Emotional & Temperamental Disposition Scales

Twelve scales describe broad emotional and temperamental dispositions: Joyfulness, Friendliness, Emotional Instability, Distrust, Belligerence, Power-Seeking, Achievement-Seeking, Planfulness, Risk-Avoidance, Imagination, Conservatism and Unlikely Virtues. The last of these is a check on self-presentation: it describes claiming virtues that few people actually have.

Dispositional scales of this kind belong to the tradition of describing personality through a small number of affective and motivational tendencies, related to positive and negative emotionality and constraint (Tellegen, 1985). The scales here were assembled from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999).

Each scale is scored separately. Higher scores describe a stronger version of the disposition; lower scores describe its absence or opposite. A high Unlikely Virtues score suggests that answers elsewhere may lean toward the favorable and should be read with that in mind. Reading Distrust beside Friendliness, or Power-Seeking beside Achievement-Seeking, often clarifies whether a person tends to approach others with confidence or with suspicion.

The scales are used in research and in personal assessment. On this site, the Temperament and Character Scales give a broader description, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) measures typical emotion directly, and the Social Desirability scales examine favorable self-presentation in more depth.

Tellegen built the MPQ through what he and Waller call exploratory test construction: draft items for candidate constructs, factor the responses, revise the constructs, and iterate until structure and scales stabilize together (Tellegen & Waller, 2008). The resulting primary scales organize under three broad superfactors — positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and constraint — a temperament-first architecture with emotional reactivity at the core of personality.

That architecture made the MPQ a bridge between personality and emotion research: Tellegen (1985) argued that trait positive and negative emotionality are the dispositional counterparts of the two great dimensions of mood, the same research program from which the PANAS schedules administered elsewhere on this platform emerged. The Unlikely Virtues scale, whose IPIP counterpart appears here, reflects that program's insistence that self-report be checked for improbably flattering responding rather than merely trusted.

The scales here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to the MPQ's scales, under IPIP's own labels rather than Tellegen's scale names; scores here are not scores on the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire itself, and MPQ-based research findings do not transfer to this form. Scale membership and reverse-keying are taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items), with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

“Act comfortably with others.”

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.