Alex M. Wood, P. Alex Linley, John Maltby, Michael Baliousis and Stephen
Joseph, “The Authentic Personality: A Theoretical and Empirical
Conceptualization and the Development of the Authenticity Scale”, Journal
of Counseling Psychology 55(3):385–399, July 2008 —
DOI-10.1037/0022-0167.55.3.385. published: is Crossref’s online date,
15 July 2008; the issue is dated July 2008.
The brief’s citation is correct; the full title is the one above.
Key takeaways
Registered from the abstract, not a reading. The abstract, as the Manchester portal gives it:
- “This article describes the development of a measure of dispositional authenticity and tests whether authenticity is related to well-being, as predicted by several counseling psychology perspectives.”
- “Scales were designed to measure a tripartite conception of authenticity, comprising self-alienation, authentic living, and accepting external influence, which was supported with exploratory factor analysis. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis showed that the factor loadings were invariant across sample, ethnicity, and gender.”
- “The scale showed substantial discriminant validity from the Big Five personality traits, nonsignificant correlations with social desirability, and 2- and 4-week test-retest correlations ranging from r = .78 to .91. Each subscale was strongly related to self-esteem and aspects of both subjective and psychological well-being.”
- It claims “the first direct test of several theoretical models that view authenticity as integral to well-being.”
The scale’s length (12 items, three subscales of four) and its grounding in Rogers’s person-centred theory are from scale-description pages found by search, not from the article.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the most used self-report measure of authenticity and the person-centred alternative to Kernis and Goldman. It is psychology with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Authenticity Scale” and the DOI found nothing.
Tagged psychopathology-and-treatment because the theory it measures is a
theory of distress and therapy: in the person-centred tradition, loss of
authenticity (self-alienation) is what goes wrong and its recovery is what
therapy does, and the abstract frames the scale as a test of the counseling
models that say so.
Where it bears.
- Kernis and Goldman (LIT-574). The two are the field’s rival measures. Kernis and Goldman’s construct includes self-awareness and unbiased processing; this one includes “accepting external influence”, a measure of how far others’ expectations steer the person. Whether the article compares itself with the AI-3 is not known from the abstract, so no relation is declared.
- SDT (LIT-559). “Self-determination” is one of the article’s keywords. “Accepting external influence” sits close to SDT’s external and introjected regulation, which THEORY-047 ties to the history of how a value was acquired. A reading should say whether the subscale measures present influence or acquired regulation.
- Taylor (LIT-594). The scale scores a person as authentic for living by his own values and resisting others’ influence. Taylor’s account, as commonly summarized, makes authenticity dialogical and dependent on shared horizons, so a high score on “accepting external influence” reversed is not obviously authenticity in his sense.
Priority for a reading: medium. It is a measurement paper; the record needs it chiefly to say what the most-used authenticity score measures.
Access when seeded:
- Crossref record (authors, volume, issue, pages, dates).
- University of Manchester research portal: abstract, keywords, and a listed submitted manuscript behind a JavaScript challenge (HTTP 403).
- Stirling STORRE (hdl 1893/12219): published version under embargo until 3000-01-01.
- Warwick WRAP (eprint 27595): restricted. Lincoln repository (figshare 24400642): a record with no file.