Confusing items on psychology test. Any psychologists out there?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently participated in a study at a nearby university. Among other things I had to fill out a long personality/psychological test. Part of it lists a quality and asks me to rate myself as having that quality on a scale of 1-10. Most of the qualities were given as two terms: “outgoing/sociable”, “sexy, sensual”, “humorous/playful” and mostly I didn’t object to the pairing of words but two qualities were

“stable/unemotional”
“dominant/assertive”

I wanted to rate myself as being highly stable but not as unemotional. I think I’m at least moderately assertive but hardly dominant. (for the purposes of rating I split the difference)

Do you agree that those words don’t go together? Do you think it was a mistake of English on the test makers’ part or a psychologists’ trick to trip up test takers?

2

I think that “unemotional” in this context means that you don’t fly into a rage or into fits of sobbing whenever you’re exposed to stimuli that affect your feelings. Most everyone other than true sociopaths experience some level of emotion; it’s just a matter of whether or not the response is inappropriate or not.

Dominant/assertive seem to go together just fine. Assertive people usually are dominant in most social situations.

3

Well since most Personality Testing has proved to be complete and utter bullshit, I would just forget about it.