Measuring personality through emotions

In short: Profil-e does not ask people to describe themselves, and it does not put them in a box. It presents 18 work situations and reads, in the reactions people choose, an emotional signal that is continuous, anchored in time and readable at several scales. It describes how someone reacts today, not who they are.

A photo or a film

Profil-e’s promise fits in two lines: “Since 1950, we’ve been photographing personality. It was time to watch the film.”

A photo freezes one instant and ends up standing in for the whole person. A film shows someone in motion. Profil-e sides with the film. What it produces is a reading of how a person reacts emotionally, today, in work situations, not a portrait of who they are.

Emotions are already at work

Many of us learned early that performance is about preparation, execution and goals, and that emotions should be left at the door: Monday irritation, the fatigue of a meeting that drags on, the pride of a successful delivery.

Yet every working day is a web of interactions, and every interaction is coloured by what people feel. Emotions act like a pair of glasses: they filter reality before any thinking begins.

Coaches work in exactly this less visible zone. Until now, they have mostly relied on intuition and experience. Guessing someone’s emotional state from what they show is fragile, because what they show is precisely what they chose to show. Profil-e offers a measurement instead.

Two families of tools, two limits

Most assessment tools fall into one of two families.

Self-report tools ask people to describe themselves: “I’m an organized person,” “I enjoy working in a team.” They are sensitive to social desirability: the valued answer is easy to guess, and the temptation to polish it is strong.

Typological tools sort people into a category: a colour, an acronym, one of a handful of profiles. The format is appealing, but it can mistake a preference in a given context for a fixed identity. A label doesn’t move. A person does.

Profil-e is not trying to replace the tools people already know, or to contradict them. It measures something else: where classic tools measure behaviours and traits, Profil-e reads a signal.

What Profil-e does instead

Profil-e does not ask people to describe themselves. It presents 18 workplace situations and asks, for each one, how the person would react: first their spontaneous reaction, then the one they would choose if the first were unavailable. They then pick the 12 words that describe them best today, and rank them.

The situations are projective, so there is no need to have lived them. There is no right answer to guess, so there is nothing to polish. From these reactions, the engine derives an emotional signature, explained in detail on the page about what the questionnaire produces: the emotional signature.

Three properties a signal has and a label doesn’t

It is continuous. Each dimension runs from one pole to the other on a scale from 0 to 10, with the norm at the centre, 5. There is no border between “one kind of people” and “the other”: everyone sits somewhere along a line.

It is anchored in time. A signature describes the person today and is considered valid for 12 to 18 months. After that, a re-test shows what has shifted. Coaching exists to help things shift, and the 12-month re-test makes that visible.

It reads at several scales. The same signal describes one person, then the resonance between two people, then the dynamics of a team.

What Profil-e is not

Being clear about limits is part of the method.

• It is not a typology. Profil-e measures personality through its emotional dynamics, without sorting anyone into a type. When someone asks “So, what am I?”, the honest answer is: “You’re not a type. This is how you react, today.”
• It is not a diagnosis. No dimension describes a disorder or a condition. A position far from the norm is a distinctive position, nothing more.
• It is not a score. A high value is not “good” and a low value is not “bad”: each pole describes a way of operating.
• It is not a prediction. No dimension predicts work results, success in a role or difficulty. And the resonance between two people describes a relationship as it stands, not its fate.

A position does not explain why, either. The signature describes how a person reacts, never the cause.

What it changes in a coaching session

With many tools, coaches spend hours interpreting complex reports, and two coaches can read the same report differently. Profil-e takes the opposite approach: the engine does the calculation, and the engine also writes the text that comes with each result, using the same method for everyone.

So the coach’s work changes. It is no longer about interpreting. It is about relaying faithfully what the screen shows, then supporting the person in what they make of it. The coach presents the result in the screen’s own words, asks an open question, and lets the person connect it to their own situations.

You can hear the difference. The coach does not say: “You’re a very sociable person.” The coach says: “On Warmth, you’re above the norm. Here’s what the engine says about it. Does that sound like you?”

The reading does not replace the coaching relationship. It gives it a shared starting point: a screen that participant and coach look at together, using the same words. You walk into the session with a reading, not a hunch.

What the measurement rests on

All calculations are done by a separate psychometric engine; Profil-e sends the answers, receives the results and displays them. When the engine does not respond, Profil-e shows nothing rather than an approximate number. And when a measurement does not exist, the screen shows a dash and the reason, never a zero.

The method behind the engine comes from 20 years of research and has been validated with more than 2,500 participants from more than 25 nationalities. Each emotional mechanism it measures reaches a Cronbach’s alpha of at least 0.90. The number of situations is not arbitrary either: below 18, profile validity drops sharply. To learn more, read about the method and how it was validated.

Frequently asked questions

Is Profil-e a personality test?

Not in the sense of a typology. Profil-e measures personality through its emotional dynamics, without sorting anyone into a type. It reads a way of reacting emotionally in work situations, on continuous dimensions, at a given moment.

Can people polish their answers?

There is nothing to polish. The questionnaire does not ask people to describe themselves; it presents situations and asks how they would react. There is no right answer to guess.

Does Profil-e replace the assessment tools people already know?

No, and it does not contradict them. It measures something else: an emotional signal rather than behaviours or traits.

Do participants need to have lived the situations in the questionnaire?

No. The situations are projective: it is enough to imagine yourself in them.

Can results change?

Yes. A signature describes the person today and remains valid for 12 to 18 months; a re-test then shows what has evolved.

Want to work with a signal rather than labels? The Profil-e certification teaches you to relay a reading without interpreting it: see what the certification covers.