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In the history of personality psychology, the main method to characterizing personality structure has been a trait-centered approach. Rather than sorting people into types, which entails loss of information (Felsenstein and Pötzelberger 1998), individuals are characterized on continuous dimensions. Informed by lexical studies and expert-derived models of what gives rise to personality traits, a variety of models characterizing the dimensions on which people vary have been used to characterize individual differences. This chapter takes a brief look at a few influential models of personality throughout the history of personality psychology, describes some strengths and limitations of each, and discusses the extent to which models of personality structure depend on methodological choices.
History of Structural Models Derived Using Lexical Approach
The lexical hypothesis has been particularly generative for defining the domain...
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Saucier, G., Iurino, K. (2018). Personality Structure. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_468-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_468-1
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