Emotionality in HEXACO: fear, worry and compassion

Halfway through the flight to Amsterdam the plane drops. Nothing dramatic: fifteen seconds of shaking and the seatbelt signs back on.

Emma grips the armrest and does not let go for another ten minutes. James, in the seat beside her, never looks up from his spreadsheet. After landing, though, something happens that you would expect the other way round. Emma notices that the woman in row three has gone white, fetches her a bottle of water from the machine and walks her over to the baggage hall. James deals with two phone calls in the meantime and only remembers the woman when somebody asks him about her.

Fear for yourself and concern for other people do not look like one trait. In the six-factor model of personality they sit under the same letter anyway.

What fits under the letter E

The six-factor HEXACO model describes personality through six traits, and the E in its name stands for emotionality. It is not about how intensely you experience things in general. Joy, enthusiasm and the pull towards other people do not belong here; they fall under extraversion.

Emotionality turns on a single question: how tuned in are you to threat, your own and other people's. It is built from four areas that look unconnected at first glance but stay together in the data.

This is a scale, not two boxes. Most people sit somewhere in the middle, and even a high score means a quick alarm system rather than daily panic. Inside that one number the four areas can also combine in various ways: you certainly know somebody who skis the steepest slope without blinking and then cries at films.

One more thing deserves a mention. Of all six traits, emotionality is the one where the male and female averages diverge most in the data, with women scoring higher. An average says nothing about an individual, though, because the two distributions overlap to a large degree. Knowing your own number is therefore more useful than inferring it from the box you tick on a form.

Where did the anger go

Anyone who knows the Big Five expects something like neuroticism under E. The resemblance is real, since both scales measure a tendency towards anxiety and tension. But the border between the factors runs somewhere else, and that difference is exactly what makes emotionality a concept in its own right.

Behind the shift lies the work of two Canadian psychologists. Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee spent the years from the turn of the millennium analysing dictionaries of adjectives in a range of languages, among them Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Polish. In 2004 they summed up that descriptions of character in those languages repeatedly assemble into six groups rather than five. And more importantly: words such as irritable, hot-tempered or explosive did not stay with anxiety but with the group that became agreeableness.

Neuroticism in the five-factor model thus mixes together two things that HEXACO keeps apart. The differences are worth spelling out:

• Anger and irritability sit in HEXACO under agreeableness, at its low pole to be precise. Somebody with a short fuse can perfectly well have below-average emotionality.
• Sentimentality and attachment to loved ones travelled into emotionality from the opposite direction, out of five-factor agreeableness.
• That leaves the need for support, meaning the sharing of worries with people around you, which neuroticism usually does not track as a component of its own.

The practical consequence is bigger than it appears. After this reshuffle, emotionality is no “neuroticism scale”. Its high pole goes with empathy, compassion and a readiness to care for others, and nobody counts those as defects. A person high in E startles easily and is also the first to notice that a colleague is not doing well. The two things are connected, because both grow out of the same sensitivity to signals of danger.

Take Nathan. In meetings he is reliably wound up by the colleague who talks for too long, and in the car he has a comment for everyone who pulls into his lane. A five-factor description would read that irritability as higher neuroticism. In the six-factor split, however, his temper lands under low agreeableness, while his emotionality comes out below average: he enjoys horror films at the cinema, goes to the dentist without postponing it and keeps his worries to himself. Two separate things that a single number glues together.

The ones who are afraid are the ones who protect

Ashton and Lee also offered an evolutionary reading of the six factors. Honesty and agreeableness, in their account, reflect reciprocal exchange between unrelated people, whereas emotionality is tied to kin altruism, the investment in the survival of your own family.

That line of thought holds together things that otherwise look mismatched. Whoever avoids physical risk lives long enough to raise the children. Anxiety guards resources and hazards in advance, before they have a chance to materialise. And emotional attachment maintains a network of close people that can be relied on in an emergency. Fear for yourself and care for others are two sides of one coin: you cannot protect your children if you have got yourself killed first.

The other pole came with its own reward, though. Lower emotionality meant a willingness to hunt further out, to cross the ridge after dark, to stand up to something the rest of the group backed away from. Part of what we admire in firefighters and surgeons today is a direct descendant of that equipment. The evolutionary reading is not proof, more an interpretation that sits well on the way the individual areas cluster in the data.

High emotionality at work and at home

In a team, a person high in E works like an early warning. They sense a risk in the project before it shows up in a spreadsheet, and in a meeting they voice the misgiving that the others are still only half feeling. They are usually also the one colleagues come to when things are bad at home, because with them you can talk about unpleasant matters without being judged.

Companies tend to read that sensitivity as a lack of resilience, which is a mistake that costs money. Naming a worry out loud does not slow a project down. It only puts a name a month earlier on something that would have surfaced anyway, just more expensively. Wherever safety, quality or work with people is involved, a quick alarm system functions as a tool of the trade. The trouble starts only at the moment when the same worry keeps repeating and stops carrying new information.

The bill is paid elsewhere. Unpleasant feedback lands harder and echoes for longer than its content would warrant. Before a decision you need to call somebody, and if that somebody does not pick up, the decision waits. And the mind has a habit of calculating the worst version before the second piece of information arrives.

How many of the worst-case scenarios that you thought through in detail over the past year actually happened? The answer is usually sobering and it is worth counting on your fingers once, because the sensitivity itself is useful, it just likes to fire on nothing.

In relationships, high emotionality creates a depth that a partner normally experiences as closeness. The risk lies in one person becoming the only outlet. When every worry ends up with the same person, it starts to weigh on them however much they love you. Spreading that load across several people is not distance, it is maintenance.

Low emotionality and what it costs

The opposite end of the scale looks like calm from the outside. A crisis meeting does not throw you, bad news does not get stuck in you, and you can make a decision without having it confirmed by three other people. In any job where time and nerves are at stake, a person like that is worth their weight in gold.

The blind spot sits exactly where you would expect it. A risk that does not announce itself inside you as an unpleasant feeling is easy to underestimate. James from the opening put off home insurance for years and treated the skipped boiler inspection as pointless bureaucracy, until one December water came through his ceiling. It was not stupidity but a missing signal. What others read as a warning felt to him like excessive caution.

The second price is paid at home. Your concern for the people close to you exists, only nobody sees it from outside, because it does not express itself in phone calls, questions or visible tension. A partner or a child interprets the silence as indifference. Low E does not mean lower honesty or less willingness to behave fairly either; those things are carried by other letters in the model. It only means that other people's trouble does not reach you by itself and that you have to sign up for it deliberately.

It shows up most clearly in leading people through a reorganisation. A change that strikes you as a logical reshuffling of roles lands on a team, half of whom are still turning it over on Sunday evening. Nobody is asking you to be afraid along with them. It is enough to reckon with the fact that one sentence sent on Friday afternoon gets reinterpreted privately for two days, and to add the part of the explanation that seems self-evident to you.

What to do with it

Neither end of the scale is a disorder that could be repaired, and honestly, there is not much point in trying. The more sensible move is to know which way your setting deviates and build a few rules around it.

If your emotionality is high, separate the facts from the film in your head. Write down what actually happened and next to it what you are adding to it. The gap between those two columns tends to be surprisingly wide. It also helps to decide in advance who you call first and about what, so that the whole weight does not end up with one person.

With low emotionality the opposite trick works: replace the missing internal signal with an external procedure. Once a quarter, go through the risks you would otherwise never address, from data backups to inspection dates. And in relationships, ask about what you would never register on your own, because the question “how was your day, really?” costs ten seconds and stands in for an instinct that simply does not kick in for you.

Where you belong on this scale is hard to estimate, because we take our own level of tension for the norm and comparing yourself with others from the inside does not work. Our HEXACO test has 60 questions, takes around eight minutes and gives you an approximate picture of all six traits, emotionality included.

Before you take on anything, try one simple thing for a week. Every evening, write down one moment during the day when you felt tension, and add a single word to it: was it about you, or about somebody else? After seven days, look at the ratio between the two columns and at how many entries had a real reason behind them. That list will tell you more about your emotionality than any type description, because it is written by your own week.