Is the Neuroticism Scale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory contaminated by response bias?

Abstract

Neuroticism (N) is perceived to be socially undesirable and the items measuring it in the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) are all positively keyed. To investigate whether N is contaminated by social desirability or acquiescence response bias, undergraduates completed the EPI Form A or B [measuring N, extraversion (E) and lie (L)] in its original version, or in a balanced version where items were positively or negatively keyed. A measure of self-deceptive enhancement (SDE) and various criterion measures for N and E were also administered. Reliability, convergent validity and discriminative validity of the original and balanced EPIs were similar, indicating that acquiescence was not a problem. N and SDE were negatively related, but convergent validity coefficients corrected for SDE were lower than the raw ones, indicating that SDE represented content not error variance. In contrast, some L-corrected validity coefficients increased, indicating that N may be distorted by faking. Finally, some psychometric properties were weaker for Form B than for Form A.