Circumplex Models of Personality and Emotions

During the past few decades, two major approaches have been used in efforts to define the structure of personality traits and emotions. One is the five factor analytic model. The other is a circumplex. The circumplex approach focuses on determining the similarity structure of all traits and emotions, and its underlying assumption is that a relatively seamless circular ordering (or circumplex) is an economical description of the relations among traits and among emotions.