The Serbian Validation of the Rational-Experiential Inventory-40 and the Rational-Experiential Multimodal Inventory

The widely used Rational-Experiential Inventory-40 (REI-40) assesses Rational and Experiential thinking styles. Recently, the authors have distinguished three aspects of the Experiential style: Intuition, Emotionality and Imagination and developed the Rational-Experiential Multimodal Inventory (REIm). In this study, we examined the internal consistency, structural/factorial, discriminant and known-groups validity of both REI-40 and REIm, in two samples of Serbian students. Participants in Study 1 (N = 819, mean age M = 19.81, 31% males) completed REI-40 and HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO-PI-R), while participants in Study 2 (N = 304, mean age M = 19.47, 29% males) completed REIm, HEXACO-PI-R and Disintegration inventory DELTA. The internal consistency of both REI version subscales was acceptable to good. The results of CFA analyses indicated an acceptable fit for REI-40, while the structural validity of REIm was poor. Both REI-40 subscales (Rationality and Experientiality), as well as REIm Intuition demonstrated only a small content overlap with basic personality traits, while REIm Experientiality, Emotionality and Imagination correlated highly with Openness and Emotionality. We also observed some gender differences in the expected direction.