There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The theory of healthy neuroticism, that neuroticism can impact health through both
negative and positive pathways, often relies on descriptions of vigilance to illustrate
beneficial effects. The current study is among the first to describe the relationship
of neuroticism to body vigilance and test the degree to which this relationship impacts
health. In an online participant panel (N = 1055), neuroticism was associated with
one factor of vigilance: sensation awareness belief. This factor had a suppression
effect on the relationship between neuroticism and healthy behavior, such that the
effect of neuroticism through vigilance was healthy, whereas the direct effect was
unhealthy. We discuss the implications of these findings and caution against using
vigilance to explain the heterogeneity in neuroticism-health relationships.