The dimensions of personality

Abstract

Publisher SummaryEarly genetic studies of personality gave few consistent results. The three main reasons for this were small sample sizes, lack of a coherent personality theory, and absence of any systematic theory and methodology to guide data collection and interpretation. This chapter describes the elements of the personality theory that lead to these developments. It explains that there exists a paradigm in personality study and that this paradigm has both descriptive and explanatory aspects. Three major dimensions of personality emerge consistently as higher order or super-factors from large-scale factor analyses of matrices of intercorrelations, the elements of which are individual answers to inventory questions, single ratings, or test scores of one kind or another. The names given to these three super-factors are psychoticism (P), extraversion (E), and neuroticism (N), with ego control, introversion, and emotional stability being the opposite ends of the three continua in question.

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