[Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ): validation in a French-speaking control population]

Among the dimensional scales that measure personality, Cloninger's TPQ (Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire) holds a place apart in the literature, because the hypotheses it relies on are partially biological. The questionnaire (100 forced binary items) includes three axes: "Novelty Seeking", "Harm Avoidance" and "Reward Dependence", each theoretically bound to a preferential neuromediator, respectively dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Each axis includes four minor subscales. The study presented here is the analysis of 104 control volunteers from both genders (59 males). This database is the first to be published with a French-speaking population. The comparison with Cloninger's normative database shows many similarities: the mean values for the 3 axes are relatively close. The population studied here is younger and this factor could play a role in the somewhat higher mean novelty seeking scores found here. The three axes show a normal distribution. Skewness and kurtosis are between -1 and +1 for all the subscales, except here for NS2. Factorial structure is quite similar to Cloninger's results. The three first axes correspond to the variables isolated in the first studies and the fourth one includes the same subscales as in the large American database. Inverse correlation between age and novelty seeking, positive correlation between female gender and harm avoidance and reward dependence were also found. However, no correlation was found between novelty seeking and male gender. A correlation was found between level of instruction and NS1 only, not with the whole NS axis. Eighty-seven % of volunteers presented with at least one standard deviation on at least one axis and 68% on at least two. This does not seem to have been described previously. It can be a sign of the difficulty of human beings to show a balanced personality. In conclusion, the database presented here shows many similarities with Cloninger's normative database. This underscores its value for comparisons in clinical trials in the future.