Glossary of psychological constructs

A

Absorption: The immersion facet of work engagement: being fully concentrated and happily engrossed in one's work, with time passing quickly and difficulty detaching (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003). Fed by vigor and dedication it is the pleasure of deep work; standing alone, with the other facets low, it can mean the work has simply swallowed the foreground.
Acceptance: Accepting the reality of the situation and learning to live with it (Carver, 1997). Within the transactional model, strategies are evaluated by their fit to the situation rather than as universally good or bad (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and acceptance is the strategy addressed to what cannot be changed.
Accomplishment: The mastery pillar — making progress toward goals, achieving objectives, and feeling competent in handling responsibilities (Seligman, 2011).
Acting with Awareness: Attending to one's current activities rather than operating on autopilot or behaving mechanically (Baer et al., 2006).
Active Coping: Taking concrete steps to remove or reduce a stressor, concentrating effort on doing something about the situation (Carver, 1997). A problem-focused strategy in the transactional model (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984); it relates to lower distress in adjustment research (Carver, 1997).
Adventure: Vocational interest in competition, physical challenge, and work with real stakes attached (Pozzebon et al., 2010). It is not recklessness: a high score describes someone who is more present when something is on the line, while a low score describes a preference for conditions where attention can go to the work instead of the danger.
Agreeableness: A Big Five personality dimension reflecting individual differences in cooperation, prosocial orientation, trust, and concern for social harmony (Costa & McCrae, 1992). It comprises facets of trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness, with high scorers tending to assume positive intentions in others and prioritize interpersonal warmth over personal gain.
Agreeableness: The HEXACO model's Agreeableness dimension (Ashton & Lee, 2004) comprises forgivingness, gentleness, flexibility, and patience, reflecting the tendency to overlook others' wrongdoings, be lenient in judging others, accommodate to the wishes of others, and control one's temper. It differs from FFM Agreeableness by incorporating anger-proneness (moved from Neuroticism) and excluding morality-related content (moved to Honesty-Humility), making it a narrower construct focused on interpersonal tolerance and emotional equanimity.
Alcohol Use Risk: The risk carried by a person's current pattern of drinking, read across three things at once: how much and how often they drink, whether the drinking has begun to run itself (not stopping once started, needing a morning drink, blackouts), and whether it has already cost something (guilt, failed obligations, injury, other people saying so). It is graded rather than binary, and it is deliberately about a pattern over a period rather than about a person: the same reading can describe a stretch of months that ends. Because the questions are transparent, the measurement is easy to understate on purpose, which limits what a low reading can prove and leaves a high one hard to explain away.
Aloof-Introverted (FG): Low dominance, low affiliation — quiet, private, reserved (Wiggins, 1995).
Alterations in Arousal and Reactivity: Criterion E of the DSM-5 four-cluster PTSD model captures marked changes in arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event, manifesting as irritable or aggressive behavior, reckless or self-destructive behavior, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, concentration difficulties, and sleep disturbance (APA, 2013). Two or more symptoms must be present, reflecting a state of heightened physiological alertness.
Altruism: Vocational interest in work whose result is another person being better off — teaching, care, counselling, service (Pozzebon et al., 2010). A low score says nothing about whether the person is kind, only that helping is not what they want the working day to consist of.
Amotivation: The absence of any intention to act: the person no longer sees a connection between what they do and what it returns (Vallerand et al., 1992). A construct of its own on the self-determination continuum, not the reverse of the six motivations, and read inverted from them — a high score is a signal worth respecting, not a trait to develop.
Analysis: Vocational interest in the sciences, mathematics, and problems that hold still long enough to be taken apart (Pozzebon et al., 2010). High scorers want the mechanism, not just the outcome; a low score is common in people entirely capable of the work who would rather spend the day doing something else.
Anxiety: In the DSM-5 cross-cutting symptom framework, anxiety is assessed as a transdiagnostic symptom dimension that screens for the presence and severity of worry, nervousness, and anxious apprehension across psychiatric disorders, regardless of primary diagnosis (APA, 2013). It captures the frequency of anxiety-related symptoms to identify clinically relevant anxious distress that may co-occur with any primary condition and warrant further evaluation.
Anxiety: In Lovibond and Lovibond's (1995) tripartite model as operationalized in the DASS, anxiety is conceptualized as a syndrome of autonomic arousal, skeletal muscle tension, situational anxiety, and the subjective experience of anxious affect. Corresponding to the physiological hyperarousal component of Clark and Watson's (1991) tripartite model, this construct emphasizes somatic and autonomic symptoms as its defining features, distinguishing it from the cognitive and motivational deficits that characterize depression.
Appreciation of Beauty: The character strength of noticing and being moved by beauty and excellence — in nature, in art, and in skilled performance (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It describes being interrupted by something well made, not taste or knowledge about art.
Arrogant-Calculating (BC): High dominance, low affiliation — competitive, cutting, sharp-tongued (Wiggins, 1995).
Articulating a Vision: The leader behavior of identifying new opportunities for the group and communicating a picture of where the work is going that people can see and want to reach (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990). It is the behavior that turns a direction held in the leader's head into something the team can steer by.
Artistic: Holland's Artistic type: vocational interest in creating — making something exist that did not: text, music, images, scenes (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). A high A in rigidly structured work is a common source of quiet career misery; a low A is equally informative — briefs, standards, and formats feel like support, not a cage.
Assured-Dominant (PA): High dominance interpersonal style — assertive, commanding, confident (Wiggins, 1995).
Attachment Anxiety: How much a person worries about being left, rejected, or mattering less to close others than those others matter to them: fear of abandonment, monitoring of a partner's availability, and the need for reassurance (Brennan, Clark & Shaver, 1998; Fraley, Waller & Brennan, 2000). A continuous dimension, read as the sensitivity of an alarm rather than as the size of someone's love, and never converted into an attachment type.
Attachment Avoidance: How uncomfortable closeness and dependence feel: reluctance to open up, defensive self-reliance, and unease as intimacy deepens (Brennan, Clark & Shaver, 1998; Fraley, Waller & Brennan, 2000). The dimension measures the price of being seen, not how much a person cares, and it is only moderately related to attachment anxiety, which is why the two are reported apart.
Avoidance: Criterion C of the DSM-5 four-cluster PTSD model reflects persistent effortful avoidance of trauma-related stimuli, manifesting as either avoidance of distressing internal reminders (thoughts, feelings, or memories) or avoidance of external reminders (people, places, conversations, activities) that arouse recollections of the traumatic event (APA, 2013). At least one avoidance symptom must be present for diagnosis.

B

BAS Drive: Persistent pursuit of desired goals — motivation to succeed, lead, and excel (Carver & White, 1994).
BAS Fun-Seeking: Impulsive approach toward novel and exciting stimuli — desire for new experiences and spontaneity (Carver & White, 1994).
BAS Reward Responsiveness: Positive emotional responses to reward cues — excitement, enthusiasm, and positive anticipation (Carver & White, 1994).
Behavioral Disengagement: Giving up the attempt to deal with the stressor, or abandoning the goals it interferes with (Carver, 1997). It relates to higher distress in adjustment research (Carver, 1997).
Behavioral Inhibition (BIS): Sensitivity to punishment, novelty, and threat cues producing anxiety and behavioral inhibition (Gray, 1970).
Bounce-Back Resilience: The ability to recover from stress, adversity, or difficult life events — conceptualized as a trait-like capacity reflecting how quickly and effectively one returns to baseline functioning after being disrupted (Smith et al., 2008).

C

Calculated Thrill-Seeking: Willingness to take controlled risks — confident risk-taking with awareness of potential outcomes (Zuckerman, 1994).
Capacity for Love: The character strength of valuing close relationships and being able both to give and to receive affection and care (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). The receiving side is often the harder half: accepting care means letting someone else matter that much.
Chance: Belief that luck, fate, and chance determine outcomes (Levenson, 1981).
Citizenship/Teamwork: The character strength of loyalty to a group and pulling one's weight in something collective (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is not sociability — it often shows up in people who dislike parties — and a low score can mean independence rather than distance.
Client-Related Burnout: Physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion perceived as attributed to working with clients, patients, or other people served (Kristensen et al., 2005).
Cognitive Reflection: The disposition to notice an intuitive answer, distrust it, and check it before committing (Frederick, 2005). It is measured with problems engineered so that the wrong answer feels finished, which is why the arithmetic is deliberately light: the difficulty sits in suppressing the first response, not in producing it. The construct correlates with measures of cognitive ability without being one — it is a habit of verification, and the ordinary human result is that the planted answer usually wins.
Cold-Hearted (DE): Low affiliation — emotionally detached, unsympathetic, uninterested in others (Wiggins, 1995).
Common Humanity: Recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience, rather than isolating events that happen to oneself alone (Neff, 2003).
Common Mental Distress: Non-psychotic distress read as one field rather than sorted into diagnoses: low mood, worry and tension, and the bodily complaints that usually arrive with them (headaches, poor sleep, poor appetite, a bad stomach, shaking hands, tiredness that does not lift). The construct exists because in general health care the two halves show up together and separating them costs more information than it buys. It is a state tied to a recent window, not a trait, and it has no universal threshold: how many complaints amount to a probable case depends on the language, the population and what the screening is for.
Conscientiousness: A Big Five personality dimension characterized by individual differences in self-discipline, organization, goal-directed behavior, dependability, and deliberate decision-making (Costa & McCrae, 1992). It encompasses facets of competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation, and is the strongest and most consistent personality predictor of academic achievement and job performance across cultures.
Conscientiousness: The HEXACO model's Conscientiousness dimension (Ashton & Lee, 2004) comprises organization, diligence, perfectionism, and prudence, reflecting the tendency to organize one's time and physical surroundings, work in a disciplined way toward goals, strive for accuracy and perfection, and deliberate carefully when making decisions. Closely aligned with FFM Conscientiousness in content and structure.
Consistency of Interest: The tendency to maintain sustained interest and commitment to a specific domain or goal over extended periods, resisting the pull of novel alternatives (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009).
Contingent Reward: The transactional leader behavior of tying recognition and reward clearly and promptly to performance (Podsakoff, Todor & Skov, 1984; measured alongside the transformational behaviors by Podsakoff et al., 1990). An exchange rather than a transformation, and not the opposite of transformational leadership: it is one of the most consistently useful things a leader does, and strong leaders often show both.
Control over Working Time: The worker's control over the timing of their own work — deciding when to take a break, taking holidays roughly when wanted, leaving the workplace for private business. Small time freedoms measured as a distinct resource dimension (Burr et al., 2019).
Conventional: Holland's Conventional type: vocational interest in organizing data and processes — records kept right, inventories that balance, systems where nothing falls through (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). Organizations run on high C people and habitually forget to say so; precision work here is the something, not a stepping stone.
Creativity: Vocational interest in writing, performing, design, and art as working activities rather than as tastes (Pozzebon et al., 2010). It asks about making, not appreciating: enjoying music and wanting to play it professionally are different answers, and this construct is about the second.
Curiosity: The character strength of taking interest in ongoing experience for its own sake — the breadth of appetite for the new (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It sits close to love of learning without being the same: curiosity opens the door, love of learning keeps a person in the room.

D

Dangerous Thrill-Seeking: Attraction to physically dangerous activities and situations involving risk of injury (Zuckerman, 1994).
Dedication: The significance facet of work engagement: being strongly involved in one's work and experiencing it as meaningful, with enthusiasm, inspiration, and pride (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003). It is the facet most resistant to bad weeks and the most serious when it goes — energy can be rebuilt with rest, but meaning rarely returns by resting.
Demands for Hiding Emotions: The requirement to conceal feelings and keep opinions unexpressed at work — staying kind regardless of how one is treated. It names the self-containment load carried by many people-facing roles (Burr et al., 2019).
Denial: Refusing to believe that the stressor is real, or acting as if it has not happened (Carver, 1997). An avoidance-oriented strategy that relates to higher distress in adjustment research (Carver, 1997).
Depressed Affect: The first of Radloff's four CES-D factors (1977, p. 397): the core dysphoric mood — feeling sad, depressed, lonely, fearful, and unable to shake off the blues. Descriptive grouping for report prose; not a scored scale.
Depression: In the DSM-5 cross-cutting symptom framework, depression is assessed as a transdiagnostic symptom dimension that screens for the presence and severity of depressed mood and diminished interest or pleasure across psychiatric disorders, regardless of primary diagnosis (APA, 2013). As a dimensional measure, it captures the frequency of depressive symptoms over a two-week period to supplement categorical diagnosis and inform clinical decision-making about co-occurring symptomatology.
Depression: In Lovibond and Lovibond's (1995) tripartite model as operationalized in the DASS, depression is conceptualized as an emotional syndrome characterized by dysphoria, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest or involvement, anhedonia, and inertia. Corresponding to the low positive affect component of Clark and Watson's (1991) tripartite model, this construct emphasizes the loss of motivation and the inability to experience pleasure as its defining features.
Depression Severity: As operationalized in the PHQ-9 and PHQ-2 (Kroenke, Spitzer & Williams, 2001), depression severity is assessed by the frequency of the nine cardinal symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder specified in DSM-IV: anhedonia, depressed mood, sleep disturbance, fatigue, appetite change, guilt/worthlessness, concentration difficulty, psychomotor change, and suicidal ideation. Scores index symptom burden rather than categorical diagnosis.
Depressive Symptoms: Current depressive symptomatology as frequency of symptoms over the past week (Radloff, 1977): depressed mood, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness, psychomotor retardation, loss of appetite, and sleep disturbance, with the deliberate inclusion of positive affect whose absence is part of depression that pure symptom lists miss. A state expected to move with life events, read against published screening cutoffs — never a diagnosis.
Describing: Labeling internal experiences with words — the ability to articulate feelings, thoughts, and sensations verbally (Baer et al., 2006).
Dispositional Optimism: A generalized tendency to expect positive outcomes — the stable personality dimension associated with better coping, health, and well-being (Scheier, Carver & Bridges, 1994).

E

Emotional Demands: The extent to which work places the worker in emotionally disturbing situations or requires dealing with other people's personal problems. An exposure reading characteristic of care, teaching, and service work (Burr et al., 2019).
Emotional Support: Seeking comfort, understanding, and moral support from other people (Carver, 1997). An emotion-focused use of one's social network, distinct from instrumental support, which seeks help with the problem itself.
Emotionality: The HEXACO model's (Ashton & Lee, 2004) counterpart to Big Five Neuroticism, encompassing facets of fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, and sentimentality, and reflecting the tendency to experience fear of physical danger, worry about minor problems, need emotional support from others, and form strong emotional bonds. Unlike FFM Neuroticism, HEXACO Emotionality excludes anger-related content (placed under HEXACO Agreeableness) and includes prosocial emotional sensitivity such as empathic concern and attachment.
Empathic Concern: Other-oriented feelings of sympathy, tenderness and protectiveness toward people going through difficulty (Davis, 1980). The affective dimension pointed outward, at the other person, and the one closest to what everyday language calls a good heart.
Engagement: The flow pillar — being fully absorbed, interested, and engaged in activities and life (Seligman, 2011).
Enterprising: Holland's Enterprising type: vocational interest in persuading and leading — negotiating, deciding, owning outcomes including the risk (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). High E profiles often already run things informally wherever they are placed.
Equity/Fairness: The character strength of treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice, without letting personal feelings bias decisions about others (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Its real test is consistency under pressure: whether the rules bend for people one likes or dislikes.
Erudition: Vocational interest in reading, writing, languages, and the handling of ideas in words (Pozzebon et al., 2010). It sits close to Analysis without being the same: one wants the mechanism, the other wants the expression.
External Regulation: Acting for consequences that come from outside: pay, credentials, requirements, the expectations of others (Vallerand et al., 1992). The least autonomous of the regulations and the most fragile — it stops when the reward does — which says nothing against it, since it carries most of the world's obligations.
Extraversion: A Big Five personality dimension reflecting an energetic approach toward the social and material world, encompassing sociability, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, warmth, and the tendency to experience positive emotions such as enthusiasm, joy, and energy (Costa & McCrae, 1992). High scorers are drawn to social interaction and stimulation, while low scorers (introverts) prefer solitary activities and quieter environments.
Extraversion: The HEXACO model's Extraversion dimension (Ashton & Lee, 2004) encompasses social self-esteem, social boldness, sociability, and liveliness, reflecting positive self-regard, confidence in leading or addressing groups, enjoyment of social gatherings, and the experience of enthusiasm and energy. While broadly similar to FFM Extraversion, it places somewhat greater emphasis on self-confidence and social assuredness as core components.

F

Fantasy: The tendency to transpose oneself imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictional characters in books, films and plays (Davis, 1980). Cognitive rather than affective in the model, and less trivial than it sounds: the machinery that lets a novel take over an evening is the machinery used to simulate lives one has never lived.
Financial Well-Being: A state of being wherein a person can fully meet current and ongoing financial obligations, can feel secure in their financial future, and is able to make choices that allow enjoyment of life (CFPB, 2015). The definition is consumer-driven — derived from qualitative research with consumers rather than from expert-set literacy standards — and spans present security, future security, and financial freedom of choice. High scores describe a life with absorbable surprises and a provisioned future; low scores describe margins thin enough that money decides things for the person.
Forgiveness/Mercy: The character strength of forgiving those who have done wrong and giving people a second chance (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is about what happens after being hurt: whether the account closes or stays open.
Fostering the Acceptance of Group Goals: The leader behavior of promoting cooperation toward a common aim: framing targets as collective, pulling divergent efforts back to the shared goal, and crediting results to the team (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990). It is what makes coordination cheap, because the goal already belongs to everyone.

G

General Job Satisfaction: The global evaluative judgment of one's job as a whole — a pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's work (Locke, 1976) — measured directly rather than by summing facet satisfactions such as pay, supervision, or colleagues. As operationalized by the MOAQ-JSS (Cammann et al., 1983), it captures the overall verdict the job's pieces add up to; it moves more slowly than mood and is distinct from momentary affective states at work.
Generalized Anxiety Severity: As operationalized in the GAD-7 (Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams & Löwe, 2006), anxiety severity is assessed by the frequency of seven core symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder specified in DSM-IV: nervousness, uncontrollable worry, excessive worry, restlessness, difficulty relaxing, irritability, and fearfulness.
Generalized Self-Efficacy: A broad and stable sense of personal competence to cope effectively with a variety of stressful or novel demands, rooted in Bandura's (1977, 1997) social cognitive theory. As operationalized by Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1995), generalized self-efficacy extends beyond task-specific beliefs to capture the optimistic self-belief that one can handle unforeseen challenges, recover from setbacks, and persist in the face of adversity across diverse life domains.
Gratitude: The character strength of being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is a habit of noticing rather than a mood, and it is one of the strengths that tends to move with practice.
Gregarious-Extraverted (NO): High dominance, high affiliation — sociable, outgoing, comfortable with people (Wiggins, 1995).

H

High Performance Expectations: The leader behavior of demanding excellence and refusing second-best work (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990). The construct measures the size of the demand, not its wisdom: the same level of demand reads as belief when it arrives with individualized support and as pressure when it does not, which is why it is interpreted next to that behavior rather than on its own.
Honesty-Humility: A personality dimension unique to the HEXACO model (Ashton & Lee, 2004) that captures individual differences in sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty, representing the tendency to be genuine in interpersonal relations, unwilling to manipulate or exploit others for personal gain, and uninterested in lavish wealth or special privileges. Distinct from Big Five Agreeableness, it focuses specifically on moral character and the propensity toward or against exploitation and entitlement.
Hope/Optimism: The character strength of expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is expectation, not cheerfulness: a default forecast that leans favorable, as opposed to rehearsing the bad outcome.
Horizontal Trust: Whether employees in general trust each other. A workplace social capital dimension: trust between colleagues makes information move and cooperation cheap, and its absence taxes every interaction (Burr et al., 2019).
Humor: Making jokes about the situation or treating it with lightness to reduce its weight (Carver, 1997). An emotion-focused strategy that changes the stance toward the stressor rather than the stressor itself.
Humor/Playfulness: The character strength of liking to laugh and to bring smiles to other people — producing lightness, not merely appreciating it (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Its clearest expression is producing it when things are grim.

I

Identified Regulation: Acting because the activity serves goals the person personally endorses, even when the activity itself is not enjoyable (Vallerand et al., 1992). Extrinsic by definition — the reason lies in an outcome — yet self-determination theory treats it as the most sustainable of the extrinsic regulations, because the reason is the person's own.
Illegitimate Tasks: The share of work tasks that seem unnecessary to the person performing them. The operational reading of illegitimate tasks — work experienced as an offence to one's professional sense of self (stress-as-offence-to-self tradition; Burr et al., 2019).
Impulsive Sensation-Seeking: Acting on impulse, doing unpredictable and spontaneous things without planning (Zuckerman, 1994).
Individualized Support: The leader behavior of showing respect and attention to each follower's personal needs and feelings (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990): consulting people before decisions land on them, adapting to the individual, and keeping track of what is going on beyond the task list. It is the behavior leaders most reliably overrate in themselves.
Industry/Perseverance: The character strength of finishing what one starts and persisting in a course of action despite obstacles (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is the strength most likely to be praised by others and least likely to be enjoyed by its owner.
Influence at Work: The degree of say a worker has over decisions concerning their own work, including the amount of work and how it is done. A classic buffering resource in the demand-control tradition: the same demands weigh differently with and without it (Karasek & Theorell; Burr et al., 2019).
Insecurity over Working Conditions: Worry about unwanted changes to the conditions of the job — being transferred, having the schedule changed, or pay reduced against one's will. Insecurity about the shape of the job, distinct from insecurity about keeping it (Burr et al., 2019).
Instrumental Support: Seeking advice, information, or practical help from other people about what to do (Carver, 1997). The problem-focused counterpart of emotional support: the network is used to act on the situation rather than to feel better about it.
Integrity/Honesty: The character strength of speaking the truth and presenting oneself in a genuine way (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Its real content is the expensive case: keeping one's word, and the truth, when doing so costs something.
Intellectual Stimulation: The leader behavior of challenging followers to rethink old problems and settled assumptions, the leader's own included (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990). Where it is high, precedent is not an argument and disagreement with the leader is survivable; where it is low, a well-aligned team solves this year's problems with last year's playbook.
Internality: Belief that outcomes are determined by one's own actions and efforts (Levenson, 1981).
Interpersonal Difficulties: The fourth of Radloff's four CES-D factors (1977, p. 397): the social perception component — feeling that people were unfriendly or disliked you. Descriptive grouping for report prose; not a scored scale.
Intrinsic Motivation to Experience Stimulation: Engaging in an activity for the sensations it produces: absorption, excitement, the pull of material that carries a person along (Vallerand et al., 1992). The most state-dependent of the three intrinsic motivations, and usually the first to fade under exhaustion.
Intrinsic Motivation to Know: Engaging in an activity for the pleasure and satisfaction of learning, exploring and understanding something new (Vallerand et al., 1992, on Deci & Ryan's self-determination theory). The most autonomous end of the continuum: the activity pays for itself while it happens, and needs no outcome to justify it.
Intrinsic Motivation Toward Accomplishment: Engaging in an activity for the satisfaction of surpassing oneself and creating or accomplishing something (Vallerand et al., 1992). The fuel is progress that can be felt: the distance between what a person could do before and what they can do now, rather than any reward attached to it.
Introjected Regulation: Acting under pressure that has moved indoors: guilt, shame, self-worth and the need to prove something to oneself (Vallerand et al., 1992). Genuinely motivating and genuinely costly, it can produce years of effort alongside a persistent sense that none of it was enough.
Intrusion: Criterion B of the DSM-5 four-cluster PTSD model encompasses re-experiencing symptoms in which the traumatic event is involuntarily relived through recurrent intrusive memories, distressing nightmares, dissociative flashback reactions, intense psychological distress upon exposure to trauma-related cues, and marked physiological reactions to reminders of the event (APA, 2013). At least one intrusion symptom must be present for PTSD diagnosis.
Investigative: Holland's Investigative type: vocational interest in working with ideas — experiments, diagnosis, evidence, questions actually answered (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). High I profiles do their best work one step back from the action; the construct does not require a lab coat — analysis lives in finance, medicine, code, and repair shops alike.
Isolation: Feeling cut off and isolated in one's suffering, as if one's problems are uniquely personal — the negative pole of common humanity (Neff, 2003).

J

Job Insecurity: Worry about becoming unemployed and about how difficult it would be to find another job. A documented stressor that acts well before — and whether or not — any job is actually lost (Burr et al., 2019).
Job Satisfaction: Overall satisfaction with the job — work prospects, pay, and the job as a whole, everything taken into consideration. The summary evaluation that the other work environment dimensions feed (Burr et al., 2019).
Judgment/Open-mindedness: The character strength of thinking things through, examining them from all sides, and weighing evidence before deciding (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is deliberation rather than intelligence: the disposition to slow down and look for the other side on purpose.

K

Kindness/Generosity: The character strength of doing favors and good deeds for others as a disposition rather than a transaction (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). What separates the two is patience with other people's problems and kindness that does not keep score.

L

Leadership: Vocational interest in directing, persuading, and being the one who decides — the appetite for leading rather than the skill at it (Pozzebon et al., 2010). High scorers are drawn to roles that own outcomes in public; a low score is not passivity, since many people want real influence over the work with no interest in owning the outcome visibly.
Leadership: The character strength of encouraging a group to get things done while maintaining good relations within it (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is about making a group work, not about authority or being in front.
Life Satisfaction: A global cognitive judgment of one's life as a whole, reflecting the extent to which a person perceives their life circumstances as matching their personal standards and ideals (Diener et al., 1985). Distinct from momentary affect or domain-specific satisfaction.
Love of Learning: The character strength of mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge for their own sake, outside any requirement (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It differs from curiosity in duration: curiosity opens the door, this strength keeps the person in the room.

M

Machiavellianism: A strategic, calculating orientation toward other people: planning ahead, managing what others know, choosing alliances for what they yield, and waiting for the right moment (Christie & Geis, 1970; measured alongside the other two traits by Jones & Paulhus, 2014). The dimension describes patience and manipulation together, which is why it predicts success in negotiation and a slow erosion of the trust that cannot be strategized into existence. It is subclinical: everyone sits somewhere on it.
Management Safety Empowerment: The workgroup's shared perception of whether management empowers and involves workers in safety — consulting the people closest to the risk, trusting their judgment, and backing them when they exercise it (Kines et al., 2011). High empowerment goes with rules that fit the work; low empowerment goes with rules made at a distance and quietly renegotiated on the floor.
Management Safety Justice: The workgroup's shared perception of whether incidents are investigated to find causes rather than culprits, and whether people are treated fairly when they report (Kines et al., 2011). This dimension governs the upward flow of bad news: where justice is perceived as low, incidents do not stop happening — they stop being reported, and the organization loses its early-warning system.
Management Safety Priority, Commitment, and Competence: The workgroup's shared perception of whether management genuinely prioritizes safety when it competes with production pressure, is committed to it, and handles it competently (Kines et al., 2011). It reads the collision, not the policy: what management rewards when safety costs something. Low scores contaminate the other dimensions, because workers calibrate to what management actually prioritizes rather than to what it posts.
Meaning: The purpose pillar — perceiving one's life as purposeful, valuable, and directed toward something greater than oneself (Seligman, 2011).
Meaning of Work: Whether the work is experienced as meaningful and important. One of the strongest sustaining resources a job can offer; its absence makes even light work heavy (Burr et al., 2019).
Mental Well-Being: Positive mental well-being as the proportion of a recent period spent in five positive states: cheerful and in good spirits, calm and relaxed, active and vigorous, waking rested, and finding daily life filled with things that interest you (WHO, 2024; DepCare Project, 1998). It is defined by presence, not by the absence of symptoms, which is why a low reading is an absence of positive states rather than a symptom count. A current state that moves with circumstances, read against a published cutoff and never as a diagnosis.
Mindfulness: Holding painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than suppressing or exaggerating them — a prerequisite for self-compassion (Neff, 2003).
Modesty/Humility: The character strength of letting one's accomplishments speak for themselves (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is not low self-regard: the question is whether accomplishments need an audience, and a low score is not arrogance — some people simply enjoy being seen.
Morningness: The position of a person's internal clock on the morning-to-evening continuum: how early the body wants to wake, when sleep actually arrives, and when mind and muscles reach their best (Horne & Östberg, 1976). Morning and evening types differ in the timing of body temperature, melatonin and alertness, not in discipline. The middle is not indecision — intermediate types are the most common and the most flexible about schedule — and the position shifts across the lifespan rather than being fixed.

N

Narcissism: Grandiosity, a sense of being special, and a running need for admiration (Raskin & Hall, 1979; measured alongside the other two traits by Jones & Paulhus, 2014). Confidence recruits attention and attention feeds confidence, which is part of why the trait persists; the exposure is the dependence on the mirror, since criticism or someone else's turn in the light registers as injury. The subclinical trait measured here is not narcissistic personality disorder, which is a clinical diagnosis made by a professional through interview.
Need for Cognition: The tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activity — seeking out, engaging in, and enjoying complex thinking tasks (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982).
Negative Alterations in Cognition and Mood: Criterion D of the DSM-5 four-cluster PTSD model captures persistent negative changes in thinking and emotional experience that began or worsened after trauma, including inability to recall key features of the event, exaggerated negative beliefs, distorted blame, persistent negative emotional states, diminished interest, feelings of detachment, and inability to experience positive emotions (APA, 2013). Two or more symptoms must be present.
Neuroticism: A Big Five personality dimension reflecting the tendency to experience frequent and intense negative emotions including anxiety, anger, sadness, guilt, and self-consciousness, as well as heightened emotional reactivity to stress (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Often conceptualized on a continuum with Emotional Stability at the opposite pole, high Neuroticism is associated with interpreting ordinary situations as threatening and experiencing negative emotional reactions that persist for unusually long periods.
Non-Judging of Inner Experience: Taking a non-evaluative stance toward one's thoughts and feelings — not labeling them as good or bad (Baer et al., 2006).
Non-Reactivity to Inner Experience: Allowing thoughts and feelings to come and go without getting caught up in or carried away by them (Baer et al., 2006).

O

Observing: Noticing and attending to internal and external experiences such as sensations, cognitions, emotions, sights, sounds, and smells (Baer et al., 2006).
Openness to Experience: The HEXACO model's Openness to Experience dimension (Ashton & Lee, 2004) comprises aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity, and unconventionality, reflecting the tendency to become absorbed in the beauty of art and nature, be curious about various knowledge domains, use imagination freely, and take an interest in unusual ideas or people. Closely corresponds to FFM Openness, though it emphasizes unconventionality as a distinct facet.
Openness to Experience: A Big Five personality dimension reflecting the tendency to be intellectually curious, imaginative, and receptive to novel experiences, encompassing facets such as aesthetic sensitivity, fantasy, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and willingness to examine unconventional ideas (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Individuals high in Openness actively seek out new aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual experiences, while those low on this dimension prefer the familiar, concrete, and conventional.
Organization: Vocational interest in budgets, schedules, records, and the administrative machinery that keeps an operation from drifting (Pozzebon et al., 2010). High scorers find genuine satisfaction in a system that holds — a different thing from personal tidiness; low scorers are not disorganized, they simply get nothing back from maintaining the structure itself.
Organizational Justice: Whether conflicts are resolved in a fair way and the work is distributed fairly — the perceived fairness of the organization's procedures, a workplace social capital dimension (Burr et al., 2019).
Originality/Creativity: The character strength of thinking of novel and productive ways to do things (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is appetite for doing things differently rather than artistic talent; contentment with the method that already works is a preference, not a deficit.
Others' Emotion Appraisal: The ability to perceive and understand the emotions of the people around you (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Wong & Law, 2002): catching tone shifts, silences, and the gap between what someone says and what their face is doing. Distinct from caring about those emotions, which is what an empathy measure reads.
Over-Identification: Becoming consumed by and merged with one's negative feelings, losing perspective on the broader context — the negative pole of mindfulness (Neff, 2003).

P

Perceived Helplessness: The degree to which life situations are appraised as unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloading — the core stressor component of perceived stress (Cohen et al., 1983).
Perceived Self-Efficacy: The degree to which one feels able to handle problems, control important things, and manage irritations — the coping resource component of perceived stress (Cohen et al., 1983).
Perseverance of Effort: The tendency to work hard and persist despite setbacks, obstacles, and failures — the stamina component of grit (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009).
Personal Burnout: Physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion experienced by the person, independent of work or client contexts (Kristensen et al., 2005).
Personal Distress: Self-oriented anxiety and unease when witnessing another person's suffering (Davis, 1980). Read differently from the other three: a high score does not mean more empathy, it means the sight of pain sets off the observer's own alarm, and energy goes to managing that reaction before it can go to the person in trouble. In the reference model this dimension tends to correlate negatively with the others, which is why no composite empathy score exists.
Perspective Taking: The cognitive tendency to reconstruct how a situation looks from where another person stands, with their information and their stakes (Davis, 1980). The dimension of the model that behaves most like a skill: it improves with deliberate practice and costs effort a person may skip when tired or certain they are right.
Perspective/Wisdom: The character strength of being able to provide wise counsel and to see the world in a way that makes sense to oneself and others (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is largely confirmed from the outside — by whether people bring their hard questions to the person.
Planning: Thinking about how to confront the stressor and devising a strategy before acting (Carver, 1997). A problem-focused strategy and the close companion of active coping: one prepares the action, the other carries it out.
Positive Affect: The second of Radloff's four CES-D factors (1977, p. 397): the presence or absence of positive feeling — feeling as good as other people, hopeful, happy, enjoying life. Measured through reverse-keyed items so that rarely feeling happy raises the score the same way often feeling sad does. Descriptive grouping for report prose; not a scored scale.
Positive Emotion: The hedonic pillar of well-being — the frequency of pleasant emotional states such as joy, contentment, and serenity (Seligman, 2011).
Positive Reframing: Reinterpreting the situation in a more positive light, looking for something good in what is happening (Carver, 1997). A meaning-changing strategy that relates to lower distress in adjustment research (Carver, 1997).
Possibilities for Development: Whether the work offers the possibility of learning new things and using one's skills and expertise. A resource dimension of the work environment: work that neither stretches nor draws on the worker is a documented path to disengagement (Burr et al., 2019).
Powerful Others: Belief that powerful people control outcomes and events in one's life (Levenson, 1981).
Predictability: Whether information arrives when needed — advance notice of important decisions and changes, and all the information required to do the work well. Uncertainty about one's own near future at work is a stressor in its own right (Burr et al., 2019).
Presence of Meaning: The extent to which one perceives one's life as having a clear sense of purpose, significance, and comprehensibility (Steger et al., 2006). Presence of meaning is associated with greater well-being, life satisfaction, and psychological adjustment.
Production: Vocational interest in growing, building, repairing, and working with tools, land, and animals — the most physical of the eight ORVIS interests (Pozzebon et al., 2010). It describes wanting the day to end with something concrete to point at.
Providing an Appropriate Model: The leader behavior of setting an example consistent with the values and standards the leader asks of others (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman & Fetter, 1990). People read what a leader does faster than they hear what a leader says, so this behavior decides whether instructions arrive with support or against a counter-example.
Prudence: The character strength of being careful about one's choices and considering consequences before acting (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). A low score is not carelessness: liking risk is a preference, not a failure to notice that it exists.
Psychopathy: Impulsivity and thrill seeking combined with low empathy and little remorse (Hare's tradition, in the subclinical operationalisation of Jones & Paulhus, 2014). Of the three, it is the one most consistently linked to the harshest outcomes, and also the one that reads as composure in a crisis. The score describes where impulse and distance are doing the deciding, on a dimension the general population varies along; it is not a forensic finding and not a clinical category.

Q

Quality of Leadership: How good the immediate superior is at the concrete craft of leading — planning the work, solving conflicts, developing people. Read as a working capability of the leader, not charisma (Burr et al., 2019).
Quality of Work: Satisfaction with the quality of the work performed at one's workplace. Measured by a single item in the COPSOQ III middle version; low scores often mark conditions that force work below one's own standard (Burr et al., 2019).
Quantitative Demands: The mismatch between the volume of work and the time available to perform it — tasks piling up, work left undone, insufficient time. A core demand dimension of the psychosocial work environment (Burr et al., 2019); high scores indicate exposure to work overload.

R

Realistic: Holland's Realistic type: vocational interest in working with things — building, repairing, operating, testing — work whose result is tangible (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). People high on R are often worn down not by effort but by abstraction: a whole day about the work instead of in it.
Recognition: Whether one's work is recognized and appreciated by the management. Measured by a single item in the COPSOQ III middle version, it reads whether sustained effort visibly registers above (Burr et al., 2019).
Regulation of Emotion: The ability to regulate one's own emotions, recovering quickly from psychological distress (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Wong & Law, 2002). Not suppression: steady people still feel the spike, they get their hands back on the wheel sooner. Of the four dimensions, the one that responds most directly to practice.
Relationships: The social connection pillar — feeling supported, loved, and satisfied with one's personal relationships (Seligman, 2011).
Religion/Spirituality: Turning to religious or spiritual beliefs and practices in search of comfort and guidance (Carver, 1997). It can function both as emotional support and as a source of meaning for the situation.
Role Clarity: Whether the work has clear objectives, known areas of responsibility, and explicit expectations. High clarity lets energy go to the work itself instead of to decoding what counts (Burr et al., 2019).
Role Conflicts: Exposure to contradictory demands at work and to tasks one believes should be done differently. A property of how the role is designed — work that argues with itself (Burr et al., 2019).

S

Sadism: Everyday sadism: finding other people's suffering appealing rather than merely tolerable (Buckels, Jones & Paulhus, 2013; added to the dark traits as the fourth member by Paulhus, 2014). The distinction from psychopathy is about reward and not about severity, in the source article's own words: where psychopathy is indifferent to suffering, sadism finds it attractive. In the subclinical population where it is studied, most of what the construct picks up is vicarious, an appetite for watching conflict in sport, in fiction and in games, together with a taste for cutting remarks. It is a continuous dimension of ordinary personality, not a diagnosis and not a forensic category, and research on subclinical samples has found little sign of psychological dysfunction attached to it.
Safety Communication, Learning, and Trust in Co-workers' Safety Competence: The workgroup's shared perception of whether safety knowledge actually circulates — risks discussed when they appear, help exchanged, lessons drawn from what goes wrong, and co-workers' safety competence taken seriously (Kines et al., 2011). It is the mechanism dimension of the workgroup side: commitment supplies the will, communication turns it into shared practice.
Search for Meaning: The active pursuit of purpose and significance in life — the degree to which one is actively exploring, questioning, or striving to establish meaning (Steger et al., 2006). Search and presence are partially independent; one can search while possessing or lacking meaning.
Self-Blame: Criticizing and blaming oneself for what happened (Carver, 1997). It relates to higher distress in adjustment research (Carver, 1997), which distinguishes it from taking responsibility as a step toward action.
Self-Distraction: Turning to other activities — work, entertainment, daydreaming — to take one's mind off a stressor (Carver, 1997). Within the transactional model of coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) it manages the emotional response rather than the situation, offering relief without changing the demand.
Self-Emotion Appraisal: The ability to perceive, understand and express one's own emotions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Wong & Law, 2002): noticing a feeling while it is happening and being able to tell one state from another. The other three dimensions build on it, because a feeling has to be noticed before it can be used or steadied.
Self-Esteem: A global evaluative attitude toward the self, defined by Rosenberg (1965) as the individual's overall positive or negative orientation toward oneself as a totality, encompassing feelings of self-worth, self-respect, and self-acceptance. High self-esteem reflects the belief that one is 'good enough' without necessarily considering oneself superior, while low self-esteem is associated with self-rejection and a pervasive lack of self-respect.
Self-Judgment: Being harshly critical and intolerant of one's own shortcomings and inadequacies — the negative pole of self-kindness (Neff, 2003).
Self-Kindness: Being warm and understanding toward oneself during suffering or failure rather than harshly self-critical (Neff, 2003).
Self-Monitoring: The tendency to monitor and control one's expressive behavior and self-presentation in social situations (Snyder, 1974).
Self-rated Health: The worker's general rating of their own health, from excellent to poor. A single-item measure with a long epidemiological record as a predictor of health outcomes; in the COPSOQ III it provides individual context for the environmental dimensions (Burr et al., 2019).
Self-regulation: The character strength of regulating what one feels and does — discipline over appetites and impulses, and the ability to forgo a present pleasure for a future good (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is the strength people most often wish were higher.
Sense of Community at Work: The atmosphere between colleagues and the feeling of being part of a community at the workplace — the social fabric dimension of the work environment (Burr et al., 2019).
Social: Holland's Social type: vocational interest in helping — people changing because you were there: taught, guided, treated, supported (Holland, 1997; Rounds et al., 2016). It is not extraversion: one can love helping and still need silence afterwards; the content reflects sustained one-on-one impact more than social buzz.
Social Support from Colleagues: How often help, support, and a willing ear are available from colleagues when needed. One of the classic protective factors in demanding work; without it, individual difficulties are carried alone (Burr et al., 2019).
Social Support from Supervisor: How often help, support, and a willing ear are available from the immediate superior when needed. A support resource that determines whether difficulties escalate to solutions or accumulate (demand-control-support tradition; Burr et al., 2019).
Social/Emotional Intelligence: The character strength of being aware of the motives and feelings of other people and knowing what to say and do in social situations (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is the reading, not what is done with it — it is not the same as warmth and does not have to be used kindly.
Somatic and Retarded Activity: The third of Radloff's four CES-D factors (1977, p. 397): the bodily and psychomotor side of depression — being bothered by things, poor appetite, effort in everything, restless sleep, trouble concentrating, inability to get going. Descriptive grouping for report prose; not a scored scale.
Somatic Symptom Severity: As operationalized in the PHQ-15 (Kroenke, Spitzer & Williams, 2002), somatic symptom severity is assessed by the frequency and bothersomeness of 15 common physical symptoms (headaches, pain, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, etc.) that account for more than half of all outpatient visits and are often associated with functional impairment.
Spirituality: The character strength of holding coherent beliefs about a higher purpose and the meaning of life (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is deliberately wide, covering religious belief and a secular sense of purpose alike; a low score describes a worldview, not a deficiency in one.
Stress: In Lovibond and Lovibond's (1995) tripartite model as operationalized in the DASS, stress is conceptualized as a state of chronic nonspecific arousal characterized by persistent nervous tension, difficulty relaxing, irritability, agitation, impatience, and being easily upset or over-reactive. Corresponding to the negative affect or general distress component shared by both depression and anxiety, this construct captures a sustained state of feeling psychologically overloaded and unable to wind down.
Stress: In the DSM-5 cross-cutting symptom framework, stress-related distress is assessed as a transdiagnostic symptom dimension capturing perceived psychological burden, tension, and difficulty coping, screened alongside other domains to provide a comprehensive picture of psychiatric symptomatology beyond the primary diagnosis (APA, 2013). This dimensional approach recognizes that clinically significant stress responses frequently co-occur with and modulate the course of diverse mental disorders.
Substance Use: Using alcohol or other substances to feel better or to get through the situation (Carver, 1997). An emotion-focused avoidance strategy; heavy reliance on it is the coping pattern most often flagged as warranting attention.

T

Team Psychological Safety: The shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking — admitting a mistake, asking for help, disagreeing out loud, proposing unfinished ideas (Edmondson, 1999). It is a property of the team climate rather than an individual trait, and is theorized as distinct from team cohesiveness and from trust in specific individuals. Where safety is high, information moves fast and problems surface while they are small; where it is low, the taxed behaviors are minimized and errors go unreported rather than unmade.

U

Unassuming-Ingenuous (JK): Low dominance, high affiliation — tolerant, accepting, honest (Wiggins, 1995).
Unassured-Submissive (HI): Low dominance — soft-spoken, modest, deferential (Wiggins, 1995).
Use of Emotion: The ability to direct emotion toward constructive activity and personal performance (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Wong & Law, 2002): turning enthusiasm into a started task, frustration into another attempt, pressure into focus. The least discussed of the four dimensions and the most visible in what actually gets done.

V

Valor/Bravery: The character strength of not shrinking from threat, challenge, or difficulty, and of speaking up for what is right even when it costs (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). The price is what separates it from simply having opinions.
Venting: Expressing negative feelings and letting emotions out to relieve distress (Carver, 1997). An emotion-focused strategy: it can release pressure without in itself addressing the demand that produced it.
Vertical Trust: Trust between management and employees, in both directions — whether management trusts the employees to do their work well, whether the employees can trust the information coming from management, and whether views and feelings can be expressed upward (Burr et al., 2019).
Vigor: The energy facet of work engagement: high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort, and persistence in the face of difficulties (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003). It is typically the first facet to sag under chronic overload — often before anything feels wrong — which makes low vigor with intact dedication an early signal rather than a character flaw.

W

Warm-Agreeable (LM): High affiliation — caring, reassuring, interested in others (Wiggins, 1995).
Work Life Conflict: Whether work drains so much energy, and takes so much time, that it negatively affects private life. The spillover dimension of the work-family conflict tradition: the job's cost measured where it lands outside work (Burr et al., 2019).
Work Pace: The speed the work demands from moment to moment — working very fast and at a high pace throughout the day. Distinct from the volume of work (quantitative demands), it captures sustained work speed as its own exposure (Burr et al., 2019).
Work-Related Burnout: Physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion perceived as attributed to one's work (Kristensen et al., 2005).
Workers' Safety Commitment: The workgroup's shared perception of its own commitment to safety — whether workers treat safety as their own responsibility, help each other work safely, and take initiative, rather than leaving safety to rules and inspectors (Kines et al., 2011). It is the dimension most shaped by group history and by what the group visibly tolerates.
Workers' Safety Priority and Risk Non-Acceptance: The workgroup's shared perception of whether safety outranks getting the job done fast — whether hazards are treated as unacceptable or as a normal cost of the work, and risk-taking as competence (Kines et al., 2011). High scores describe a group that does not accept risk-taking; low scores describe normalized risk, which rarely announces itself.
Workers' Trust in the Efficacy of Safety Systems: The workgroup's shared perception that the safety systems — training, safety representatives, safety rounds, early planning of safety — actually work (Kines et al., 2011). High trust means the systems are used and participated in; low trust means they run as theatre, fully staffed and quietly ignored.

Z

Zest/Vitality: The character strength of approaching life with excitement and energy — feeling alive and activated (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). It is the strength most tied to physical state, so a low reading is worth interpreting alongside sleep, health, and recent months rather than as a fixed trait.

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Measure one of them