OBJECTIVE (a) To define the nuclear characteristics of the melancholic type of personality (TM), that in European and Japanese psychopathological tradition is considered the model which most accurately describes the social behavior of unipolar depressives, through clear, valid, and synthetic criteria (criteria for TM = CTM); (b) to evaluate the diagnostic power, reliability, internal consistency, and other psychometric properties of these criteria. METHODS Personality features of 115 unipolar depressives consecutively admitted to 2 psychiatric facilities were assessed with the CTM and with the Kasahara Scale (KS). Four further unipolar depressives were assessed with the CTM by 13 different raters (11 CTM-naive and 2 experienced). RESULTS The CTM have shown high reliability and internal consistency. They were also highly concordant with the KS scores. CONCLUSIONS The CTM can discriminate between TMs and non-TMs and suggests that the TM kind of personality is not a dimensional concept but a coherent structure in which one feature entails the presence of all the others.