Anemone's Research Emporium

Eysenck Personality Questionnaire - Revised (EPQ-R)

Hans Eysenck and colleagues developed a scale, the EPQ-R (100 items), that looked at the underlying personality traits that are reflected in the way different people break down under stress in different ways (when they're under stress). This is a prescriptive scale, rather than the descriptive "big five" scale that is popular right now. The names of the traits psychoticism and neuroticism are derived from two main categories of mental illness: psychosis and neurosis, but scores on these traits do not indicate mental illness. It's your personality they're describing. (However, if for some reason you were to go over the edge, they might indicate which edge you went over. But don't do that. We like you happy and healthy.)

Extraversion (E) measures how outgoing you are. (More below.)

Psychoticism (P) is associated with unconventionality and creativity. This scale is strongly right-skewed - most people score in the low range. (More below.)

Neuroticism (N) measures how emotionally stable (low N) or emotional (high N) a person is. Women generally score higher than men. Your N scores on the big three (EPQ-R) and the big five (another popular personality questionnaire) will not be identical, but should be in the same ballpark. (More below.)

The Lie Scale (L) measures either how honest you are or how well-behaved you are. People who are honest about their imperfections get lower scores. People who are perfect get higher scores. I'll leave it to you to decide how to interpret your score.

Scores vary from one country to the next, even when the tests aren't translations (e.g. North Americans are higher on E than Europeans; Australians are higher on P), as well as by sex and age. So don't worry too much about published means. Unless you want to.

Research has also been done on various demographic groups. For example, Chinese writers have scored higher on average on E, N, and P and lower on L, while Chinese mathematicians have scored lower on P and higher on L (Hu and Gong, 1990). You can see the potential.

Means reported by Eysenck, Eysenck and Barrett, 1985

More information

Hans J. Eysenck and Sybil B.G. Eysenck, 1976. Psychoticism as a dimension of personality. Hodden and Stoughton, London.

S.B.G. Eysenck, H.J. Eysenck, and P. Barrett, 1985. A revised version of the psychoticism scale. Personality and Individual Differences 6(1): 21-29.

Chiyee Hu and Yaoxian Gong, 1990. Personality differences between writers and mathematicians on the EPQ. Personality and Individual Differences 11(6): 637-638.