else on the page.
A score on this scale is a personality measurement, and no point on it means illness. A clinical diagnosis rests on how far daily life is disrupted and for how long, and it is made by a professional who talks with you. High scorers are likelier to have had one, yet most never do, and people in the middle band sometimes have.
These two lean the same way without being the same reading: they correlate minus 0.49. Cheerfulness belongs to Extraversion and measures how much delight a person generates in the first place. A quiet temperament that rarely reaches for joy can sit on a mood floor that never drops, and people who laugh easily still take setbacks hard.
Out of all 435 pairs of facets in our data this is the third most negative, at minus 0.59. Self-Efficacy is the belief that you are competent and that what you try tends to work out. When it runs low, a setback finds a ready made story about your ability waiting for it.
One end feels the drop and pays for it in recovery time, the other barely notices and misses some of what the drop is for. There is no target score here.
Setbacks land harder and stay longer. You register disappointment early and without dressing it up, you rarely pretend a poor result was fine, and people having a bad time often find you the easiest person to say so to. The bill arrives in recovery: news somebody else sheds by evening can hold you for days.
Sadness and self-criticism visit you more often than they visit most people. When something fails, the inner commentary gets loud, and lifting your mood takes real effort.
Disappointment registers and then drains away. You can lose an argument, a contract or a whole weekend and still sleep, because the event stays an event instead of becoming a statement about you. The blind spot is other people: someone who cannot shake a thing off looks like someone choosing not to.
Gloomy moods rarely hold you for long. After a setback you tend to look for the next move rather than replay the loss.
Four people in ten sit in the middle band, and that band is the working arrangement. Low moods turn up when something has given them a reason, stay a while, then let go: enough of a dip to register the loss, enough lift to try again without waiting to feel like it.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile convention Johnson uses, not any clinical cut off. A high score describes temperament. It is not a diagnosis, and low mood that will not lift is a conversation to have with a doctor.
The raw score adds up 10 answers, so it runs from 10 to 50. The curve comes from 135,947 finished profiles, and it is the widest of all thirty facets.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 15 |
| 25 | 20 |
| 50 | 26 |
| 75 | 34 |
| 90 | 41 |
Half of all men land between 18 and 32 points and half of all women between 19 and 34, with medians of 24 and 26. Only Vulnerability averages lower across the thirty facets, so the high band begins further down than readers expect. A percentile ranks you against people of your own sex and age who sat this test.
Group averages move on every scale. Here they move less by sex and much more by age than readers assume.
Women average 27.3 points here and men 25.9. That gap of 1.4 points is the smallest of the six Neuroticism facets, nothing like the 4.3 points separating the sexes on Anxiety. Age does the heavier work: the average falls from about 27 in the under 21 group to roughly 23 past 60, and only Excitement-Seeking declines faster. The oldest cell holds about 250 people of each sex.
Neuroticism is six separate scales added together, and this one carries more of the total than most: it correlates 0.85 with its own domain. The bars below show which scales it travels with.
At work the trait shows in the verdict rather than the output. A high scorer can deliver exactly what a colleague delivered and file it as a near miss, so feedback lands twice: once as information, once as confirmation. On heavy days the expense is start up energy, since the work still gets done but the first hour costs more than it should.
Close relationships feel this as tempo. High scorers usually need longer to come back after a row and can read a short reply as evidence of something larger. The same sensitivity makes them good company for someone else having a bad month. Low scorers recover fast and quietly expect the recovery to be mutual, which is easy to live with until it is not.
At the high end the movement is not in cheering yourself up, since the resting level barely responds to that. It is in the distance between a bad outcome and the conclusion drawn from it, and that distance is a habit rather than a temperament. At the low end the growth is in translation: a mood that passes for you by lunchtime is not passing for the person opposite.
Twin research puts roughly half of the variation between people on Big Five traits down to inherited differences, and most of the rest down to experiences that even siblings do not share. So nothing here is fixed at birth, but it is slow: rank order looks much the same ten years later.
The population slope on this scale is one of the steepest in the inventory: averages fall about four points between the youngest and the oldest groups, and only Excitement-Seeking declines faster. Our norms compare age groups measured at one time rather than following a person.
Two things belong apart here. Where the trait rests is a slow moving property of temperament, and that is what the scale reports. A stretch of low mood that will not lift is something else, with its own causes and its own help, which a personality score neither detects nor rules out.
A score is a level, not a pattern. The same low floor reads one way beside a warm Extraversion profile and another beside a flat one, and that second layer is where the paid analysis works.
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The 300 item version measures Depression with 10 statements and the 120 item version with 4. Answers run from 1 to 5, reverse worded items are flipped before anything is added, and the total becomes a raw score that the norm table for your sex and age turns into a percentile. Alpha comes out at 0.916 on the long version, the highest of all thirty facets.
Alpha shows how closely the statements of one scale agree with each other. In research, 0.70 and above is usually treated as solid. We counted these numbers on Johnson’s open data, so they can be checked against the published values.
The statements are kept off this page on purpose. Anyone who has read an item in advance answers it differently, so the items appear only once the test begins.
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Set the slider by feel first, without doing any arithmetic. The test will tell you afterwards how well that estimate matched the norm table for your sex and age.
0 means lower than almost everyone who took the test, 100 means higher than almost everyone.
This is a guess, not a measurement. The test compares your answers with norms from real people.
No. The scale measures a personality trait and carries no diagnostic threshold, so no score on it means illness and none rules it out. High scorers call themselves discouraged more often, and most never seek treatment. If low mood has been holding for weeks and is getting in the way of sleep or work, that belongs with a clinician.
Neuroticism is the domain and this is one of its six scales. They correlate 0.85, the fourth strongest domain link among the thirty facets, so they move together closely without being interchangeable. Someone can score high here and still land in the average band overall, provided the other five sit lower.
Because most people, most of the time, are not down. The average across our sample is 26.7 on a scale running from 10 to 50, and only Vulnerability comes out lower. That shifts the reading: 30 raw points is already above the middle of the group rather than an ordinary result.
It is easier to carry, which is not the same thing. A low floor keeps setbacks small and recovery quick, at the cost of a blind spot for people whose floor sits lower. A high score comes with a harder ride and an honest reading of when something has gone wrong. Both turn up in lives that work.
On this scale they can. We measured alpha at 0.916 for the 10 statement version, the highest of all thirty facets, and 0.851 for the 4 statement short one, both on the open data published by Johnson. The items pull in one direction rather than measuring several things at once.
Guessing your position on the widest of the thirty scales is harder than it looks. Both versions return a percentile for your sex and age group, and neither costs anything.
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