The Big Five Personality Traits model, or the Five Factor Model of personality breaks personality down into five components: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness, and Stress Tolerance.
Each trait measures a unique aspect of human personality:
Agreeableness measures tendencies with respect to social harmony, how well the individual gets along with others, how cooperative or skeptical they are, and how they might interact within a team.
Conscientiousness measures how careful, deliberate, self-disciplined, and organized an individual is, and is often predictive of employee productivity.
Extraversion is a measure of how sociable, outgoing, and energetic an individual is.
Lower scores on the extroversion scale are considered to be a sign of introversion, and a more deliberate and low-key and independent person.
Openness measures the extent to which an individual is imaginative and creative, as opposed to down-to-earth and conventional.
Stress tolerance (neuroticism) measures the ways in which individuals react to stress.
The five factor model significantly predicts all 10 personality disorder symptoms and outperform the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) in the prediction of borderline, avoidant, and dependent personality disorder symptoms.
The most prominent and consistent personality dimensions underlying a large number of the personality disorders are positive associations with neuroticism and negative associations with agreeableness.
Across nations women are found to be significantly higher than men in average neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.