Carving personality description at its joints: Confirmation of three replicable personality prototypes for both children and adults

Abstract

We tested the hypothesis that there are three major prototypic patterns of personality description (resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled) in a series of studies including adults' self-descriptions on the Big Five and parents' Big Five and Q-Sort judgments of their children, using both replicated cluster analyses and replicated Q-factor analyses. The consistency of the prototypes across ages, judges, and methods was quantitatively measured. The results confirmed the hypothesis in all studies. Personality, social relationship, and social interaction correlates of the prototypes indicated externalizing tendencies for undercontrollers and internalizing tendencies for overcontrollers for both children and adults. The studies provide strong evidence for a three-prototype model of personality description at the highest level of analysis for both childhood and adulthood.