As modern society grows increasingly complex, individuals must develop distinct behavioral and motivational patterns to adapt and thrive. Understanding how these dispositions influence adaptation is essential for effective psychological assessment and intervention. In this context, temperament serves as a fundamental layer of behavior, reflecting innate interpersonal tendencies. In contrast, character represents a person’s adaptive system—shaped by social experiences and built upon their temperament [1,2]. Together, these components offer a comprehensive view of an individual’s psychological state and guide appropriate therapeutic strategies.

Since Hippocrates introduced the theory of four humors, scholars have proposed numerous models of personality and temperament. Carl Jung’s typology—featuring introversion- extraversion and perceptual-judgmental functions—laid the groundwork for modern personality theory and inspired frameworks like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five. Later, Cloninger and colleagues [3,4] advanced a psychobiological model of temperament, identifying traits such as novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence. His Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) expanded this model to include self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence.

However, these models primarily emphasize stable personality traits and often overlook how individuals express values or direct motivation across diverse contexts. Jung’s typology, while foundational, simplifies personality into binary categories, lacks empirical validation, and reflects cultural biases that limit its universal relevance. Similarly, the TCI and its revised version (TCI-R) have faced criticism for persistent psychometric limitations, raising concerns about their ability to capture the full complexity of human personality [5]. To address these limitations, the concept of disposition has recently gained increasing attention.

Disposition refers to a consistent pattern of cognition, emotion, and behavior that reflects how individuals adapt to daily life [6]. It offers a lens for understanding how people pursue goals, express values, and engage in social relationships across everyday contexts.

Research into dispositional constructs—such as affective and moral tendencies measured by tools like positive and negative affect schedule and Gratitude Questionnaire—has underscored their impact on well-being and social functioning [7,8]. However, these instruments often rely on unidimensional structures and lack contextual depth.

Previous studies have examined mainly isolated types of dispositions and their link to specific psychological outcomes. Few have attempted to assess dispositions in relation to broader life goals or relational environments. Yet because dispositions shape how individuals seek meaning and respond to challenges, there is a growing need for multidimensional tools that reflect these everyday contexts [9].

Most adult personality assessments use standardized objective response formats that support consistency but limit insight into individualized cognitive and motivational processes. These formats may overlook the contextual and unconscious factors that influence behavior [10]. To address these gaps, this study introduced the Scale for Understanding Life-Oriented Expression and Dispositions (SULEDIS)—a forcedchoice instrument designed to assess adult dispositions by integrating motivational and relational dimensions.

The study aimed to develop and validate the SULEDIS, evaluating its reliability, factor structure, and construct validity.

This study introduced and validated the SULEDIS, a multidimensional self-report tool designed to assess adult dispositions within everyday life contexts. Findings indicated acceptable internal consistency, moderate-to-high test-retest reliability, and a stable, coherent three-factor structure across orientation domains. These findings support the SULEDIS as a reliable measure of value-oriented dispositions that are conceptually distinct from conventional temperament or personality traits.

Traditional temperament-based tools, such as the TCI-R, often exhibit modest internal consistency and problematic cross-loadings across dimensions, which can undermine their discriminant validity. The SULEDIS addresses these limitations through a forced-choice format that reduces selfpresentation bias and captures value-based decision tendencies. This approach is consistent with emerging evidence that forced-choice designs enhance construct validity and mitigate response distortion [21].

In forced-choice assessments, respondents must select between equally desirable options, prompting relative rather than absolute judgments. This response format discourages socially desirable responding by requiring individuals to pri-oritize one value over another, rather than endorsing all favorable statements. As a result, forced-choice measures tend to reveal more authentic value hierarchies and demonstrate superior construct validity and resistance to faking than traditional Likert-type formats.

By leveraging its methodological strengths, the SULEDIS captures how adults express dispositional preferences through context-sensitive decisions that reflect real-life value tradeoffs. This approach bridges the gap between traditional personality assessment and everyday functioning by illustrating how motivational and interpersonal orientations emerge within relational contexts. In psychiatric and counseling applications—where interpersonal and value-based tendencies are often underexamined—the SULEDIS provides a complementary framework for evaluating these social-motivational structures alongside conventional personality measures.

While most SULEDIS subscales demonstrated adequate internal consistency, certain domains—particularly RL (α=0.39) and FF (α=0.25)—showed lower reliability estimates. This pattern is characteristic of forced-choice formats, which inherently limit inter-item correlations by requiring respondents to choose between equally desirable but contrasting statements. Such formats intentionally minimize item overlap and homogeneity, features that would typically increase α in Likert-type scales [21,22]. Moreover, items within each block often represent multidimensional content to reduce social desirability bias, further limiting the degree of inter-item correlation [23]. These mechanisms operate within an ipsative scoring structure, where endorsing one option necessarily lowers the standing of others, constraining variance and attenuating α estimates even when items are functioning appropriately [24,25]. Taken together, these features explain the lower reliability observed in the RL and FF subscales.

Despite modest alpha values in select subscales, overall reliability and test-retest results indicated stable dispositional patterns over time (ICCs up to 0.90) and consistency across gender groups. These findings suggest that the SULEDIS effectively captures enduring dispositional tendencies while accommodating contextual variability—an essential feature for instruments designed to assess real-life motivational orientations.

Test-retest reliability, measured over a 2-week interval, ranged from moderate to high across the SULEDIS scales, supporting the instrument’s temporal stability in measuring dispositional tendencies [26]. The lowest reliability was observed for the FF scale (r=0.62), likely reflecting the greater situational variability inherent in interpersonal dispositions compared to more structured or socially regulated domains such as organizations. This finding suggests that personal relationship orientations may be more context-sensitive, offering insight into how social dynamics shape dispositional expression.

Correlational analyses revealed theoretically consistent associations among the SULEDIS subscales. The SE orientation was negatively correlated with both MN (r=-0.78) and OR (r=-0.79), indicating that self-focused tendencies contrast with altruistic or socially embedded tendencies. These pronounced negative correlations suggest a broader dispositional axis contrasting self-centered immersion with socio-transcendental orientation. This higher-order dimension within the SULEDIS framework captures the tension between internally focused, individualistic tendencies and outwardly oriented, socially embedded or value-driven dispositions. In contrast, SE showed a modest positive correlation with AC (r=0.44), indicating that self-directed individuals often pursue goal-oriented dispositions. The strong correlation between MN and OR (r=0.79) further implies that prosocial and meaning-driven tendencies frequently manifest within structured social environments, such as organizational or communal settings.

Together, these relationships affirm the internal coherence of the SULEDIS framework, demonstrating that its orientation domains are distinct yet systematically interrelated. This pattern aligns with the theoretical model underlying the scale’s development and reinforces its construct validity.

Convergent validity analyses revealed a selective yet theoretically coherent pattern of correlations with established instruments. Among the TCI subscales, only CO demonstrated moderate associations with MN (r=0.45), SE (r=-0.43), and OR (r=0.40). These findings suggest that the SULEDIS dimensions reflecting prosocial and relational orientations conceptually align with the cooperative facet of Cloninger’s character model, which emphasizes empathy and social connectedness.

In contrast, correlations with other TCI traits (e.g., novelty seeking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence) as well as with symptom-based measures including the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, were weak or negligible. This pattern indicates that the SULEDIS primarily captures motivational and contextsensitive dispositions, rather than stable temperament traits or psychopathological symptoms. The partial convergence with cooperativeness thus reinforces the construct validity of the SULEDIS while underscoring its conceptual distinction from traditional temperament-based assessments.

To examine latent structures, CATPCA was conducted separately for each orientation domain. Although the KMO values were low (0.15-0.21), Bartlett’s tests of sphericity were significant across all domains (p<0.001), confirming that the interitem associations were adequate for component extraction.

The low KMO values observed in this study are attributable to the forced-choice response format, which inherently limits inter-item correlations. In categorical data structures, such values do not necessarily indicate poor sampling adequacy; instead, they reflect the diversity of response patterns across contrasting item pairs. Previous research has similarly documented attenuated KMO indices in forced-choice and ipsative instruments, while still achieving interpretable and meaningful factor structures.

Across all four orientation domains, CATPCA yielded three interpretable factors consistent with the theoretical framework proposed during scale development. The resulting factor loadings aligned with distinct dispositional components (e.g., self-regulation, relational orientation, and value integration), providing empirical support for the multidimensional structure of the SULEDIS. Specifically, the three identified components can be readily interpreted through the lens of the scale’s dual-axis theoretical framework (self vs. other× everyday vs. transcendent values). Self-regulation (Factor 1) corresponds to a self-oriented, everyday disposition quadrant, reflecting how individuals prioritize personal well-being and immediate goals in daily life. The second factor, known as relational orientation, corresponds to the other-oriented, everyday quadrant. This factor emphasizes values centered on close relationships, community, and day-to-day social responsibilities. The third factor, known as value integration, represents the transcendent value dimension. This factor integrates self-transcendent aims and broader social or spiritual goals (bridging both self- and other-focused transcendence) into a unified orientation. It is noteworthy that this factor structure—comprising a self-focused pragmatic component, an interpersonal everyday component, and a higherorder values component—has emerged consistently across all content domains (HW, RL, AC, and MN). Despite the low KMO indices for these CATPCA analyses (as would be expected with forced-choice data), the clear, theory-consistent pattern of loadings across domains lends itself to the conclusion that the solution is indeed interpretively valid. In summary, despite suboptimal KMO values, the replication of a meaningful three-factor pattern that maps onto the intended dual-axis model confirms that the SULEDIS is capturing the hypothesized constructs. The alignment between empirical factors and the theoretical framework serves to reinforce the scale’s construct validity, thereby demonstrating that SULEDIS effectively differentiates dispositions along the proposed self-other and everyday-transcendent axes.

Despite its contributions, several limitations warrant consideration. First, although the SULEDIS demonstrated generally acceptable reliability, specific subscales—particularly RL and FF—showed lower internal consistency. This may stem from the contextual heterogeneity of items and the psychometric constraints of forced-choice formats, which tend to suppress inter-item correlations. Future research could refine item pools and response options to improve internal coherence while preserving contextual richness. Second, participants were Korean adults recruited through an online panel, which may limit the cross-cultural generalizability of findings. Several items reflect culturally embedded values (e.g., filial piety, collective responsibility, organizational loyalty) that may not translate uniformly across cultural contexts. Validation studies in diverse populations, including both Western and collectivist societies, are needed to assess measurement invariance and cultural applicability. Third, the FF domain combines two relational contexts that may function differently in real-life settings. Future iterations of the SULEDIS could separate familial and peer relationships to improve structural precision. Fourth, the study used a cross-sectional design. Longitudinal or experimental approaches could further explore how dispositional orientations shift in response to major life events or clinical interventions, thereby contributing to the ecological validity of the instrument. Lastly, although CATPCA yielded a stable and interpretable three factor structure aligned with the theoretical model, it remains an exploratory technique. The CATPCA is well-suited for categorical data and effective in uncovering latent structures; however, it has limitations in terms of structural confirmation. In light of the SULEDIS’s utilization of a forced-choice (ipsative) response format, conventional methods such as EFA or CFA may prove inadequate in capturing the underlying dispositional structure. In order to enhance the rigor of structural validation, it is recommended that future studies incorporate confirmatory models specifically tailored to forcedchoice data, such as Multidimensional Item Response Theory (IRT) or Thurstonian IRT frameworks. These approaches have the potential to yield more robust estimates of latent constructs and further strengthen the scale’s psychometric validity.

The SULEDIS offers practical utility across a range of applied settings by assessing value-driven dispositions that shape everyday behavior. In clinical and counseling contexts, it can support meaningful dialogue around clients’ value hierarchies, interpersonal orientations, and motivational conflicts, thereby offering a complementary lens to traditional personality or symptom-based evaluations. For example, a client displaying a profile characterized by high achievement orientation but low health and well-being orientation may be at risk for performance-driven burnout. This suggests the need for interventions that balance goal pursuit with selfcare. In educational and organizational environments, mapping dispositional orientations may foster self-awareness, enhance team communication, and inform decisions related to role alignment and leadership development. For instance, an employee with high meaning or organization orientation but lower self orientation might excel in collaborative or structured roles, but require support when pursuing self-directed goals.

Its concise forced-choice format enables efficient digital implementation, making the SULEDIS particularly wellsuited for integration into telehealth platforms and preventive mental health initiatives. By emphasizing contextual decision-making and relational balance, the instrument also lends itself to personalized interventions targeting motivation, adaptability, and well-being across diverse populations.

In conclusion, the SULEDIS provides a psychometrically sound and conceptually integrative framework for assessing adult dispositions in everyday contexts. Through its forcedchoice response format and contextually anchored content, it captures the dynamic interplay between self- and other-oriented motivations that shape interpersonal and value-based functioning. The present findings confirm that these dispositional orientations can be reliably identified and meaningfully differentiated within a multidimensional structure.

By prioritizing motivational direction and contextual decision-making over static trait descriptions, the SULEDIS advances beyond traditional temperament or trait models. It offers a complementary approach for both research and applied practice—enabling the assessment of real-world value systems and informing individualized strategies for psychological intervention, educational programming, and organizational development.