Personality generally refers to those characteristics of the person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving (Pervin, Cervone, & John, 2005). Modern personality research focuses primarily on personality traits – dimensions of variation between individuals that are relatively stable over time and predict behaviour in various domains. The most prominent taxonomy of personality traits, the ‘Big Five’, is based on atheoretical factor analyses of self-descriptions. An alternative taxonomy, developed by Cloninger (Cloninger, 1986, 1987), aims to reflect the psychobiological etiology of personality. This model is purportedly based on empirical findings from genetic research, studies of longitudinal development, and psychometric studies of personality structure, as well as neuropharmacological and neuroanotomical studies of behaviour and learning (Cloninger, 1986). The model is widely utilised, although some studies have revealed psychometric limitations (Farmer & Goldberg, 2008) or failed to find support for the structure of the model at the biological or psychological level (Herbst, Zonderman, McCrae, & Costa, 2000).
