Research reportValidation of the TEMPS-A Buenos Aires: Spanish psychometric validation of affective temperaments in a population study of Argentina

BackgroundThe TEMPS-A (Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego) is a 110-item questionnaire in five scales which has been translated into over 25 language versions: American, Italian (only for Interview version or TEMPS-I), French, Lebanese, Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish versions have already been validated. There are two Spanish versions, one from Barcelona, and the present one from Buenos Aires. This study represents the first attempt at validating the TEMPS-A in Spanish.Methods932 clinically well subjects were studied, of both sexes (62% female) with mean ± SD age of 35.4 ± 18.1. Standard psychometric tests of reliability and validation were performed.ResultsChronbach alphas were 0.7 (depressive) and 0.8 (anxious, cyclothymic, irritable and hyperthymic). In exploratory factor analyses, the hyperthymic was distinct from the others. As expected, the depressive and anxious correlated strongly, so did the cyclothymic and anxious. Dominant temperaments ranged from 2.1% to 4.5% of the population under study, except for the hyperthymic which had a negligible rate of 0.2% (but accounted for 13% between + 1 SD and + 2 SD).LimitationWe did not examine test-to-test reliability.ConclusionsThis is the first validation of the TEMPS-A in Spanish, the Buenos Aires version with the original 110 items, with very good psychometric properties.