Emotional stability as a major dimension of happiness

Happiness is associated with both extraversion and neuroticism, and extraversion is generally considered the more important. A recent study of happy introverts has shown that extraversion is not always an essential correlate of happiness, and an extensive meta-analysis has found that neuroticism is a greater predictor of both happiness and life satisfaction. It is suggested that the reason for the importance of neuroticism having been overlooked in the past, is the difficulty of handling the idea that (positive) happiness is related to the absence of a (negative) construct. This difficulty could be resolved by the reversal of neuroticism into an alternative and positive concept of "emotional stability". Happiness could then be regarded as being associated with two positive qualities. With this change of emphasis, a short empirical study has been made of the relationships between happiness as measured by the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI) and extraversion and emotional stability. In bivariate and partial correlation, emotional stability was more strongly associated with happiness than extraversion, and accounted for more of the total variability in multiple regression. Emotional stability was also the greater correlate for a majority of the 29 items of the OHI, and the sole significant predictor of the happiness of younger people. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.