the styles being most similar along dimensions of (1) social domi-
nance-submissiveness and (2) emotionality-restraint. Reasoning in
a related study that a measure of private self-consciousness should
relate to an Artistic personality and, to a lesser degree to an Inves-
tigative or Social type, Carson and Mowesian (1993a) extracted
samples of each of the six Holland types from existing SII files and
sent the subjects a mailing. A private self-consciousness scale, a self-
monitoring scale, and demographic questions were included. Re-
turns from 139 (35 percent) of the sample revealed a very clear
pattern of predicted correlations between private self-consciousness
and Investigative and Artistic type for men and Artistic type for
women. The study also replicated previous findings on the relation
between self-monitoring and the Enterprising and Social types.
Finally, Holland, Johnston, and Asama (1994) found that Open-
ness to Experience was correlated .62 with Investigative for men
and .43 for women and .50 and .44 with Artistic for men and
women. Extraversion was correlated .40 and .51, with Enterprising
for men and women and .31 and .39 for Social.
Thus interests and personality overlap to a considerable degree
when pathology is minimal (Borgen, 1986); psychopathology, as
opposed to personality, has a minimal impact of vocational outcomes,
except in the extreme. As Holland has repeatedly alleged, then,
“interest inventories are personality inventories” (Holland, 1997,
p. 8). Yet even at the .50 to .60 range, the relationship between the
two domains suggests that each is measuring at least some unique
component of the individual’s makeup. Hogan and Blake (1999), in
a particularly insightful contribution, suggest that personality assess-
ment “reflects the individual viewed from the perspective of an ob-
server” (that is, reputation or perspective external to the individual),
whereas interest “reflects the perspective of the actor” (that is, iden-
tity or internal perspective). This possibility, which should be exam-
ined empirically, explains both the overlap and the uniqueness of
personality and interests. If this perspective proves accurate, the rela-
tionship between the two domains could be richly explored both
theoretically and practically. For the moment, however, interests
HOLLAND’S THEORY 403