Maren Cole

Writer, Your True Self. Not a psychologist, therapist, or clinician.

Maren Cole writes about personality psychology and evidence-based self-understanding for Your True Self. She has followed the psychometric literature on the Big Five, attachment theory, and Schwartz's values framework since the early 2020s, with a particular interest in how these instruments interact rather than what any single one says on its own. She is not a psychologist, therapist, or clinician, and nothing under this byline should be read as a credentialed opinion — she is a writer who takes the underlying research seriously and works to represent it accurately. Her guides connect academic sources, including the IPIP-NEO, the ECR-RS, and the PVQ-40, to the questions people actually bring to a personality test: why the same conflict keeps repeating with a partner, or why one values framework keeps surfacing across unrelated cultures. She believes accurate self-knowledge is more useful than a flattering label, and holds every guide on this site to that standard.

How the assessments get built

Every guide on this site is tied to a named source, and we say how strong the evidence is for each. Here is the chain, instrument by instrument.

Personality (Big Five). Our 60 items are drawn from the International Personality Item Pool, a free, public-domain collection of items and scales (Goldberg et al., 2006). They score five trait dimensions (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). The selection of items is ours. It is not a published short form and has not been separately validated.

Attachment. The ECR-RS (Experiences in Close Relationships – Relationship Structures), developed by Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, and Brumbaugh (2011), scores anxiety and avoidance separately across four relationship domains: romantic partner, family, friends, peers. It does not collapse you into one of four boxes. That domain split is the whole point: a person can be securely attached to a best friend and anxiously attached with a partner, and a single-score attachment quiz cannot show that.

Values. The PVQ-40 (Portrait Values Questionnaire) is built from Schwartz's theory of ten basic human values. The theory has been tested in hundreds of samples from 82 countries, using the PVQ and a second measure (Schwartz, 2012). Scores are centered against each respondent's own mean before comparison, which removes differences in how people use the rating scale, such as rating everything high or low.

Conflict style. The site uses the DUTCH (Dutch Test for Conflict Handling), a 20-item Likert instrument described by De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, and Nauta (2001). It is a different instrument from the forced-choice Thomas-Kilmann test it is sometimes confused with. The Likert format lets a person score high on more than one conflict style at once.

Love Languages, Enneagram. Love Languages (Chapman, 1992) and the Enneagram have a large practitioner following and real descriptive usefulness. Neither carries the peer-reviewed psychometric validation of the instruments above, and the guides say so directly instead of borrowing the Big Five's credibility by association.

Communication style and career interest. Communication patterns are scored on four styles: assertive, passive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive. The taxonomy comes from the assertiveness-training tradition, and the 32 items are ours. Career interest is scored against Holland's RIASEC framework (Holland, 1997), using 48 items of our own.

Full item counts, scale types, and scoring notes for all eight instruments are on the methodology page. Where an instrument's evidence base is thinner, that is stated right next to the instrument, in the open, not buried in a footnote.

Editorial standards

Three rules govern everything published under this byline:

  1. Every psychological claim in a guide traces to a citation. An author, a year, and a source you could look up yourself, not just “research shows.” The full reference list for each guide is at the bottom of that guide.
  2. Validation strength is stated plainly. A guide about the Enneagram reads differently from a guide about the Big Five, because the underlying evidence is different, and softening that difference would be dishonest regardless of how much better the softer version might read.
  3. Report content is generated from your actual scores, and checked against them. Every section of a Your True Self report is built from your specific assessment data and validated against it before you see it. Content that does not tie back to an actual scale score gets regenerated, and none of it is generic filler.

See the methodology page for the technical mechanism, and editorial standards for the full editorial policy.

Guides by Maren Cole