Relations Between Lexical and Biological Perspectives on Personality: New Evidence Based on HEXACO and Affective Neuroscience Theory

Abstract

We provide evidence on the convergence of language-based questionnaire and biological perspectives on personality traits. The first study, conducted on Serbian students, provided evidence on the position of Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) in the personality space defined by HEXACO facets. The second, replicatory study was conducted on a sample of German young adults. Results show that the instruments based on these 2 approaches target highly similar personality phenomena, which is revealed in the high canonical correlations between them (the first 3 being above .70 in both samples). Despite the overlap, the scales measuring emotional systems do not map onto HEXACO factors one-to-one, and mostly have substantial loading on more than 1 HEXACO factor. The pattern of correlations between HEXACO and ANPS scales was highly similar in the 2 samples. The importance of the findings for the personality taxonomy and theory is discussed.

Notes

1 Score on Spirituality is calculated the following way: Spirituality score = (+18 − ans7 − ans23 − ans39 − ans55 − ans71 − ans87 + ans15 + ans31 + ans47 + ans63 + ans79 + ans95). The scores on the other scales are calculated the following way: for example, SEEK score = (+21 − ans1 − ans17 − ans33 − ans49 − ans65 − ans81 − ans97 + ans9 + ans25 + ans41 + ans57 + ans73 + ans89 + ans105) (Davis & Panksepp, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

The position of Christian Montag is funded by a grant awarded to him by the German Research Foundation (DFG, MO2363/3-2). Serbian data were collected within the project 179018, financed by the Serbian Ministry of Science.