Seven-Factor Trait Markers

Seven dimensions describe personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Intellect, as in the five-factor model, together with two dimensions of self-evaluation. Attractiveness concerns seeing oneself as appealing, impressive and admirable; Negative Valence concerns describing oneself with strongly negative evaluative words, such as cruel, wicked or worthless.

Tellegen and Waller argued that personality research had excluded strongly evaluative adjectives on the assumption that they reflected attitudes rather than traits. When such words were included, two further dimensions appeared alongside the familiar five (Almagor, Tellegen and Waller, 1995). These scales measure the seven dimensions with items from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999).

Each dimension is scored separately. Higher scores on the first five describe stronger versions of the familiar tendencies. Higher Attractiveness describes a more favorable self-image; higher Negative Valence describes a harsher, more negative self-image. The two evaluative dimensions add information about self-regard that the five-factor model does not capture directly.

The scales are used in research on personality structure and self-evaluation. On this site, the Big-Five Factor Markers measure the five factors alone, the Self-Esteem scale measures overall self-regard, and the Physical Attractiveness (Rational Scale) measures one aspect of positive self-evaluation.

Classical lexical studies reached five factors partly through a selection rule: before factoring, researchers screened out terms judged purely evaluative or merely physical. Tellegen and Waller argued that this rule pre-decided the answer, and analyses restoring the excluded terms recovered seven dimensions — the 'Big Seven', replicated cross-culturally (Almagor, Tellegen, & Waller, 1995).

Saucier (1997) then manipulated the selection rules directly, factoring person-descriptors sampled under broader and narrower criteria; unrestricted selection yielded the seven-factor structure represented here, in which self-rated Attractiveness and a strongly evaluative Negative Valence dimension stand apart from the Big Five rather than dissolving into them.

The ten-item scales here are original public-domain IPIP markers keyed to Saucier's seven factors — the model's catalogued IPIP operationalization, not an excerpt from any proprietary questionnaire. Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim, with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

The seven-factor model adds two evaluative dimensions, Positive Valence and Negative Valence, to the five broad personality factors, because people describe themselves and others with strongly evaluative words (Almagor et al., 1995). The model has been replicated across languages (Almagor et al., 1995).

The valence dimensions are related to, but distinct from, the five factors, and they capture self-evaluation that the five factors leave out (Almagor et al., 1995). The public-domain items converge with the commercial scales they represent (Goldberg et al., 2006).

“Act wild and crazy.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.