son’s (1984) Personality Research Form, or PRF . Jack Block (1961) led
another team of dynamically oriented psychologists and psychiatrists inan effort to develop a standard language for personality description. In -
stead of adopting a particular theory , their items were intended to pro -
vide a theoretically neutral language of description, useful to clinicians
or researchers of any school. Further, they made a deliberate and sus -
tained attempt to be comprehensive—to include all important personal -
ity characteristics. This is a crucial feature to which we return later.
The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan formulated an interpersonal
theory of psychiatry that has had influences on two important trait sys -
tems. Students of interpersonal behavior (Leary , 1957; Wiggins, 1979)
discovered that most traits that described styles of interacting with oth -
ers could be arranged in a circular order around the two axes of Love, or
affiliation, and Status, or dominance. Figure 1 presents a diagram of thisInterpersonal Circumplex. Individuals high on one trait (e.g., gregari-ousness) tend to be high on adjacent traits (dominance and warmth)and low on traits on the opposite side of the circle (aloofness). Con-A Trait Approach to Personality 31
FIGURE 1. An adaptation of Wiggins’s version of the Interpersonal Circumplex.
The solid lines indicate the dimensions of Love and Status used in Wiggins’s system;the broken lines indicate the dimensions of Extraversion and Agreeableness.Adapted by permission.