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Dominance is an important concept in psychology. It Is almost unavoidable in 
observational research of children’s social development, as evident in the preceding historical 
review. Dominance also appears very regularly in personality research. One of the first 
personality scales ever created was the Ascendance-Submission Scale (Allport, 1928; Allport & 
Allport, 1928). Dominance appears in the California Psychological inventory (Megargee, 1 972). 
It appears in Edward’s (1959) Personal Preference Schedule and Jackson's (1967/1985) ) 
Personality Research Form, both of which are based on Murray's (1938) theory of personality. 
Dominance also appears in the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey (Guilford & 
Zimmerman, 1956), which is a factor analytic condensation from the items of many earlier 
personality tests. 
Dominance has been claimed to be culturally universal. Russell and Mehrabian (1977), 
Mehrabian (1980), Biggers and Rankis (1983) and others have argued that dominance along with 
pleasure and arousal, account for all emotional states. These three emotional dimensions were 
based on the universal semantic differential dimensions of potency, evaluation, and activity, 
respectively, identified by Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum (1957). Based on a multinational 
survey of IBM personnel, Hofstede (1980) argued that one of the universal dimensions of 
cultures is Power-Distance, which he defined as societal authoritarianism and described 
operationally as preference for or against dominating supervision. Hofstede and Bond (1984) 
have validated this claim with cross-cultural research using Rokeach’s Value Survey, and 
Adamopoulos (1984) has reinforced this claim with other evidence that 
superordination-subordination is a universal dimension. 
The psychological literature on dominance is indeed large, too large to be reviewed here. 
However, there are definitional issues to be addressed. Allport and Allport (1928) defined 
dominance as ascendancy and described it as a form of aggression. Hanfmann (1935) 
recognized that dominance encompasses different patterns of behavior and is capable of being 
expressed in different ways. She defined positive dominance as leadership, distinct from 
negative dominance based on power, force and coercion. Maslow (1937) defined dominance 
as assErtivenass, Eisenberg (1937) extended Maslow’s work to describe four sub-syndromes 
of dominance: tyranny, cooperative control, leadership, and autonomy. Anderson (1940) 
reviewed this early work and made the objection that dominance was being used with varied