Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Genetic Basis Of Substance Abuse: Mediating Effects Of Sensation Seeking, Andrew Johnson, Philip Vernon

Andrew M. Johnson

Most modern theories of personality are structured hierarchically, with broad higher-order dimensions predicting narrower trait-level variables. This approach is necessarily reductionist, proposing to summarize the majority of trait-specific variability with a smaller number of larger dimensions. Not surprisingly, therefore, significant research has been directed to determining what might be considered to be the most basic dimensions of personality—both with regards to the identification of how many factors are needed to describe personality, and what these factors might be called (Costa & McCrae 1992a; [29] and [30]; Tupes & Christal 1992; Zuckerman 1992; [121] and [122]. While these omnibus factors of …