Population Heterogeneity Among the Six Factors of Aggressive Personality

Dozens of dispositional aggressiveness questionnaires and their idiosyncratic factor structures have been distilled into six factors: Relational, Angry, Violent, Retaliatory, Intimate, and Alcohol Aggression. Do sub-populations exist that fail to replicate these six factors? Factor mixture modeling of these aggressiveness items (N = 1,447 diverse undergraduates) identified three latent profiles characterized by medium (41.12% of sample), high (13.75%), or low (45.13%) levels of all six factors. Like the ‘Big Bang’ the six factors began strongly-correlated in the low aggressiveness profile and then rapidly drifted apart in nomological space among more aggressive profiles. All original factors re-emerged in profile-specific factor analyses, excepting Violent Aggression. Thus, the six-factor model of aggressiveness appears largely robust to population heterogeneity.