JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT, 89(2), 188–196 Copyright C  2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The Cross-Cultural Generalizability of Zuckerman’s Alternative Five-Factor Model of Personality J´ erˆ ome Rossier Institute of Psychology University of Lausanne, Switzerland Anton Aluja and Luis F. Garc´ ıa Department of Pedagogy and Psychology University of Lleida, Spain Alois Angleitner Department of Psychology University of Bielefeld, Germany Vilfredo De Pascalis Department of Psychology University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy Wei Wang Department of Medical Psychology Zhejiang University, China Michael Kuhlman and Marvin Zuckerman Department of Psychology University of Delaware The aim of this study was to analyze the cross-cultural generalizability of the Alternative five- factor model (AFFM; Zuckerman, Kuhlman, & Camac, 1988). The total sample was made up of 9,152 subjects from six countries: China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. The internal consistencies for all countries were generally similar to those found for the normative American sample. Factor analyses within cultures showed that the normative American structure was replicated in all cultures; however, the congruence coefficients were slightly lower in China and Italy. A similar analysis at the facet level confirmed the high cross-cultural replicability of the AFFM. Mean-level comparisons did not always show the hypothesized effects. The mean score differences across countries were very small. The Five-factor model (FFM; McCrae & John, 1992) is a hierarchical model based on an empirical generalization about the covariation of personality traits (Digman, 1990). This model postulates that five dimensions named Neu- roticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeable- ness, and Conscientiousness adequately map these person- ality traits (McCrae & Costa, 1985, 1999). A large consen- sus exists about the FFM (Rossier, Meyer de Stadelhofen, & Berthoud, 2004), and these five dimensions are similar to the Big Five identified in numerous lexical studies (De Raad, 2000). According to the Five-factor theory (McCrae & Costa, 1999), these dimensions are biologically rooted, pointing to evidence that the five factors and their structure are heritable (McCrae, Jang, Livesley, Riemann, & Angleit- ner, 2001). Because all people share the same human genome, Five-factor theory claims that certain characteristics of traits,