Extension of the Interpersonal Adjective Scales to include the Big Five dimensions of personality.

TLDR

Recent work shows that dominance and nurturance map onto surgency/extraversion and agreeableness, and the field has renewed interest in integrating the five‑factor model with the interpersonal circumplex. The study aims to extend the Revised Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS‑R) to incorporate conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The authors developed new adjective items and calibrated them to produce a five‑scale instrument (IASR‑B5) that integrates circumplex and five‑factor dimensions. The resulting IASR‑B5 shows strong item‑level structure, high internal consistency, and promising convergent and discriminant validity with the NEO and Hogan inventories, offering a concise tool for simultaneous circumplex and five‑factor assessment.

Abstract

Recent recognition that the dominance and nurturance dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex correspond closely to the surgency/extraversion and agreeableness dimensions of the five-factor model of personality provides an occasion for the closer integration of these two traditions. We describe the procedures whereby we extended our adjectival measure of the circumplex Revised Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS-R) to include the additional Big Five dimensions of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The resultant five-scale instrument (IASR-B5) was found to have excellent structure on the item level, internally consistent scales, and promising convergent and discriminant properties when compared with the NEO Personality Inventory and the Hogan Personality Inventory. The unique feature of the IASR-B5 is that it provides a highly efficient instrument for combined circumplex and five-factor assessment. We provide an example of such combined assessment. The current decade in personality psychology has been characterized by renewed interest in two structural models that have been well-established for almost 40 years: the five-factor model of personality and the circumplex model of interpersonal behavior. The five orthogonal factors that have been found within the former tradition are listed in Figure 1. These dimensions originated in the work of Cattell (1946), were developed by Tupes and Christal (1961), and were refined by Norman (1963). Recent extensions of this line of investigation may be found in the work of McCrae and Costa (1985a), Digman and Inouye (1986), Hogan (1983), and Peabody and Goldberg (1989).