What is Eysenck's PEN Model?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Eysenck, a contemporary of Cattell, also employed factor analysis, although he disagreed with Cattell's use of correlated factors and preferred instead to use uncorrelated factors to map the personality. As a result, he employed a statistical technique of rotating his factors so that they were highly independent (sometimes called orthogonal) of each other. In doing so, he found substantially fewer factors. Instead of 16 correlated factors, he discovered three superfactors that are referred to as the Big Three supertraits or personality types.

The three supertraits in Eysenck's model are Psychoticism, Extraversion-Introversion, and Neuroticism. Together they are referred to as Eysenck's PEN (Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism) model. Eysenck discovered that his first superfactor has trait characteristics that overlap with traits exhibited by individuals who are psychotic or who exhibit anti-social behavior, so he named it psychoticism. This was an unfortunate choice of a label since it unintentionally implies that all people who score high on the supertrait of psychoticism have a clinical psychosis (i.e., impaired reality testing combined with other clinical features), which is usually not the case.