Neuroticism and a reactive nervous system

1. Neuroticism is Eysenck's dimension covering anxiety, moodiness and strong reactions to anything unpleasant.
2. A high scorer feels fear, worry or anger quickly, and stays worked up long after the trigger has gone.
3. Eysenck put that down to an unstable, highly reactive nervous system.
4. Two structures do the work: the autonomic nervous system and the limbic system.
5. The limbic system generates the emotion, and the autonomic nervous system turns it into a reaction you can feel in your body.

The limbic system and the autonomic nervous system

1. Limbic system: a group of structures deep inside the cerebrum that produce emotion and store emotional memories.
   1. The amygdala flags anything threatening and generates the fear or anger you feel.
   2. The hippocampus stores the memory of the event, so a similar situation sets the reaction off again.
   3. The hypothalamus passes the alarm on to the body by triggering the autonomic nervous system.
2. Autonomic nervous system: the branch of the peripheral nervous system that runs automatic functions such as heart rate, breathing and digestion.
   1. Its sympathetic branch drives fight or flight, releasing adrenaline so the heart races and breathing quickens.
   2. Its parasympathetic branch slows everything back to normal once the threat has passed.
   3. In a high neuroticism scorer the sympathetic branch fires fast and hard, while the parasympathetic branch is slow to bring things back down.

The chain from trigger to reaction

1. Something unpleasant happens, such as being shoved in a busy corridor.
2. The amygdala reads it as a threat within a fraction of a second.
3. The limbic system produces a burst of fear or anger, and in a high neuroticism scorer that burst is far bigger than the shove warrants.
4. The hypothalamus signals the autonomic nervous system to get the body ready.
5. The sympathetic branch releases adrenaline, so the heart pounds, breathing quickens and the palms sweat.
6. Those bodily changes are physiological arousal, and they feel like being tense and shaky.
7. Once the moment has passed the parasympathetic branch should calm everything, but in this person it works slowly.
8. So arousal stays high, and the next small annoyance lands on a body that is already worked up.

Neuroticism and offending

1. While arousal is high, attention narrows onto the threat and self-control drops.
2. So an argument a calm person would walk away from can escalate into violence.
3. Because the body stays aroused, the anger lasts long enough to be acted on instead of fading first.
4. Constant anxiety also makes a high neuroticism child difficult to condition, because they are anxious so often that a telling-off does not stand out.
5. Neuroticism accounts for one dimension of the criminal personality, and extraversion and psychoticism account for the other two.

Turning this into marks

1. When both structures are asked for, give each its own job: the limbic system producing the emotion and the autonomic nervous system producing the bodily reaction, rather than one point written twice.
2. Name the structure and the branch, such as the amygdala and the sympathetic branch, because writing that the person gets stressed does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is placing the autonomic nervous system inside the central nervous system, when it belongs to the peripheral nervous system.