IPIP-HEXACO
Sentimentality
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 Sentimentality 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 Sentimentality Scale (E-Sent)
The IPIP-HEXACO Sentimentality scale (E:Sent) is a public-domain personality instrument from the International Personality Item Pool by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007). Sentimentality is the fourth facet of the Emotionality dimension and measures the degree to which individuals experience emotional resonance with others' feelings, respond affectively to sad narratives, and show empathic sensitivity to strangers' suffering. Items assess emotional contagion, sentimental crying, narrative sadness responsiveness, and sensitivity to social needs.
The Sentimentality facet captures the empathic-sentimental component of emotionality distinct from fear, anxiety, and dependence. Items assess emotional reactivity to interpersonal stimuli — friends' distress, movie sadness, strangers' misfortunes — rather than to personal threat or approval. The scale achieves a Cronbach's alpha of .79. Research demonstrates that Sentimentality predicts volunteering behavior, charitable giving, and empathic accuracy in social cognition tasks above and beyond the general Emotionality factor, providing meaningful incremental validity for this specific facet in prosocial behavior research.
Sentimentality vs. Empathy Quotient (EQ-Short): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Sentimentality (E-Sent) | Empathy Quotient (EQ-Short) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Empathic emotional resonance | Comprehensive cognitive-affective empathy |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 28 items (EQ-Short) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Academic research use |
| Alpha Reliability | .79 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.81 (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Sentimentality facet (E-Sent) 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 = .79) 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 Sentimentality (E-Sent) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the sentimentality 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 — Sentimentality Scale (E-Sent)
Is being highly sentimental actually a real liability in professional environments?
Research suggests it is more asset than liability when channelled consciously. High sentimentality strongly predicts empathic accuracy — the ability to correctly read others' emotional states — which is consistently valued in management, negotiation, and client-facing roles. Where it can become a liability is in high-volume emotional labour contexts — emergency medicine, social work, crisis intervention — where absorbing others' distress without adequate boundaries leads to compassion fatigue.
Why do some people cry at films they have already seen before even knowing what happens?
This illustrates high sentimentality at work. The emotional response is not primarily about information — it is about emotional resonance with the narrative. High-sentimentality individuals show stronger emotional contagion responses — their nervous system mirrors the emotional content of stories regardless of cognitive familiarity with the plot. Research also finds that people who experience emotional responses to fiction score higher on measures of social connectedness and long-term relationship investment.
Is this sentimentality scale culturally biased toward feminine emotional expression norms?
The IPIP-HEXACO Sentimentality items were validated across large cross-cultural samples including approximately equal numbers of men and women. While average sentimentality scores do show gender differences across most cultural samples — with women typically scoring somewhat higher — the scale measures the same underlying construct equally validly across genders. Men who score high on sentimentality show the same pattern of prosocial behaviour and relationship investment as women with comparable scores.
How does low sentimentality show up when someone close to you is going through something difficult?
Partners of low-sentimentality individuals often describe them as hard to reach emotionally — not because they do not care, but because their caring does not produce the visible emotional response that high-sentimentality people associate with genuine feeling. Low-sentimentality individuals often feel deeply but express it analytically or through actions rather than visible emotional reactions. This is a communication gap rather than an emotional deficit — the disconnect is about expression norms, not actual care.
Does this sentimentality profile replace a formal empathy or emotional intelligence evaluation?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Sentimentality scoring engine is an educational self-reflection worksheet for academic baseline purposes only. It does not measure emotional intelligence, empathy capacity, or interpersonal skill, and produces no formal conclusions about individual emotional functioning. Formal evaluation of empathy or emotional processing requires a qualified professional and appropriate validated instruments.