Temperament & Character Scales

This 284-item collection measures 30 subconstructs keyed to the scales of Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI; Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994), administered under everyday IPIP names alongside retained originals such as Harm Avoidance. The model's central distinction is between more automatic, emotionally toned temperament dispositions and the more deliberate self-concepts of character.

C. Robert Cloninger proposed the model in two stages. His tridimensional framework (Cloninger, 1987) posited heritable temperament dimensions — novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence — tied to distinct neurobiological systems of behavioral activation, inhibition, and maintenance. The expanded psychobiological model (Cloninger, Svrakic, & Przybeck, 1993) split off persistence as a fourth temperament and added three character dimensions — self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence — arguing that it is the character dimensions that distinguish the presence or absence of personality disorder.

The temperament idea carries a much older psychiatric lineage. Emil Kraepelin (1921) described depressive, manic, irritable, and cyclothymic 'fundamental states' — constitutional dispositions he saw shading into mood illness — and later researchers, Cloninger among them, studied how such Kraepelinian affective temperaments relate to Cloninger's own dimensions (Maremmani et al., 2005). The TCI thus belongs to a tradition that treats temperament as the constitutional, emotion-linked layer of personality, with character layered above it.

The scales here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to the TCI's subscales, mostly relabelled with the everyday construct names catalogued at ipip.ori.org; scores here are not scores on the Temperament and Character Inventory itself, and TCI-based interpretation, including any clinical use, does not transfer to this form. Scale membership and reverse-keying are taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items).

Every subconstruct is reported against Eugene–Springfield Community Sample reference values in the norms section.

“Accept challenging tasks.”

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

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg’s adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach’s α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale’s exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.

Public-domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, L. R., 1999; ipip.ori.org). Scale membership and reverse-keying taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items). Construct names from ipip.ori.org.