Cognitive-based approaches to social and personality psychology have studied the structure of trait constructs in memory. The bipolar view of traits suggests that the activation of a trait construct such as "hostile" should be associated with the simultaneous activation of its semantic opposite "kind." The unipolar view, in contrast, can be summarized in terms of construct activation, but not activation of the construct's opposite semantic associates in the referent cognitive structure. A study was conducted to examine the representation and span of accessible trait constructs and, in particular, trait construct polarity. Undergraduates (N=43) completed a construct accessibility measure and, one month later, completed behavior generation and evaluative ratings tasks. Complete data were analyzed from subjects (N=34) who generated examples of behaviors describing people who had certain traits in the behavior generation task, and subjects (N=39) who rated the extent to which various statements were typically true or not true of themselves in the evaluative ratings task. The results generally support a bipolar trait representation across tasks. An important exception to this finding was obtained for positively valenced constructs in the behavior generation task. The results suggest that task may influence the structure of accessible trait constructs such that more complex processing leads to more polarized trait conceptions. Further, valence may impact on information elaboration about accessible trait constructs. (NB)