Previous taxonomies of personality traits have been lexical in nature and have been concerned primarily with the meaning of adjectives in personality description. The taxonomy presented in this article employed personality scales as the units to be classified and was guided by theoretical, rather than lexical, considerations. A priori distinctions among different domains of trait‐descriptive terms identified a distinctive domain of interpersonal traits within which a preliminary conceptually‐based taxonomy was developed. The Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS) were constructed to provide geometrically precise semantic markers of that domain in the form of a circumplex model organized around the orthogonal coordinates of dominance and nurturance. In the course of a decade of research, some 172 personality scales were classified with reference to the IAS by computational procedures described in detail. Advantages and limitations of the current geometric taxonomy of personality scales are discussed, and future research directions are indicated.

Three studies tested predictions derived from interpersonal theory regarding the relations among gender, personality, and conceptions of love. It was predicted that women would conceptualize love in terms of its nurturant varieties, namely companionate kinds of love, whereas men would conceptualize love in terms of non‐nurturant varieties, namely passionate kinds of love. Only the latter prediction received consistent support. Both women and men held a companionate conception of love, with the exception that women assigned higher ratings to friendship love and sisterly love. Regarding personality, it was predicted that high‐nurturance traits (e.g., warm‐agreeable) would be associated with a companionate conception of love whereas low‐nurturance traits (e.g., cold‐hearted) would be associated with a passionate conception of love. Results supported predictions. It was concluded that women's and men's conceptions of love are more similar than has been assumed and that the two robust interpersonal dimensions of dominance and nurturance hold considerable promise for integrating the literature on personality and gender differences in love.

This study examined the predictive validity of different strategies for constructing personality scales. The Adjective Check List (ACL) was used as a common item pool to construct sets of eight scales by each of six strategies. A prototype strategy was introduced in this study as a proposed improvement on rational scale construction methodology. Its validity was compared with four traditional strategies and one random strategy in predicting eight criterion measures. The four traditional strategies compared were empirical, factor analytic, rational, and internal consistency. The subjects were 234 paid fraternity males ranging in age from 18-26, who supplied ACL responses and eight criterion measures in the form of peer ratings. Included in the eight criteria were peer ratings on the traits of achievement, dominance, nurturance, affiliation, exhibition, autonomy, aggression, and deference. Zero-order correlational analyses were followed by multipleregression procedures used in a double cross-validation design. Results indicated that the prototype strategy was statistically superior to all of the other strategies, and further research on this methodology and its application to other pools and samples is urged.

The concept of prototype (clear category member) and the fuzzy-set form of cognitive categorization that it entails (Rosch, 1973) has been shown to be useful as an organizational principle for guiding research and assessment in personality psychology. With the aid of a prototype framework for conducting research, personality assessment instruments have been refined (Broughton, 1984), predictable behavioural acts have been brought into focus (Buss & Craik, 1981), abnormal diagnosis has improved (Horowitz, French, Lapid, & Weckler, 1982; Wiggins 1980), and person perception studied (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). These (and other) authors argue that prototypes "work" to the extent they bring us closer to the way in which people actually think about person variables and behaviour. In this article some of the past payoffs of a prototype approach in the field of personality psychology are reviewed, and a multidimensional scaling model of personality assessment, involving a similarity-to-the-prototype rating task, is introduced and its merits discussed.

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