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The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) is an instrument for personality assessment that was developed by C. Robert Cloninger to provide a comprehensive biopsychosocial model of personality as it develops within individuals (Cloninger et al. 1993). It deconstructs personality into seven dimensions that vary widely in the general population, rather than focusing only on pathology or abnormal traits (Cloninger 2004). Nevertheless, it was designed to be equally applicable to clinical populations without being stigmatizing or pathologizing. The TCI is based on a biopsychosocial model of complex interactions among genetic, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual constructs, rather than assuming that personality can be decomposed into independent dimensions (Cloninger and Cloninger 2011; Cloninger and Garcia 2015). The four dimensions of temperament and three dimensions of character measured by the TCI are summarized in Fig. 1.
Biopsychosocial...
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References
Cloninger, C. R. (2004). Feeling good: The science of well-being. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cloninger, C. R., & Cloninger, K. M. (2011). Person-centered therapeutics. The International Journal of Person Centered Medicine, 1(1), 43–52.
Cloninger, C. R., & Garcia, D. (2015). The heritability and development of positive affect and emotionality. In Genetics of psychological well-being – The role of heritability and genetics in positive psychology (pp. 97–113). New York: Oxford, University Press.
Cloninger, C. R., Svrakic, D. M., & Przybeck, T. R. (1993). A psychobiological model of temperament and gharacter. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50, 975–990.
Cloninger, C. R., Przybeck, T. R., Svrakic, D. M., & Wetzel, R. D. (1994). The temperament and character inventory (TCI): A guide to its development and use. St. Louis: Washington University Center for Psychobiology of Personality.
Garcia, D., Anckarsäter, H., Kjell, O. N. E., Archer, T., Rosenberg, P., Cloninger, C. R., & Sikström, S. (2015). Agentic, communal, and spiritual traits are related to the semantic representation of written narratives of positive and negative life events. Psychology of Well-Being: Theory, Research and Practice, 5, 1–20. doi:10.1186/s13612-015-0035-x.
Mousavi, F., Rozsa, S., Nilsson, T., Archer, T., Anckarsäter, H., & Garcia, D. (2015). Personality and intelligence: Persistence, not self-directedness, cooperativeness or self-transcendence, is related to twins’ cognitive abilities. Peer J, 3, e1195. doi:10.7717/peerj.1195.
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Garcia, D., Lester, N., Cloninger, K.M., Robert Cloninger, C. (2017). Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). 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_91-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_91-1
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