Temperament and Character Inventory

The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) is an inventory for personality traits devised by Cloninger et al. It is closely related to and an outgrowth of the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ), and it has also been related to the dimensions of personality in Zuckerman's alternative five and Eysenck's models and those of the five factor model.

TCI operates with seven dimensions of personality traits: four so-called temperaments

and three so-called characters

Each of these traits has a varying number of subscales. The dimensions are determined from a 240-item questionnaire.

The TCI is based on a psychobiological model that attempts to explain the underlying causes of individual differences in personality traits.

Originally developed in English, TCI has been translated to other languages, e.g., Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, German, Polish, Korean, Finnish, Chinese and French. There is also a revised version TCI-R. Whereas the original TCI had statements for which the subject should indicate true or false, the TCI-R has a five-point rating for each statement. The two versions hold 189 of the 240 statements in common. The revised version has been translated into Spanish, French, Czech, and Italian.

The number of subscales on the different top level traits differ between TCI and TCI-R. The subscales of the TCI-R are:

TCI has been used for investigating the neurobiological foundation for personality, together with other research modalities, e.g., with molecular neuroimaging, structural neuroimaging and genetics.

Cloninger suggested that the three original temperaments from TPQ, novelty seeking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence, was correlated with low basal dopaminergic activity, high serotonergic activity, and low basal noradrenergic activity, respectively.

Many studies have used TCI for examining whether genetic variants in individual genes have an association with personality traits. Studies suggest that novelty seeking is associated with dopaminergic pathways. Dopamine transporter DAT1 and dopamine receptor DRD4 are associated with novelty seeking. Parkinson's patients, who are intrinsically low in dopamine, are found to have low novelty seeking scores. Gene variants that have been investigated are, e.g., 5-HTTLPR in the serotonin transporter gene and gene variants in XBP1.

...
Wikipedia