The Neuroticism Paradox: How Emotional Instability Fuels Collective Feelings (2510.16046v1)

Abstract: Collective emotions shape organizations, communities, and societies, yet the traits that determine who drives them remain unknown. Conventional wisdom holds that stable, extraverted individuals act as emotional leaders, calming and coordinating the feelings of others. Here we challenge this view by analyzing a 30.5-month longitudinal dataset of daily emotions from 38 co-located professionals (733,534 records). Using Granger-causality network reconstruction, we find that emotionally unstable individuals -- those high in neuroticism (r = 0.478, p = 0.002) and low in conscientiousness (r = -0.512, p = 0.001) -- are the true "emotional super-spreaders," while extraversion shows no effect (r = 0.238, p = 0.150). This "Neuroticism Paradox" reveals that emotional volatility, not stability, drives contagion. Emotions propagate with a reproduction rate (R_0 = 15.58) comparable to measles, yet the system avoids collapse through high clustering (C = 0.705) that creates "emotional quarantine zones." Emotional variance increased 22.9% over time, contradicting homeostasis theories and revealing entropy-driven dynamics. We propose an Affective Epidemiology framework showing that collective emotions are governed by network position and volatility rather than personality stability -- transforming how we understand emotional leadership in human systems.