Openness to Experience · Facet O3
Emotionality is the facet of Openness that measures how much room your own feelings take up. It asks how vividly moods reach you, the good ones as well as the bad, and how much weight they carry when you decide. High scorers live with the volume up. Low scorers keep a level temperature inside.
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Emotionality in the Big Five is about access, not stability. The statements ask whether you register shifts in your own mood, whether feeling arrives strongly when it arrives, and whether you count it as information worth having. Nothing here counts how often the mood is a bad one.
The facet belongs to Openness because that family is about range of experience: art, ideas, invented worlds, unfamiliar places, and the weather inside you. Its nearest sister is Artistic Interests at 0.42, while Intellect, the argumentative end of the same family, barely keeps in touch at 0.19.
One figure says most about this scale. Of thirty facets only eight have their closest partner outside their own family, and this is one: Sympathy over in Agreeableness at 0.43, ahead of every openness sister.
Papers usually file this scale under Feelings, its label in the classic six way split of Openness, and the wider idea turns up as openness to affect. Our wording sits in the free item pool that Goldberg started.
No facet on this site gets misread more often, and always in the same direction: a high band is taken for a warning about stability.
Being open to feeling is not the same as being hurt by it. This scale asks how present your feelings are, never how negative. It does share ground with the anxious side of the map: of the thirty six pairs between an openness facet and a neuroticism facet, this scale holds the top five, and it stands at 0.39 with Anxiety. Most of the movement stays unshared.
Emotional intelligence names a set of skills: reading a room, putting words to what you feel, choosing what to do next. This scale measures none of that. It records how loudly the signal comes in, and a loud signal can be handled well or badly, by someone who could not name any of it.
The closest pair anywhere between Openness and Agreeableness, 0.43, and still two different questions. Sympathy asks what a stranger in trouble does to you. Emotionality asks about your own inner weather, whoever brought it.
Neither end is the warmer human being. One buys signal and pays in noise, the other buys steadiness and pays in blind spots.
Your own mood is loud enough to be used. Within minutes you know that a room has changed or that a decision is sitting badly, and that early reading is often right before there is any argument for it. Good news lands just as hard. The bill: a strong signal is not always a true one.
Your inner life is vivid and detailed. You register shades of feeling most people skip, which is a real instrument, and it deserves rest like any instrument.
Feelings are there, they simply do not take the floor. You notice them late and rarely give them a vote, which keeps your judgement clear while everyone around you is reacting. The cost is a thinner set of signals: something can be quietly wrong for weeks before you would call it a problem.
Your feelings run quietly in the background. You would rather act than analyze an emotion, and drama around you tends to calm down because of it.
Four profiles in ten sit in the middle band, and in raw points that band runs high: 37 to 42 out of 50 for women, 33 to 39 for men. In the middle, feeling arrives clearly when something real has happened, then stands aside.
Low, average and high cut the sample 30, 40 and 30 percent, the convention these norms follow. A high band says feeling registers strongly in you. It says nothing about whether you are unstable or kind.
Ten answers worth one to five points each put a raw total between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 finished runs of the long test, and the scale is a high one: most totals crowd the upper half.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 29 |
| 25 | 34 |
| 50 | 39 |
| 75 | 43 |
| 90 | 46 |
The median is 40 for women and 36 for men, so one raw total means two things at once: 38 points puts a man at the 63rd percentile and a woman at the 40th. A percentile compares you with people of your own sex and age who took this test.
Two things stand out in the group averages: the sex difference is one of the widest we measure, and the age line is nearly flat.
Women average 39.2 points here and men 35.5. That gap of 3.7 is the fourth widest of the thirty facets, behind Anxiety, Artistic Interests and Vulnerability, and the second widest inside Openness. Age barely touches it: the male average stays between 35.4 and 35.9 across every age group, the female one between 37.8 and 39.6. Neither curve moves two full points over a lifetime. The oldest cell holds about 250 people per sex, so read that end as a hint.
This scale keeps the loosest hold on its own family of any facet in Openness: 0.57 with the domain total, third lowest of the thirty, and 0.36 with the other five put together. The bars show where it stands and what it travels with.
At work a high score shows up as early information. You often know a project is in trouble a week before the numbers say so, because the mood of the meetings changed first. The bill is that the same signal fires when nothing is wrong, and a bad morning can colour a judgement that deserved a neutral look. A low score holds a steady line and misses what the room already knows.
In close relationships the difference is visible inside a week. High scorers bring the inner weather into the room, name it and expect it to count, which some partners experience as intimacy and others as a great deal of weather. Low scorers give solid ground and rarely add to a storm, and that steadiness can read as absence.
The useful work differs sharply at the two ends. High scorers gain least from cultivating feeling, which already arrives in full, and most from the gap between having one and acting on it. At the low end the gain is in checking on purpose, because this profile sends no reminder of its own.
Twin work puts something near half of the spread on Big Five traits down to what people inherit, and most of the rest down to experience that even one household does not hand out equally. So there is room to move, and it is not wide: where you stand next to other people drifts rather than jumps.
This scale is the one that barely moves with age. From the under 21 group to the over 60 group the male average travels from 35.4 to 35.6 and the female one from 38.8 to 37.8, while a facet such as Excitement-Seeking gives up ten points over the same distance. The tables set different people side by side rather than following anyone.
What a single band cannot say is what all that feeling is attached to. Loud feeling next to a high Sympathy score points outward, at other people; next to a low one it points inward, at your own state. That is the level the paid analysis works at.
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The 300 item version measures Emotionality with 10 statements, the 120 item version with 4. Every answer is worth one to five points, and five of the ten are worded the other way round, so agreeing with those pulls the total down. The sum is read against the norm table for your sex and age group. Two of the four short items are reversed.
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.
We keep the statements off this page on purpose. People answer differently once they have read the items in advance, so you meet them only after the test has started.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Put the slider where you think you stand against everybody else who took the test, then answer the questions and see how far the guess was.
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. Stability belongs to Neuroticism, this facet belongs to Openness. They do overlap in part: the scale stands at 0.39 with Anxiety, the closest any openness facet comes to any facet of neuroticism. It also runs at 0.43 with Sympathy and 0.42 with Artistic Interests, neither of which is distress.
The middle band covers 37 to 42 raw points for women and 33 to 39 for men, out of 50. The whole scale sits high, so a total of 35 already puts a woman below average at the 23rd percentile, while for a man the same 35 sits near the middle at the 46th.
Women sit at 39.2 in our sample and men at 35.5, the fourth widest sex difference of the thirty facets. Part of it is what self report picks up: the scale asks how much attention you pay your own feelings. It is a gap between averages and predicts nothing about one person.
No, and the difference matters when you read your band. Nothing here asks what other people can see. Somebody can register every shift in their own mood and show almost none of it. Expression lives closer to Extraversion; this scale is about what arrives, not what gets broadcast.
Openness is the domain and this is one of its six facets, the one tied least tightly to the rest: 0.57 with the domain total against 0.87 for the most closely bound facet in the inventory. A middling domain result can hide a very loud inner life next to no interest in ideas.
We measured alpha at 0.788 for the ten statement version and 0.659 for the four statement one, both on the open data Johnson published. The long form is solid. The short one loses more here than on almost any other facet, second lowest of the thirty, so read it as a broad band.
Both versions hand you all thirty facets with percentiles the moment you finish: 300 statements for the sharpest facet detail, 120 when ten minutes is what you have. Free either way.
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