A brief form of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales

The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) were developed to measure behavioral traits related to 6 affective neurobiological systems (play, seek, care, fear, anger, and sadness). However, the ANPS has a number of problems, including an ill-defined factor structure, overly long scales, and items that are poorly worded, ambiguous, and of questionable content validity. To address these issues, we constructed an improved short form of the ANPS--the Brief ANPS (BANPS). Three studies demonstrated that the 33-item BANPS has a clear and coherent factor structure, relatively high reliabilities (for short scales), and theoretically meaningful correlations with a wide range of external criteria, supporting its convergent and discriminant validity. Unlike typical short-form scales, the BANPS improves upon the psychometric properties of the long form, and we recommend its use in all research contexts.