Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) is an inventory

Inventory

Inventory means a list compiled for some formal purpose, such as the details of an estate going to probate, or the contents of a house let furnished. This remains the prime meaning in British English...

 for personality traits devised by Cloninger et al.
It is closely related to and an outgrowth of Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire

Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire

Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire is a personality test.It was devised by C. Robert Cloninger.A newer version of the questionnaire is called Temperament and Character Inventory....

 (TPQ),
and it has also been related to Zuckerman's and Eysenck's dimensions of personality.

TCI operates with seven dimensions of personality traits: four so-called temperaments

• Novelty Seeking
  Novelty seeking
  In psychology, novelty seeking is a personality trait.It is measured in the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire as well as the later version Temperament and Character Inventory.NS has been suggested to be related to low dopaminergic activity....
  
   (NS)
• Harm Avoidance
  Harm avoidance
  In psychology, harm avoidance is a personality trait characterized by excessive worrying; pessimism; shyness; and being fearful, doubtful, and easily fatigued...
  
   (HA)
• Reward Dependence
  Reward dependence
  In psychology, Reward Dependence is a moderately heritable personality trait which is stable throughout life. It is an inherited neurophysiological mechanism that drives our perception of the environment and society...
  
   (RD)
• Persistence
  Persistence (psychology)
  In psychology, persistence is a personality trait.It is measured in the Temperament and Character Inventory.The subscales of PS in TCI-R consist of# Eagerness of effort # Work hardened # Ambitious # Perfectionist...
  
   (PS)

and three so-called characters

• Self-Directedness (SD)
• Cooperativeness (CO)
• Self-Transcendence (ST)

Each of these traits has a varying number of subscales.
The dimensions are determined from a 240-item questionnaire.

Versions

Originally developed in English, TCI has been translated to other languages, e.g., Swedish,
Japanese, Dutch, German, Polish, Korean,
Finnish, Chinese and French.
There is also a revised version TCI-R.
Whereas the original TCI had statements for which the subject should indicate true or false, the TCI-R has a five-point rating for each statement.
The two versions hold 189 of the 240 statements in common.
The revised version has been translated into
Spanish,
French,
Czech,
and Italian.

The number of subscales on the different top level traits differ between TCI and TCI-R.
The subscales of the TCI-R are:

• Novelty seeking (NS)
  1. Exploratory excitability (NS1)
  2. Impulsiveness (NS2)
  3. Extravagance (NS3)
  4. Disorderliness (NS4)
• Harm avoidance (HA)
  1. Anticipatory worry (HA1)
  2. Fear of uncertainty (HA2)
  3. Shyness (HA3)
  4. Fatigability (HA4)
• Reward dependence (RD)
  1. Sentimentality
     Sentimentality
     Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason....
     
      (RD1)
  2. Openness to warm communication (RD2)
  3. Attachment (RD3)
  4. Dependence (RD4)
• Persistence (PS)
  1. Eagerness of effort (PS1)
  2. Work hardened (PS2)
  3. Ambitious (PS3)
  4. Perfectionist (PS4)
• Self-directedness (SD)
  1. Responsibility (SD1)
  2. Purposeful (SD2)
  3. Resourcefulness (SD3)
  4. Self-acceptance (SD4)
  5. Enlightened second nature (SD5)
• Cooperativeness (C)
  1. Social acceptance (C1)
  2. Empathy
     Empathy
     Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
     
      (C2)
  3. Helpfulness (C3)
  4. Compassion
     Compassion
     Compassion is a virtue — one in which the emotional capacities of empathy and sympathy are regarded as a part of love itself, and a cornerstone of greater social interconnection and humanism — foundational to the highest principles in philosophy, society, and personhood.There is an aspect of...
     
      (C4)
  5. Pure-hearted conscience (C5)
• Self-transcendence (ST)
  1. Self-forgetful (ST1)
  2. Transpersonal identification (ST2)
  3. Spiritual acceptance (ST3)

Neurobiological foundation

TCI has been used for investigating the neurobiological foundation for personality, together with other research modalities, e.g., with molecular neuroimaging,
structural neuroimaging
and genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

.

Temperament	Neurotransmitter system
Novelty seeking Novelty seeking In psychology, novelty seeking is a personality trait.It is measured in the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire as well as the later version Temperament and Character Inventory.NS has been suggested to be related to low dopaminergic activity....	Low dopamine Dopamine Dopamine is a catecholamine neurotransmitter present in a wide variety of animals, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. In the brain, this substituted phenethylamine functions as a neurotransmitter, activating the five known types of dopamine receptors—D1, D2, D3, D4, and D5—and their... rgic activity
Harm avoidance Harm avoidance In psychology, harm avoidance is a personality trait characterized by excessive worrying; pessimism; shyness; and being fearful, doubtful, and easily fatigued...	High serotonergic Serotonin Serotonin or 5-hydroxytryptamine is a monoamine neurotransmitter. Biochemically derived from tryptophan, serotonin is primarily found in the gastrointestinal tract, platelets, and in the central nervous system of animals including humans...  activity
Reward dependence Reward dependence In psychology, Reward Dependence is a moderately heritable personality trait which is stable throughout life. It is an inherited neurophysiological mechanism that drives our perception of the environment and society...	Low noradrenergic activity

Cloninger suggested that the three original temperaments from TPQ, novelty seeking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence, was correlated with low basal dopamine

Dopamine

Dopamine is a catecholamine neurotransmitter present in a wide variety of animals, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. In the brain, this substituted phenethylamine functions as a neurotransmitter, activating the five known types of dopamine receptors—D1, D2, D3, D4, and D5—and their...

rgic activity,
high serotonergic

Serotonin

Serotonin or 5-hydroxytryptamine is a monoamine neurotransmitter. Biochemically derived from tryptophan, serotonin is primarily found in the gastrointestinal tract, platelets, and in the central nervous system of animals including humans...

 activity, and low basal noradrenergic activity, respectively.

Many studies have used TCI for examining whether genetic variants in individual genes have an association with personality traits. Studies suggest that novelty seeking is associated with dopaminergic pathways.
Dopamine transporter DAT1 and dopamine receptor DRD4 are associated with novelty seeking.
Parkinson's patients, who are intrinsically low in dopamine, are found to have low novelty seeking scores.
Gene variants that have been investigated are, e.g., 5-HTTLPR

5-HTTLPR

5-HTTLPR is a degenerate repeat polymorphic region in SLC6A4, the gene that codes for the serotonin transporter.Since the polymorphism was identified in the middle of the 1990s,...

 in the serotonin transporter

Serotonin transporter

The serotonin transporter is a monoamine transporter protein.This protein is an integral membrane protein that transports the neurotransmitter serotonin from synaptic spaces into presynaptic neurons. This transport of serotonin by the SERT protein terminates the action of serotonin and recycles it...

 gene and gene variants in XBP1

XBP1

X-box binding protein 1, also known as XBP1, is a protein which in humans is encoded by the XBP1 gene. The XBP1 gene is located on chromosome 22 while a closely related pseudogene has been identified and localized to chromosome 5...

.