Grounded in real psychology: the four lenses
To turn a conversation into something you can see, Elevate reads your words through four well-established lenses from psychology. None is a test or a verdict. Each is a vocabulary for naming what is already in what you say. Together they feed your Twin: traits for who you tend to be, values for what you weigh, patterns for the loops you fall into, and attachment for how you bond.
The Big Five (OCEAN)
The most empirically validated map of personality: five broad traits on which everyone sits somewhere, not in boxes.
In Elevate:Durable tendencies you express, such as curiosity, drive, sociability, warmth and sensitivity, become trait nodes, each anchored to one of the five dimensions.
- Openness: curiosity, imagination, appetite for the new
- Conscientiousness: organization, discipline, follow-through
- Extraversion: energy drawn from the outer, social world
- Agreeableness: warmth, trust, cooperation
- Neuroticism: sensitivity to stress and negative emotion
Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values
Ten universal values arranged in a circle, where neighbours are compatible and opposites pull against each other.
In Elevate:What you care about becomes value nodes. When two of your values sit on opposite sides of the circle, Elevate draws a tension (an 'oppose' edge) between them. These are the felt trade-offs you actually live.
- Self-Direction · Stimulation · Hedonism
- Achievement · Power
- Security · Conformity · Tradition
- Benevolence · Universalism
Young's Early Maladaptive Schemas
Self-defeating themes that form early and quietly repeat in adult life: the recurring 'scripts' behind a stuck pattern.
In Elevate:Repeating patterns you describe are named against Young's schemas (e.g. Unrelenting Standards, Abandonment). This is a descriptive lens on a loop, never a label you 'have'.
- e.g. Unrelenting Standards: nothing is ever good enough
- e.g. Abandonment: expecting closeness to be lost
- e.g. Subjugation: surrendering your needs to others
- …18 schemas in five domains
Attachment Theory
How early bonds shape the way you seek and hold closeness as an adult: your default stance in relationships.
In Elevate:Relational and affective nodes are anchored to an attachment style, giving your map a way to hold how you relate, not just how you think.
- Secure: comfortable with closeness and autonomy
- Anxious: craving closeness, fearing its loss
- Avoidant: valuing independence over intimacy
- Disorganized: closeness felt as both need and threat
How it works, technically
For anyone who wants to look under the hood, here is what actually happens to a message.
- 01
Extraction from the conversation
Each message is read by a language model against the four frameworks. What you express becomes candidate nodes: traits, values, patterns, triggers. The relationships between them become candidate edges.
- 02
Correspondence with a framework rule
Every node is anchored to a specific reference in one of the frameworks (e.g. BigFive:Openness, Schwartz:Achievement, Young:UnrelentingStandards, Attachment:Anxious): the rule it is judged to match.
- 03
Weighting, not certainty
Each edge carries a weight from 0 to 1 for how strongly your own words support it. Causal links, like a trigger firing a pattern or a self-reinforcing loop, are deliberately down-weighted unless you state the cause yourself, and the model is instructed to stay silent rather than invent a connection.
- 04
Grounded and traceable
Every edge keeps a one-sentence rationale drawn strictly from what you said, and every node keeps its framework anchor, so each connection traces back to the theory it rests on and the wording that supports it. None of it is an assumption added on your behalf.
- 05
Non-destructive updates
Node identities are recomputed deterministically, so the same idea never duplicates. An update keeps and enriches what is already there, removes only what a new message directly contradicts, and never wipes your map on an empty read. Every revision is saved as a timestamped snapshot, so your map's evolution is preserved rather than overwritten.
These lenses rest on decades of peer-reviewed work: McCrae & John (1992) for the Big Five, Schwartz (1992) for basic values, Young, Klosko & Weishaar (2003) for schemas, and Bowlby & Ainsworth for attachment.
Further reading
- McCrae & John (1992): An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications.
- Schwartz (1992): Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: the ten basic values.
- Young, Klosko & Weishaar (2003): Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide, on early maladaptive schemas.
- Ainsworth & Bell (1970): Attachment, Exploration, and Separation: the foundations of attachment styles.
- Bennett-Levy et al. (2004): Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy.
- Deci & Ryan (2000): Self-Determination Theory: the psychology of motivation and goals.
- Pennebaker (1997): Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process.
Frameworks are applied as descriptive lenses, in line with each theory's intended use. Elevate is not affiliated with these authors or publishers.