Jerry S. Wiggins

Jerry S. Wiggins
Born	1931
Died	2006
Occupation	Clinical psychologist
Known for	Writings on personality theory and psychometrics

Jerry S. Wiggins (1931–2006) was an American personality and clinical psychologist known for developing scales to assess the traits in the circumplex model^[1], writing and editing texts on personality theory^[2][3][4] and psychometrics^[5][6] and for developing measures of interpersonal behavior.^[7]

Wiggins was one of the most prominent advocates of circular representations of personality and he formalized the circular model (also called circumplex model) with modern statistical techniques. Wiggins started with the lexical assumption - (the idea that all important individual differences are encoded within the natural language). But he went further in his effort at taxonomy by arguing that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in which individuals differ. Wiggins was most concerned primarily with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these from other categories of traits.^[1]

Dr. Wiggins' contributions to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) were the subject of an article in the scientific journal Multivariate Behavioral Research,^[8] edited by Lewis Goldberg. His work was mentioned following his death in the newsletter for the professional society he helped found, the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research.^[9]

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Larsen, R.J. Buss, D.M. (2010). Personality psychology: domains of knowledge about human nature. NY: McGraw-Hill
2. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (1971). Psychology of personality. NY: Random House
3. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (1996). The five-factor model of personality. NY: The Guildford Press.
4. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (2003). Paradigms of personality assessment. NY: The Guilford Press.
5. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (1966). Substantive dimensions of self-report in the MMPI item pool. Psychological Monographs, 80(22) #630.
6. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (1973). Personality and Prediction: Principles of personality assessment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
7. ^ Wiggins, J.S. (1979). A psychological taxonomy of trait-descriptive terms: The interpersonal domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 395-412.
8. ^ Nichols, David (April 2004). "Giving the Self a Voice in MMPI Self-report: Jerry Wiggins and the Content Scales". Multivariate Behavioral Research (Psychology Press) 39 (2): 155–165. doi:10.1207/s15327906mbr3902_2. 
9. ^ Tracey, Terence (October 2006). "President's Message". SITAR Newsletter. SITAR (VCU). pp. 1, 7. http://www.vcu.edu/sitar/SITARNewsletterOct2006.pdf. Retrieved 2009-08-20. 

Persondata
Name	Wiggins, Jerry S.
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1931
Place of birth
Date of death	2006
Place of death