Negative affectivity: how serious a threat to self-report studies of psychological distress?

Serious questions have been raised about the common practice of relying on self-report measures to assess the relation between subjective role experiences on the one hand and both mental and physical health symptoms on the other. Such self-report measures may reflect a common underlying dimension of negative affectivity (NA), thereby leading to spurious results. In this article, we present findings from analyses in which we estimate, using a hierarchical linear model, the relation between subjective experiences in job and marital roles and self-reports of symptoms of psychological distress after controlling for NA in a sample of 300 full-time employed men and women in married couples. Results demonstrate (a) that NA can account for a great deal of the variation in self-reported psychological distress, as much as half in the case of the men in the sample; (b) that estimates of the relations between a self-reported predictor of social-role quality (e.g., marital-role quality, job-role quality) may be biased by failure to include NA as a predictor of self-reported psychological distress; (c) that the degree of bias in these estimates is dependent on the nature of the predictor, and (d) that the role of NA as a confounder does not appear to be dependent on gender.