Personality has been studied extensively from a hierarchical perspective. It has been described as existing along two higher order dimensions known as alpha and beta (Digman, 1997); along three, four, or five dimensions that underlie those two (the five dimensions have labels such as neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1993; Markon et al., 2005); and along 30 dimensions that underlie those five, higher order composites (Costa & McCrae, 1992, 1995). Here we focus primarily on studies of the NEO PI-R measure of the FFM of personality, both because there is extensive evidence of the validity of this measure of the FFM and because results with this measure represent the typical outcomes to comprehensive models of personality (Markon et al., 2005; McCrae, Zonderman, Costa, Bond, & Paunonen, 1996). The NEO PI-R representation of the FFM specifies six homogeneous facet constructs within each of the five broad factors, for a total of 30 personality constructs (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Figure 1 is a depiction of a common hierarchical personality model. It includes Digman's (1997)
