In 1963, Norman Cattett worked on composing a list of terms that could be used to describe each dimension of personality. He attempted to gather as many terms as possible from the English language because he believed that the terms described traits which are very important to the "big five" theory. "Although the conception of personality he abstracted from the natural language was broad and complex, Norman saw traits as central to the notion of personality" (#2, pg. 74). He viewed traits as "enduring characteristics".
Norman compiled a list of 18,125 terms to describe personality, and then began the narrowing down process. He eliminated an evaluative terms, such as "nice", "awful" and "gifted", aft ambiguous or vague terms, such as "aesthetic" and "mannered", all terms referring to physical and anatomical conditions, such as "ill", "athletic", "obese", and "pretty", and all obscure terms, such as "eldritch" and "scait". This process eliminated approximately half of the terms. He then classified them into groups describing various levels of personality.
Normans's next step was to present these terms before 140 male and 140 female judges in order for them to vote on which terms were best for describing personality traits. Then the unpopular terms were removed from the list. Tn the end, 112 descriptive terms remained. This painstaking process provided the terms which are used on nearly every personality test today.
"The five factor model measures how personality traits vary across 5 broad dimensions" (#3, pg. 190) Personality disorders result when one or more of these traits "reach inflexible and harmful extremes" (#3, pg. 190). In a test conducted by psychologist Lee Anna Clark, 64 women who had been assigned the diagnoses of borderline personality disorder were stuck in a larger group of normal women. A test, based on the "big five", was then administered to the group of women. The test results correctly identified the women with borderline personality disorders.
