Neuroticism is one of the five fundamental dimensions of personality based on the model of the Big Five. It is defined as the general tendency to experience unpleasant emotions such as hostile emotions, feelings of anxiety or depression.

The objective of this work is to validate the Neuroticism scale of the NEO-PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1985) among Tunisian students.

Neuroticism among students was evaluated using the Neuroticism scale of the NEO-PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1985). This scale provides an overall score of Neuroticism Lire phonétiquement Dictionnaire - Afficher le dictionnaire and also different scores for each of the six Neuroticism facets are: anxiety, depression, anger / hostility, impulsivity, social shyness and vulnerability to stress.

The validation was made on a representative sample of university students (n = 500) randomly selected.

The main properties studied were: acceptability, reliability (Pearson’s coefficient ‘r’), face validity and content validity (Cronbach’s alpha).

The acceptability of the questionnaire was good, less than 10% of students were unable or unwilling to complete the questionnaire. The Pearson coefficient showed good reliability for this scale r = 0.96, p < 0.05. The Cronbach’s alpha was acceptable for all items of the scale α = 0.73.

The Neuroticism scale of the NEO-PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1985) is valid in Tunisian students. It is now available for clinicians to measure the level of neuroticism among students.