Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ): Three Dimensions That Place You

Are you naturally outgoing, or is solitude a habit you built? Is moodiness part of who you are, or just a response to pressure? These sound like small talk, but Eysenck turned them into three scorable dimensions.

The EPQ grew out of the Maudsley Personality Inventory and the Eysenck Personality Inventory during the 1960s, and was revised into the current form (EPQ-R) in 1985. Behind it sits a biological claim: personality differences map onto things like brain arousal levels, not just social learning.

This site uses the 48-item short form (EPQ-RS) with a 5-point agreement scale. It takes about 5 minutes.

Three dimensions and a lie scale

• Extraversion (E): High scorers are outgoing, active, drawn to stimulation; low scorers are quiet, conservative, comfortable alone. That is a difference in energy orientation, not a difference in worth.
• Neuroticism (N): Emotional stability, in plain terms. High scorers worry more, ride bigger mood swings, and pick up negative signals faster; low scorers stay even under pressure.
• Psychoticism (P): The name scares people, and psychologists themselves think it is poorly chosen — the literature often says “tough-mindedness” instead. High scores mean coldness, low empathy, hostility; low scores mean warmth and empathy. It is not a psychiatric diagnosis; it measures trait differences that exist in normal populations too.
• Lie scale (L): Flags socially desirable responding. A high L score means you may have been answering the way you think you should, which matters in any self-report measure.

Versions and scoring

The original EPQ used yes/no answers: 100 items in the long form, 48 in the short form. The 1985 revision addressed a known weakness — the early psychoticism scale had low reliability, a narrow scoring range, and a skewed distribution — by dropping some P items and expanding the item set.

The 48-item short form here switches to a 5-point agreement scale (0-4), with 18 reverse-scored items. Each of the four scales has 12 items, summed separately. The manual recommends converting raw scores to Sten scores; this site reports the relative level of each dimension directly.

Reliability and validity in brief

The EPQ has a long history of use in research and applied settings worldwide. A Chinese adaptation appeared in 1984 (Gong Yaoxian), and Chinese-language versions have been used in clinical and personnel settings since. Reported reliability for the short-form scales moves around across samples and language versions, so no single coefficient deserves too much weight.

This test is a reference point, not a diagnosis. If persistent emotional distress is interfering with your life, talk to a professional.