To know personality is to measure it Introducing a Dutch brief form of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire

The Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ; Tellegen, 1982; Tellegen & Waller, 2008) is a comprehensive hierarchical measure of normal personality variation. The instrument comprises 11 primary traits that coalesce into 3 higher-order constructs. Positive Emotionality (PEM) is composed of Wellbeing (WB), Social Potency (SP), Achievement (AC) and Social Closeness (SC); Negative Emotionality (NEM) consists of Stress Reaction (SR), Aggression (AG) and Alienation (AL); Constraint (CON) is the higher-order construct for Control (CO), Harm Avoidance (HA), and Traditionalism (TR). Absorption (AB) cannot be satisfyingly allocated to any of the three higher-order factors, and consequently has a ‘status aparte’. The original U.S. MPQ scales have demonstrated to have good psychometric properties. Moreover, the scale scores have been shown to predict behavior (Kamp, 1986), to distinguish between different forms of psychopathology (see for example McGue et al., 1999, 1997; Miller et al., 2003) and to predict clinical variables better than most other personality scales (Grucza & Goldberg, 2007). Because of these favorable properties of the MPQ it seemed like a meaningful endeavor to develop a form of the instrument suitable for Dutch speakers.The aims of this thesis are twofold: (1) developing and validating a Dutch brief form of the MPQ (MPQ-BF-NL), and (2) contributing to our knowledge about individual differences in personality. Both aims were simultaneously achieved by using the newly developed MPQ-BF-NL for inquiries into cross-cultural differences in personality, personality in general and clinical samples, personality and its associations with brain structure.