Validating the Dimensional Structure of Psychological Spaces: Applications to Personality and Emotions

Psychological data are often described and interpreted through the use of multidimensional scaling. These models embed the objects under study in a coordinate space, typically an Euclidean plane, such that the order of the metric distances between points reflects the psychological proximity between the respective objects (see volumes edited by Davies & Coxson, 1982; Romney, Shepard, & Nerlove, 1972; Shepard, Romney, & Nerlove, 1972). Such representations have been applied to many perceptual and semantic domains, notably personality traits (e.g., Conte & Plutchik, 1981; Kim & Rosenberg, 1980; McCrae & Costa, 1989; Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968; Rosenberg & Sedlak, 1972a, 1972b; Wiggins, 1979, 1982; Wiggins & Broughton, 1985) and emotional states (e.g., Argyle & Crossland, 1987; Fisher, Heise, Bohrnstedt, & Lucke, 1985; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980, 1983; Russell & Bullock, 1985, 1986; Schlosberg, 1954; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985).

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