Haley Narita, Dominique Davis, Conrad Liszka, Jayden Ramirez de Arellano, Cesar Sandoval, & Dr. Weldon Zane Smith
As discussed by Xu et al. (2015), financial stress is negatively linked with the personality trait neuroticism, also known as emotional stability. Financial stress has become a growing problem in adults since the Covid-19 pandemic (Fenton-O’Creevy & Furnham, 2021). As further research demonstrates, individuals with neurotic tendencies and higher levels of financial distress tend to have increased mental and physical health consequences (Wickrama et al., 2018). Understanding the relationship between these factors is important because both can impair an individual’s life through negatively impacting sleep quality, work ethic, energy levels, and self-esteem among other things. Not much research has been done related to the cognitions and emotions related to financial stress and their link to neuroticism. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between neuroticism and financial stress in the general working population and to find out if neuroticism can be a significant predictor of financial stress. In this current study we hypothesize that neuroticism and financial stress have a negative relationship. The data is being collected from participants across the United States. The Financial Worry and Rumination Questionnaire (de Bruijn & Antonides, 2020) was used to measure financial stress, and consists of four subscales: financial rumination-related emotions, financial rumination-related cognitions, financial worry-related emotions, and financial worry-related cognitions. The BFI-2-XS (Soto & John, 2017) was used to measure neuroticism. A MANCOVA will be performed to investigate how neuroticism relates to each of the financial stress subscales and additionally investigate stress levels of individuals in different job areas. Preliminary results suggest that neuroticism is a significant predictor of financial stress. Findings will be presented in terms of practical implications these relationships could have on an individual. Findings from this research will be important for working individuals and how they can overcome both their financial worry and their neuroticism and begin to live a stress-free life.