IPIP-HEXACO
Fearfulness
A public-domain personality facet scoring engine
Instructions: For each statement, select the response that best describes how accurately it reflects your typical behavior and attitudes. There are no right or wrong answers. Respond as honestly as possible for the most informative academic baseline.
Scale: 1 = Very Inaccurate · 2 = Moderately Inaccurate · 3 = Neither · 4 = Moderately Accurate · 5 = Very Accurate
Your Fearfulness Profile
IPIP-HEXACO · Ashton, Lee & Goldberg (2007) · Public Domain
Facet Interpretation
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Academic Citation
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42, 1515–1526. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.02.003
About the IPIP-HEXACO Fearfulness Scale (E-Fear)
The IPIP-HEXACO Fearfulness scale (E:Fear) is a public-domain personality instrument from the International Personality Item Pool by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007). Fearfulness is the first facet of the Emotionality dimension and measures the degree to which individuals experience fear in response to physical danger, threatening environments, and risky situations. Unlike general anxiety measures, Fearfulness specifically targets physiological and behavioral responses to concrete physical threat rather than cognitive worry or social evaluation concerns.
Fearfulness items in the IPIP-HEXACO tap responses to extreme physical scenarios — rapids canoeing, burning buildings, high-crime neighborhoods, dangerous situations — to ensure the construct is clearly distinguished from social anxiety and cognitive worry captured by companion facets. The scale reports a Cronbach's alpha of .84. Research has demonstrated differential validity between Fearfulness and Anxiety: Fearfulness more strongly predicts avoidance of physical risk-taking while Anxiety more strongly predicts rumination and cognitive worry, supporting the theoretical value of the two-facet emotionality structure.
Fearfulness vs. Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS-V): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Fearfulness (E-Fear) | Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS-V) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Physical fear & danger avoidance | Sensation-seeking & thrill motivation |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 40 items (SSS-V) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Proprietary |
| Alpha Reliability | .84 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.80+ (Zuckerman) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Fearfulness facet (E-Fear) is one of four facets within the Emotionality (E) dimension of the six-factor HEXACO personality model developed by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee. Unlike the Big Five framework, HEXACO adds a sixth dimension — Honesty-Humility — capturing variance in sincere, fair, modest, and non-materialistic behavior that the five-factor model distributes across Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The IPIP representation of this facet, developed in collaboration with Lewis Goldberg and the International Personality Item Pool project, provides researchers with an openly licensed operationalization that achieves internal consistency (alpha = .84) comparable to the proprietary HEXACO-PI-R while remaining entirely free for academic, organizational, and educational deployment.
Research and Applied Utility
Researchers and students in personality psychology, organizational behavior, and educational research regularly use the IPIP-HEXACO facet scales as targeted instruments for hypothesis testing, survey battery supplementation, and educational self-reflection activities. Because the IPIP scales are public domain, they may be embedded in any survey platform, online tool, or research system without licensing restrictions. The Fearfulness (E-Fear) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the fearfulness construct within the Emotionality domain, enabling comparison with published normative data from the Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007) validation study. The scale has been applied in cross-cultural research across more than 35 countries, providing researchers with substantial normative reference material.
Frequently Asked Questions — Fearfulness Scale (E-Fear)
Why do some highly intelligent people take reckless physical risks?
Intelligence and fearfulness are essentially uncorrelated in personality research — they sit in different dimensional spaces entirely. What research does show is that fearlessness in the physical domain is strongly linked to sensation-seeking, a separate but related trait. High-sensation-seeking individuals often report that risk itself is the reward — the neurochemical response to danger is genuinely pleasurable rather than aversive for them. Intellect provides no reliable protection against this.
Is physical fearfulness actually related to social anxiety?
Research clearly distinguishes these as separate systems. The HEXACO model explicitly splits them into two facets: Fearfulness (physical threat sensitivity) and Anxiety (cognitive worry and tension). Studies show only modest correlation between them, and many people score high on one while scoring low on the other. You can be genuinely terrified of heights while being entirely fearless in public speaking — or deeply comfortable with physical danger while highly anxious about social evaluation.
Does being physically fearless make someone a better emergency responder or leader?
The evidence is mixed. Physical fearlessness correlates with willingness to take bold action under genuine danger — valuable in first response, surgery, and military contexts. But the same trait also predicts underestimation of real risk and occasionally catastrophic miscalculation in complex threat environments. The most effective high-stakes performers in research show calibrated rather than uniformly low fearfulness — able to act decisively while maintaining genuine respect for real danger signals.
Can fearfulness be reduced through exposure and training?
Exposure-based approaches show consistent evidence for reducing fear responses to specific stimuli — phobias, avoidance behaviours, and fear-based hesitation respond well to gradual structured exposure. What is less clear is whether deep trait-level fearfulness shifts substantially through psychological intervention. Targeted skill-building around specific feared scenarios shows better outcomes than attempts to change the underlying trait itself.
Does this fearfulness profile replace a formal anxiety or wellbeing evaluation?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Fearfulness scoring engine is an educational self-reflection tool for academic baseline purposes only. It does not measure anxiety, phobias, or any psychological state, and produces no formal conclusions about individual wellbeing or functioning. Any formal assessment of fear-related concerns requires a qualified professional and appropriate validated instruments.