Emotional & Temperamental Disposition Scales

This 127-item collection measures 12 emotional and temperamental dispositions keyed to constructs of Auke Tellegen's Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), administered under IPIP's everyday names — Joyfulness, Friendliness, Power-Seeking, Emotional Instability, Belligerence, Risk-Avoidance, Planfulness, Conservatism, Distrust, Achievement-Seeking, and Imagination — plus a counterpart to the MPQ's Unlikely Virtues validity scale.

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.

Where a very short subscale's computed reliability in the Eugene–Springfield Community Sample falls below the platform's floor, the norms section shows an explicit low-reliability caution beside the percentile.

“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.

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. Subscales whose computed α is below 0.50 — or single-item scales, where α is undefined — carry an explicit low-reliability caution next to the percentile.

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.