Life-Line purports to use proven psychological methods to measure four personality characteristics: Autocracy is your tendency to take the initiative and get results, Social Skills is your ability to make friends and influence people. Persistence is the ability to join with others to finish the task in hand, while Precision is attention to detail and ability to finish a job to a high standard.

The program measures these by displaying sets of four words from which you must pick the word which is most like you and the one which is least like you. The choice is not always easy as the words are chosen at random, but the program does tell you not to think too hard.

Your results are plotted in a clever Mode 7 barchart and are applied to the three sides of your character: Assumed is the image you would like others to see, Natural is your real self and Self-Image is how you see yourself.

When the final results have been displayed, the three aspects are scored against 17 character types. These include categories such as Leader, Advertiser, Tactician, Helper, Convincer and Forceful - one or two types will usually dominate. The manual describes them in more detail, and also suggests possible careers and ways to improve yourself.

Your three character types may not have the same characteristics, but the closer they all are, the more balanced and at ease with yourself you are.

I tried the program on myself several times. The word lists are different each time you run it so you still have to think about each set. Each run produced slightly different results too, but they were close enough to show a definite trend towards one personality type with shades of another.

All my friends who tried it agreed that the results were fairly accurate, although the careers advice was usually way off target - or was it their chosen professions that were wrong?

The program can produce a printout of the analysis and comparing all our results showed a fairly close similarity of types between all my guinea pigs - sorry, friends. Which either proves that birds of a feather... or that the program has a bias towards normal, well-balanced people.

Life-Line is great fun, although you would only use it once or twice. You need lots of friends to get your money's worth out of it. It could find a use in schools or colleges: Not giving career advice - it's nowhere near sophisticated enough for that - but to promote discussion of social skills or even raise money at fairs.

If you enjoy filling in questionnaires you'll enjoy this. It could be used to break the ice at parties and even take over from Trivial Pursuit.

Ian Waugh