Mehrabian, A., & O'Reilly, E. (1980). Analysis of personality measures in terms of basic dimensions of temperament. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(3), 492-503.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.3.492
Studied 211 college students to explore the heuristic value of a 3-dimensional framework of temperament (trait pleasure; arousability and its converse, screening; and dominance–submissiveness) by analyzing commonly employed measures of personality (e.g., the Eysenck Personality Inventory and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). Regression analyses yielded the following groupings of available measures: exuberant (pleasant, arousable, dominant); anxious (unpleasant, arousable, submissive); relaxed (pleasant, unarousable, dominant); disdainful (unpleasant, unarousable, dominant); dependent (pleasant, arousable, submissive); aggressive (unpleasant, arousable, dominant); docile (pleasant, unarousable, submissive); and depressed (unpleasant, unarousable, submissive). These 8 groups in turn help define 4 additional temperament dimensions (exuberant–depressed, relaxed–anxious, disdainful–dependent, hostile–docile) that are the diagonals of the 3-dimensional temperament space. Of the 8 groups, the last 2 seem underrepresented among commonly used measures of personality for normal populations. Measures of depression are available for clinical populations, but measures of docility (which differs from dependency in terms of arousability) do not seem to be available. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)