An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour

Abstract

A novel two-dimensional matrix taxonomy, or atlas, of personality, emotion and behaviour is presented. The two dimensions of the atlas, affiliation and dominance, are demonstrated to have theoretical foundations in neurobiology and social psychology. Both dimensions are divided into five ordinal categories, creating a square matrix of 25 cells. A new catalogue of 20,669 English words descriptive of personality, emotion, behaviour, and power is also presented. The catalogue is more comprehensive than previous catalogues, and is novel in its inclusion of intrapersonal, group, and societal behaviours. All words in the catalogue were scored according to the atlas, facilitating visualisation in two dimensions. This enabled a contiguous and novel comparison of existing psychological taxonomies, as well as broader societal concepts such as leadership, ethics, and crime. Using the atlas, a novel psychological test is developed with improved sensitivity and specificity.

Fig 1. The Interpersonal Circumplex.

(A) Interpersonal Circumplex used as a taxonomy of personality[1,30,45] with radially divided concentric circles superimposed over the two orthogonal dimensions of affiliation and dominance. (B) The Interpersonal Circumplex used to represent the Dark Triad[41]. (C) The Interpersonal Circumplex used as a taxonomy of emotion.

Fig 2. Deficiencies of the Interpersonal Circumplex.

(A) Adominant behaviours (neutral dominance) not specifically identified on previous versions of the Interpersonal Circumplex, for example: ‘separate’, ‘gamble’ and ‘cooperate’. (B) Intrapersonal behaviours (neutral affiliation) not described on previous versions of the Interpersonal Circumplex[51] ‘innovate’, ‘learn’ and ‘stagnate’. (C) Maximally dominant and disaffiliative behaviours, such as killing, fall beyond the limits of the outermost concentric circle of the Interpersonal Circumplex.

Fig 3. Areas associated with affiliation and dominance in the human brain.

(A) The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is related to dominance and submissiveness. (B) The Putamen is related to affiliation.

Fig 4. Atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour.

Matrix taxonomy of personality created by ordinal division of the affiliation and dominance dimensions. Neutrally affiliative and dominant behaviours and traits are shown in yellow. Behaviours may be independently classified by reference to each orthogonal axis.

Fig 5. Artist's impression of emotional expressions according to the atlas.

Fig 6. Emoji arranged according to the atlas.

Images copyright https://openmoji.org/ distributed in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Fig 7. Visualisation of social and psychological constructs and personality disorders.

(A) Good leadership (Blue) and bad leadership (Red)[–104]. (B) Synonyms of Lead (Blue) and Follow (Red). (C-G) IPIP-NEO-120 Five Factor Model[111,112]. Positive valence (Blue), Negative valence (Red). (H) Dark Triad[41]. Narcissism (Green), Machiavellianism (Blue), Psychopathy (Red). (I) Synonyms of Good (Blue) and Bad (Red). (J) Synonyms of Ethical (Blue) and Unethical (Red). (K) Criminal behaviours[–110] DSM-5 personality disorders[113]. Positive valence (Blue), Negative valence (Red). (AH-AP) ICD-11 Mental, behavioural or neurodevelopmental disorders[114].

Fig 8. Binary pairs maximising overall contrast of the psychological test.

For each of the 12 graphs, the blue and orange kernel density plots represent each side of the antonymic dipole. The kernel density plots are representative of the 299 observations (99.999999th percentile) out of 4 billion simulations that average distance between the 12 pairs, maximising the overall contrast of the psychological test. The lines shown on each graph represent the binary pairs that have a sufficient number of antonyms identified in the reference thesauri to allow the construction of a psychological test. The diamond at location (0,0) represents the point of reflection about which the antonymic pairs are reflected.