About Your True Self
Your True Self is a personality assessment platform built on one premise: accurate self-knowledge is more useful than a flattering generalization.
Most personality tools give you a label and a three-paragraph description that could apply to half the population. Your True Self uses eight distinct instruments to build a layered picture — not a type you fit into, but a profile that describes how you actually think, attach, conflict, communicate, and find meaning.
The instruments we use are based on psychology research, and we label how strong the evidence is for each. Three (attachment, values, conflict style) are published questionnaires. The Big Five (our own selection of public-domain IPIP items) and Holland codes (our own questions) are built against well-supported models. The Enneagram, Love Languages and Communication Style have thinner support, and we say so. We are not in the business of overstating what a personality assessment can tell you.
The Eight Instruments
Each instrument is cited by source and carries the evidence label we use throughout the product: a published instrument, a research-backed model with items we selected or wrote, or a popular framework where the evidence is thin.
Big Five
Research-backed modelMeasures personality across five dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Our 60 items are drawn from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain item pool (Goldberg et al., 2006). The item selection is ours and has not been separately validated.
Attachment Style (ECR-RS)
Published instrumentMeasures attachment anxiety and avoidance across four relationship domains: romantic partners, family, friends, and peers.
Experiences in Close Relationships – Relationship Structures scale, developed by Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, and Brumbaugh (2011). Based on Bowlby's attachment theory.
Personal Values (PVQ-40)
Published instrumentMeasures ten basic human values (Schwartz Values Theory): power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security.
Portrait Values Questionnaire, developed by Shalom Schwartz. Schwartz's values theory has been tested in hundreds of samples from 82 countries, using this and a second measure (Schwartz, 2012).
Conflict Style (DUTCH)
Published instrumentMeasures five approaches to handling disagreement: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating.
Based on the Dutch Test for Conflict Handling (DUTCH), as described by De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, and Nauta (2001).
Love Languages
Popular, evidence is thinMeasures how you prefer to give and receive affection across five categories: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch.
Based on Gary Chapman's Love Languages framework. Widely used; note that peer-reviewed psychometric validation is more limited than the instruments above.
Enneagram
Popular, evidence is thinIdentifies your core personality type (1–9) based on core motivations, fears, and coping strategies, including wing types and tritype.
Based on the Enneagram of Personality. Widely used in coaching and self-development contexts; peer-reviewed clinical validation is more limited than instruments like the Big Five.
Communication Style
Popular, evidence is thinIdentifies your primary communication pattern across four styles: assertive, passive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive.
Based on the assertiveness-training tradition rather than a psychometric development program. Evidence is thin; hold the result loosely.
Holland Codes (RIASEC)
Research-backed modelMeasures career interest patterns across six types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional.
Based on John L. Holland's RIASEC model. Our 48 items are our own, not the Self-Directed Search or the O*NET Interest Profiler, and have not been separately validated.
How We Build Reports
Your responses are scored by fixed, deterministic algorithms. The three published instruments follow their published scoring approach; the others use scoring we built for our own items. The scores are then synthesized into a written report that connects patterns across instruments into a coherent picture of how your traits interact.
Every insight in your report is anchored to your actual assessment data — nothing generic gets generated. If a section describes your conflict style, it is drawing on your DUTCH responses. If it describes your attachment patterns, it is drawing on your ECR-RS scores.
Reports are a self-understanding tool. They are not clinical evaluations, psychological diagnoses, or medical advice. See our methodology page for more detail on scoring and validation.
What This Is — and Isn't
- ✓A self-understanding tool built on research frameworks and published instruments, with the evidence behind each stated
- ✓A starting point for conversations with a therapist, coach, or partner
- ✓A way to put language to patterns you already sense about yourself
- ✗Not a clinical psychological evaluation or diagnosis
- ✗Not a substitute for professional mental health treatment
- ✗Not suitable for use in hiring, legal, or clinical decision-making
Questions
Reach us at team@yourtrueself.app. For instrument methodology and scoring details, see the methodology page.