Cross-cultural personality research is about understanding individual differences within and across cultural borders. A recurrent issue in this context is traceable in two dominant research lines—one emphasizing theorizing, structuring, and modelling personality applicable in all cultures and the other emphasizing the value of indigenous ideas, trait-dimensions or facets, and other culture-specific findings (cf. Cheung, van de Vijver, & Leong, 2011; Church, 2000, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Some of these latter authors (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1998) have particularly questioned the dominating (Western) view of personality. Others (e.g., Cheung et al., 2011; Church, 2000) have argued in favor of an approach that integrates the two.
The Western emphasis is often illustrated alongside the individualist-collectivist distinction, apparently containing an ideal for the very concept of “personality” located on the individualist pole of the dimension, to be conceived of as independent and autonomous. The flavor of the “collectivist,” cultural, or “Asian” position is to be found in personhood being seen as interdependent, as being part of a larger social-cultural context, and with less motivation for self-enhancement. From such different perspectives, “individualistic” traits may be given greater relevance with greater exposition of related facets in Western contexts, and “collectivistic” traits may be given greater relevance in Asian contexts.
For different reasons (e.g., climato-economic, cf. Van de Vliert, Chapter 5 in Volume 3 of this book set), cultures may have developed their own distinctive, interpretive frameworks that give meaning and coherence to behaviors, emotions, dispositions, and cognitions. Once adopted, such frameworks may form the background of daily existence and co-define the way people organize and value behaviors, thoughts, and ideas of self and others (cf. Markus, 2004). The two different research lines (within and across borders) have frequently been characterized in terms of the etic-emic metaphor, with etic representing the supposedly objective or universal (across borders) position and emic representing the indigenous or cultural (within borders) position.
Between persons, groups, and cultures there may be differences in explanatory mechanisms and in the extent to which contextual explanations play a role. Moreover, people from different contexts or cultures may differ in observing behaviors as being relevant or meaningful. This does not mean that culture-specific behaviors or ideas have no meaning across the borders; on the contrary, not only may one assume that the meaning of unfamiliar behaviors can be communicated to other cultures, such meanings may also enrich one’s own culture and open new perspectives.
For the advancement of theory in personality and the application of findings across borders, it is important to find common ground through establishing pan-cultural patterns of individual differences. Culture-specific expressions of individual differences are more easily distinguished against the background of such universals, and they can be methodologically embedded by emphasizing their salience.
The psycholexical approach to personality assumes that traits or individual differences found important by people are represented in language (Goldberg, 1981). The approach most frequently focuses on adjectives, since they form the linguistic category most typically used to describe qualities of objects and persons. The approach agrees fully with an emic orientation in that individual differences observed in a culture are studied bottom-up by exploiting the lexicon of the language of that culture and by organizing the culture-specific language of personality in a comprehensive way.
The psycholexical approach is typically associated historically with Allport and Odbert (1936), Cattell (1943), and Goldberg (1981). Characteristic of that approach is the systematic use of tangible repositories of the lexicon of a language in order to arrive at full and comprehensive tabulations of all lingual expressions that can be used to describe personality. Those repositories are evidently most often dictionaries. Yet, there are other forms of documentation that can be exploited for this purpose, such as magazines, films, and books (e.g., Passakos & De Raad, 2009), and there are other ways to arrive at reasonably complete lists of descriptors, such as free descriptions (e.g., Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde, & Havill, 1998; Valchev, van de Vijver, Nel, Rothmann, & Meiring, 2013) and the generation of personality-descriptive items to capture the meanings of preconceived constructs of personality (e.g., Eysenck, 1991). Ultimately, such alternative approaches all tap into the lexicon of a language.
The psycholexical approach has been applied in many languages, each ultimately resulting in a trait structure that is assumed to capture the most important trait dimensions of that language. Those “emic” trait structures frequently reflect semantics with a common ground, most often put forward in terms of the Big Five model of traits, constituted by the five factors: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect or Openness to Experience (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1981, 1990). Those factors are hypothesized to cover the most important semantics of individual differences across languages. Comparisons of emic trait structures also frequently show language-specific findings, in dimensions, in facets of dimensions, and in combinations of trait-clusters, thus showcasing the emic sensitivity of the psycholexical approach.
From the onset when Big Five dimensions were repeatedly found (Fiske, 1949; Norman, 1963; Tupes & Christal, 1961), notions of universality were soon attributed to the psycholexical approach, especially to its major finding of replicable dimensions (e.g., Bond, Nakazato, & Shiraishi, 1975). This was soon followed by Costa and McCrae’s (1992) development of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). This measure of the Big Five, referred to by Costa and McCrae as the Five-Factor Model (FFM), was rapidly translated into an increasing number of languages and widely adopted as a standard for assessing the Big Five. The inventory leaves much to be desired in terms of the number and difficulty of items, the content-validity of the facets per factor, and the origin of the specific contents of the fifth factor. Nonetheless, the use of the NEO-PI-R in so many different research and applied contexts gave an enormous boost to the field of personality.
Cross-cultural psychologists have often endorsed the universality of psychological characteristics, as can be seen in cross-cultural studies on dimensions such as achievement motivation, anxiety, and authoritarianism (Church, 2000). With Big Five measures there is no exception. There has been excellent cross-cultural research with the Big Five through validation of imported measures in sometimes dozens of distinct languages (e.g., Hendriks et al., 2003; McCrae et al., 2005). Yet, translated instruments tend to be relatively insensitive to detect individual differences of interest in the target language (cf. Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 2002). Ashton and Lee (2001), for example, found that certain Openness to Experience facets of the FFM were not very applicable in many Asian samples.
Generally, the successful use of imported measures may demonstrate that it is relatively easy to translate personality constructs from one language into the other and to have those constructs understood. However, it does not mean that people are comfortable with using imported constructs; they may feel that there are more optimal ways to make sense of behavior of self or other (cf. Lin & Church, 2004).
The 30 or so trait taxonomies that have been performed thus far do cover a rather restricted number of languages, mainly belonging to the Indo-European language family (see, De Raad et al., 2014). Many more lexical studies are needed in non-Indo-European languages, especially in Asia and Africa, to arrive at a stage where one might start to talk about global research findings and draw tentative conclusions on a proper cross-culturally valid trait structure. More indigenous studies in Africa, Asia, and South America may also give additional insight into more culturally typical trait characteristics. It should be added, though, that there are diminishing returns especially in areas (e.g., Europe) where many neighboring languages are studied for their personality lexicon.
Notwithstanding the supportive findings for the Big Five in the literature thus far, the various trait structures that were independently obtained in the different languages according to the psycholexical approach have shown too much variation to conclude the presence of a one-for-all cross-culturally canonical structure. Rather, the Big Five seem clearly replicable in certain languages (mainly Indo-European and European-American languages), less clearly replicable in certain other languages (usually more remote from the European-American languages) such as Filipino, Chinese, or Persian, and rather deviant in still other languages, such as Hindi.
With no canonical solution for a trait structure to be expected, it seems to make more sense to focus on a consensually acceptable model that does justice to central trait concerns in most languages and that may play a role in the development of instruments that are useful in integrated emic-etic research and practice (cf. Cheung et al., 2011).
A consensual model may be achieved with a less ambitious goal than the replication of the Big Five factors in most or all languages. Rather, we might search for a smaller set of differentiating factors that might indeed be identified across all languages. Such a smaller set of dimensions can be amplified with regional factors or facets. The Big Five form a strong case for additional factors beyond that smaller set but are likely more relevant in America and Europe than elsewhere. Ashton et al. (2004) gave evidence of a strong factor beyond the Big Five, namely Honesty-Humility, relevant in certain languages. Cheung et al. (2001) and Fung and Ng (2006) gave evidence of another factor beyond the Big Five, namely Interpersonal Relatedness (IR), found relevant not only in China but, for example, also in Canada (cf. Hill et al., 2013, for a similar construct, namely Relationship Harmony in South Africa).
Systematic cross-cultural integrated emic-etic studies using a good variety of languages or cultures have shown the omnipresence of such a smaller set of factors, namely structures with two factors (Saucier et al., 2014) and three factors (De Raad et al., 2010, 2014; Peabody & De Raad, 2002).
It is of great importance for the advancement of the psycholexical approach to taxonomize personality traits in a large variety of languages that represent the many language families, languages, cultures, and geographical regions of the world. The selection of languages may well be done using language families as a convenient stratification of the population of languages. Each new trait taxonomy not only adds to a better understanding of the trait language and to the dimensional specification of the trait model but also forms a rich resource and a springboard for measurement instruments within its language domain.
The main rationale of the psycholexical approach that had, according to Allport and Odbert (1936), a “portion of plausibility” is the lexical hypothesis (Goldberg, 1981), holding that traits or individual differences found important by people are represented or will be represented in language:
Those individual differences that are of most significance in the daily transactions of persons with each other will eventually become encoded into their language. The more important is such a difference, the more people will notice it and wish to talk of it, with the result that eventually they will invent a word for it. (Goldberg, 1981, pp. 141–142)
Quite similar propositions have been made by Austin (1970), Themerson (1974), and Miller (1991), the first being a philosopher, the second a poet, and the third a psycholinguist. Trait words, such as “egoistic,” “aggressive,” or “shy,” have proven their use in many different contexts and cultures, for which reason they ended up in the lexicon: they have shown to be useful vehicles in the communication on what moves and inspires people. The more often a trait or disposition in the behavior of people is observed, the greater is the chance that the trait is labeled and that it becomes a communicative commodity. The lexical hypothesis was formulated to be applicable to single languages. Adapting Goldberg’s (1981, pp. 141–142) language, we generalize the kernel idea of the hypothesis to languages of the world as follows:
If individual differences in personality are considered important, then language(s) will have lexical expressions or invent lexical expressions (most typically single words) to communicate on those differences. The more important is such a difference across languages, the more people will notice it and wish to talk of it, with the result that in more languages people eventually invent a word for it.
In order to arrive at a full understanding of trait differentiation as sedimented in the languages, a task ahead for personality researchers is to tabulate all personality-trait-relevant words and expressions for the various languages and to bring order in the trait vocabularies through the use of an intelligible classification.
It is virtually impossible to determine the exact number of languages in the world. Lewis, Simons, and Fennig (2014), in their 17th edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the world, estimated that there are some 7,100 living languages, with the smallest number (285) in Europe, the largest number (2,300) in Asia, and the second-largest in Africa (2,100). Many languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people, with, on average, African languages spoken by close to 400,000 speakers, Asian languages by 1.6 million, and European languages by close to 6 million speakers.
With regard to vocabularies of personality, it seems to make sense, for practical purposes, to give preference to psycholexical studies in languages that are spoken by a certain minimum number of speakers. In Table 6.1, languages with at least 3 million speakers are tabulated according to language families and their branches. There are quite some differences of opinion with respect to the definition of language families, but we accepted a construction that was suitable for the present purposes. The Altaic group, for example, is still a disputed language family for linguists. For our purposes it is just fine.
Most of the languages spoken in Europe (except Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian: they belong to the Uralic family) belong to the Indo-European family of languages. In addition to Europe, Indo-European languages are also spoken in the American continents, in most South Asian countries, in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Asiatic Russia. They are also dominant in Australia and New Zealand, and in Africa they are spoken in some countries (Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, Afrikaans in South Africa). The largest number of languages is spoken in the vast continent of Asia, with the languages belonging to Indo-European, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Afro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai (predominates in Thailand) language families.
| Language Family | Branch | Languages |
|---|---|---|
| Indo-European 2,910 million | Indo-Aryan | Bengali (211), Hindi (181), Marathi (68), Punjabi (61), Urdu (61), Gujarati (46), Oriya (32), Maithili (25), Sindhi (21), Nepali (17), Assamese (15), Sinhalese (13), Kashmiri (5) |
| Indo-Iranian | Farsi (25), Pashto (19), Kurdish (12), Dari (8), Balochi (7), Tajik (4), Gilaki (3), Mazanderani (3) | |
| Hellenic | Greek (12) | |
| Italic | Spanish (322), Portuguese (178), French (65), Italian (62), Romanian (24), Catalan (7) | |
| Germanic | English (309), German (95), Dutch (17), Swedish (9), Afrikaans (6), Norwegian (5) | |
| Baltic | Lithuanian (3) | |
| Slavic | Russian (150), Polish (43), Ukrainian (37), Czech (12), Serbian (11), Belarusian (9), Bulgarian (9), Croatian (6), Slovak (5), Bosnian (4) | |
| Albanian | Albanian (5) | |
| Armenian | Armenian (7) | |
| Uralic 20 million |
Finno-Ugric | Hungarian (14), Finnish (5) |
| Afro-Asiatic 380 million |
Semitic | Arabic (206), Amharic (18), Hebrew (5), Tigrinya (5) |
| Berber | Tachelhit (3), Tamazight (3), Kabyle (3) | |
| Cushitic | Somali (13), Oromo (13) | |
| Chadic | Hausa (24) | |
| Niger-Congo 437 million |
Mande | Pular (3), Bambara (3) |
| Benue-Congo | Swahili (60), Yoruba (20), Igbo (18), Shona (11), Zulu (10), Nyanja (7), Kinyarwanda (7), Xhosa (7), Luba-Kasai (6), Gikuyo (5), Southern Sotho (5), Rundi (5), Tswana (4), Umbundu (4), Northern Sotho (4), Tsonga (3), Ganda (3), Lingala (3), Mbundu (3) | |
| Atlantic | Fula (12), Wolof (4) | |
| Gur | Moore (5) | |
| Kwa | Akan (8), Ewe (3) | |
| Nilo-Saharan 42 million |
Luo (4), Kanuri (4), Kalenijn (3) | |
| Dravidian 229 million |
Telugu (70), Tamil (66), Kannada (35), Malayalam (35) | |
| Altaic 370 million |
Turkic | Turkish (70), Azeri (25), Uzbek (24), Kazakh (12), Uyghur (10), Turkmen (6), Tatar (5), Kyrgyz (3) |
| Mongolic | Mongolian (5) | |
| Koreanic | Korean (67) | |
| Japonic | Japanese (123) | |
| Sino-Tibetan 1,268 million |
Chinese | Mandarin (875), Wu (77), Yue (71), Min Nan (46), Jinyu (45), Xiang (36), Hakka (30), Gan (21), Min Bei (10), Min Dong (9) |
| Tibeto-Burman | Burmish (35), Loloish (5) | |
| Tai-Kadai 80 million |
Thai (40), Zhuang (14), Shan (3), Lao (3) | |
| Austroasiatic 103 million |
Vietnamese (68), Khmer (7), Santali (6) | |
| Austronesian 323 million |
Western | Javanese (76), Sundanese (27), Indonesian (23), Cebuano (20), Malay (18), Tagalog (16), Madurese (14), Ilocano (8), Hiligaynon (7), Minangkabau (7), Malagasy (6), Banjar (6), Bali (4), Buginese (4), Malay Pattani (3), Acehnese (3) |
| Amerindian 20 million |
Quechuan | Quechua (8) |
| Tupian | Guarani (5) | |
| Caucasian 8 million |
Kartvelian | Georgian (4) |
Note. Numbers in parentheses are numbers of speakers in millions; languages in bold refer to languages in which psycholexical studies have been conducted. |
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Sixty percent of the population of Africa speaks a Niger-Congo language of which Swahili is largest. Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken in a central belt extending westward from east of Lake Victoria through southern Sudan and Chad, parts of Niger and Nigeria up to Mali in West Africa.
Besides English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, in North and South America there is an additional rich set of languages mainly spoken by native Americans, the Amerind languages.
Considering the distribution of languages, the numbers of speakers per language and per language family, and the availability of psycholexical trait studies (indicated in boldface in Table 6.1), one may conclude that the world’s languages are disproportionately represented in psycholexical studies. With a focus on the languages with a larger number of speakers, the Indo-European family is comparatively well represented in psycholexical studies, except for the Indo-Aryan and the Indo-Iranian branches, which are each represented in just one lexical study. Also, the Uralic family, the Afro-Asiatic family, the Altaic family, and the Sino-Tibetan family are represented in lexical studies.
Besides the really grand (in terms of numbers of speakers) Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Bengali, Punjabi) and maybe the Indo-Iranian Pashto, good candidates for future lexical representation might be found in Niger-Congo (e.g., Swahili, Yoruba), Dravidian (e.g., Telegu, Tamil), Tai-Kadai (Thai), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese), and Austronesian (e.g., Javanese, Sundanese) languages. Lexical studies in these languages would help complete the representation in the psycholexical enterprise.
Trait words are often contaminated by their context of origin; such trait words may not be fully appreciated in other contexts, because people in those contexts are not educated with the relevant interpretative frameworks from where those trait words are given meaning. This may be the case in a certain language or culture or in sets of languages or cultures. Quite a few words that are developed in, for example, the clinical arena to describe in detail the many different facets of neurotic behavior have found their way into the everyday lexicon, where they then build up their own practical semantics. Words from the past may be evaluated differently in the present or may become more or less salient. For example, there is some recent movement (e.g., Cain, 2012) toward the rehabilitation of the introvert, who had turned into a socially poor and eccentric person, after being considered as the educated and inwardly rich person more than half a century ago. Words can even take on their opposite meaning. For example, the word “temperament” originally stood for balance but is now generally understood to refer to a person who is lively beyond balance.
Across remote languages, such problems may become more pregnant. Asch (1955) has given nice examples of the use of the same words describing the same or different psychological properties in languages from different language families (Hebrew, Greek, Chinese, Thai, Malayalam, Hausa). The word “straight” refers to honesty and righteousness in all given languages; “crooked” stands for dishonesty. But there is also variation: “Hot”, for example, means rage in Hebrew, enthusiasm in Chinese, sexual arousal or worry in Thai, and energy in Hausa. “Cold” means self-possession in Hebrew, indifference in Chinese, loneliness in Thai, and laziness in Hausa.
A Swahili word for “outgoing” does not exist (H. Garrashi, personal communication, July, 2016). The translation dictionary gives, for example, the expression “being generous” or “being happy.” Yet, the corresponding “outgoing” behavior is readily observed in the Swahilian context, but it is also attached with evaluative and moral considerations. It is not generally appreciated to “go out,” especially not if it means going out to places occupied with people of mixed gender. It may reasonably be assumed that in such an evaluatively restricted context, outgoing behavior is not described in its various possible facets (as in some other languages), except maybe in a negative sense. Culture may thus be of influence on the expression of traits.
Not only single trait terms may malfunction in a cross-cultural communication. The very concept of personality is subject to similar restrictions. In Chinese and Japanese, for example, personality seems to imply a reference to social norms and is seen as part of a social network, while in Western conceptions personality is independent and autonomous (cf. Markus, 2004). Cross-cultural psycholexical comparisions should therefore be done with cultural-contextual mindfulness, especially regarding expressions that have a metaphorical origin.
The lexical approach started in Europe, when Galton (1884) planted the seed of the lexical hypothesis and was the first to observe that the dictionary of the natural language could serve as a resource of various aspects of character. Nonetheless it took a long time for the approach to return to its continent of origin. Before the widely cited work of Allport and Odbert (1936) in the United States, Rümelin (1890), in Germany, was the first to corroborate Galton’s hypothesis, stressing indeed that expressions of character can be scientifically explored through the analysis of the natural language. It took another three decades before Klages (1926/1932) elaborated the value of the natural language, and his estimation was that the German language contained around 4,000 words that could be useful in studying personality. The first empirical test of Klages’s estimation in the German language resulted in a much smaller set of 941 adjectives and 688 personality-relevant nouns (Baumgarten, 1933). After these early efforts, interest in the lexical approach waned in Europe, found fertile ground in the United States starting with Allport and Odbert’s work, and returned to Europe some 40 years later.
The extention of the lexical hypothesis to the diverse languages of the world demands a differential appreciation of what may be observed in distinct languages. Allport and Odbert (1936) studied what was between the covers of the 1925 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary. The term “international” refers to pronunciation instructions to an international readership and not to coverage of international words. Yet, Allport and Odbert were well aware of the contextual dependency of certain trait words, with contexts stemming from astrology, Galenian medicine, the Protestant Reformation, politics, self-analysis literature, and so forth. These historical contexts all produced their own typical trait words. Moreover, quite a few trait words in American English have their origin in other languages (e.g., French, Italian, German, Spanish), as also indicated in Allport and Odbert’s list of trait words.
While Allport and Odbert (1936) facilitated subsequent pycholexical studies with their extensive list of trait names, later exploitations of that list by Cattell (1943) and Norman (1967) involved selections of the most appropriate terms. Most of the context-specific words, as mentioned earlier, were removed from trait lists that ultimately led to the Big Five because of their relative unfamiliarity and low frequency of use. This cleansing of the masterpool of traits agreed with one of the four exclusion criteria formulated by Norman (1967, p. 4), involving the removal of terms that “are quite clearly so seldom used in contemporary discourse, pertain to such obscure literary, historical, or mythological referents, or derive from archaic or little known dialects.” Individual languages each may have their own low endorsement trait words that do not make it to the final list, but across languages such terms may still accumulate and be recognized as sufficiently recurrent. The psycholexical procedure may thus form a certain constraint in the identification of traits. The combination of the early (i.e., Norman, 1963) acceptance of the Big Five model and those procedural constraints may have formed an unintended imposition in the exploitation of new languages for trait-taxonomic purposes. The psycholexical methodology developed later (cf. Angleitner, Ostendorf, & John, 1990; Brokken, 1978; De Raad, 1992) hopefully allayed those restrictions.
The “generalized” lexical hypothesis might lead to the exclusion of terms or concepts that are used in a relatively small number of cultural contexts or languages, just as is the case within single languages. Therefore, it is of great importance to be accommodative to trait descriptors that are less salient or are relatively non-frequent.
Goldberg (1981, 1982, 1990) not only laid the foundation for the contemporary psycholexical methodology but also gave the small-scale-based Norman (1963) Big Five new life in large-scale studies. Goldberg (1982, 1990) not only used the self-ratings collected by Norman on 1,710 adjectives but also collected self- and peer-ratings on subsets of that list of adjectives in different samples, all bringing Goldberg (1990, p. 1223) to write that “it now seems reasonable to conclude that analyses of any reasonable large sample of English trait adjectives in either self- or peer-descriptions will elicit a variant of the Big Five factor structure and therefore that virtually all such terms can be represented within this model.”
Given the Big Five factors, McCrae and Costa (1985), who had constructed the three-dimensional NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985), measuring Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience, found the three NEO factors to correlate essentially zero with Goldberg’s Agreeableness and Conscientiousness scales. Therefore, Costa and McCrae (1992) added Agreeableness and Conscientiousness to constitute the FFM, a close equivalent of the Big Five and measured by the NEO-PI-R. Thus, different but overlapping personality structures developed in different contexts of psychological interest were fused. Especially, the subsequent broad usage of the NEO-PI-R internationally gave an enormous boost to studies with and around the Big Five.
It is of interest to emphasize the correspondence between the NEO Openness to Experience factor and the lexically based Intellect factor. Openness to Experience had its origin in Coan’s (1974) interest in measuring the humanistic-oriented concept of the optimal personality. Some facets of that concept were not present in the lexically based Intellect factor but were broadly and easily embraced by the personality assessment community. Thus, within a single language and culture, distinct professional contexts that produce somewhat different sets of concepts can very well lead to an integrated result that is felt relevant in both those contexts.
The five broad personality trait factors of the Big Five appeared to form a powerful and encompassing system that promised inclusiveness of most or all relevant traits. Yet, the ascribed unassailability of the Big Five was far from rock-solid. Indeed, one could point to some arbitrariness in the selection of trait descriptors used as building blocks for the model and in the factor-extraction algorithms used to identify the five factors. Tellegen and Waller (1987) and Almagor, Tellegen, and Waller (1995), for example, criticized the exclusion of evaluative terms in lexical studies and took a route that included them, leading to additional Negative Valence (evil, wicked, disgusting) and Positive Valence (excellent, outstanding) factors. Ashton et al. (2004) investigated the possibility of a six-factor structure, leading to an additional Honesty-Humility factor in a certain number of lexical studies. Saucier and Goldberg (1998) and Paunonen and Jackson (2000) discussed the question, “What is beyond the Big Five?” and reviewed a number of possible outlier domains, including religiousness, deceptiveness, morality, sensuality, frugality, tradition, and humor, all belonging to the lexical selection but included or excluded for further study depending on their level of multiple correlation (communality) with the Big Five.
Following the psycholexical studies in English (e.g., Allport & Odbert, 1936; Cattell, 1943; Goldberg, 1981; Norman, 1967), the lexical approach reemerged in Europe within the confines of Germanic languages, and the first studies (Angleitner et al., 1990; Brokken, 1978) were performed following different procedures. Subsequently, those studies became known as founding two distinct psycholexical methods, the Dutch and the German method.
A specific methodological contribution of Brokken (1978) was to devise two criteria for determining which terms are useful for describing personality: the Nature criterion and the Person criterion. According to the former, a term is personality-relevant if it could fit in the sentence: “He (she) is … by nature,” and according to the latter, if it could answer the question: “Mr/Mrs X, what kind of person is he/she?” (De Raad, 2000). Brokken’s criteria helped in expanding psycholexical studies to other cultures and languages since they were expressed in simple sentence frames and could be easily translated. Besides the Dutch taxonomic studies (De Raad, 1992; De Raad & Hoskens, 1990; De Raad, Mulder, Kloosterman, & Hofstee, 1988), the Dutch method was also used in psycholexical studies in Italian (Caprara & Perugini, 1994) and Hungarian (Szirmák & De Raad, 1994).
The major contributions of the German team (Angleitner et al., 1990) to psycholexical methodology can be summarized under three aspects: the detailed explanation on what terms are trait-relevant, the elaboration of the importance of the word class of nouns for personality description, and refined development of the adjective classification system. Regarding the identification of trait-relevant words, the German team built on the work of Allport and Odbert (1936), Norman (1967), and Goldberg (1981, 1982), who pointed to six categories of personality-relevant terms to search for in the dictionary: (1) stable traits, (2) temporary states and moods, (3) activities, (4) social aspects of personality, (5) abilities and talents, and (6) appearance. Regarding the word class of nouns, Angleitner et al. (1990) distinguished attribute nouns, for example “empathy,” that are useful in describing people indirectly versus type nouns, for example “an introvert,” that are useful in describing people directly. Taking into account those previously distinguished categories, the German team developed a classification system of 5 superordinate and 13 subordinate categories that could accommodate the vast majority of personality-descriptive adjectives, with the superordinate categories being: (1) dispositions, (2) temporary conditions, (3) social and reputational aspects, (4) overt characteristics and appearance, and (5) terms of limited utility. The German method is reflected in many of the subsequently developed personality taxonomies, often also including framing sentences as in the Dutch approach.
The heuristic value of German methodology has been demonstrated in a great variety of languages, mostly Germanic, including Italian (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998) and Spanish (Quevedo-Aguado, Iraegui, Anivarro, & Ross, 1996), both belonging to Romance languages; Czech (Hřebíčková, 2007), Polish (Szarota, 1996), Croatian (Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005), and Slovak (Ruisel, 1997) from the Slavic languages; and Filipino (Church, Katigbak, & Reyes, 1996), belonging to Austronesian language family. Recent taxonomic studies adopting the German psycholexical methodology are the Vietnamese personality taxonomy from the Austroasiatic language family (Mai, 2014) and the Iranian personality taxonomy from the Indo-Iranian language family (Farahani, De Raad, Farzad, & Fotoohie, 2016).
The first European studies conducted in languages from the Germanic family generally corroborated the Anglo-American Big Five. There were, however, some deviations. The Dutch studies on adjectives (Brokken, 1978; De Raad, 1992) found five factors, of which the fifth factor consisted not only of Intellect characteristics (cf. Goldberg, 1990) but also of unconventionality characteristics (progressive, rebellious), which led the authors to name the fifth factor Intellectual Independence or Autonomy (De Raad, 1994).
The German study on adjectives (Ostendorf, 1990) provided a clear replication of the Anglo-American Big Five, both in self- and peer-ratings. An interesting observation in Ostendorf’s study was that the five factors were uneven in size, with three large factors (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) similar to Peabody’s (1987) Big Three model and two smaller ones (Emotional Stability and Intellect).
The first psycholexical studies in Slavic languages generally confirmed the Big Five structure, which made Saucier (2009) conclude that replications of the Big Five were the most successful in languages representing the pertaining two language families, Germanic and Slavic. There were, however, some deviations, not only in content but also in method. The Polish trait structure formed a clear replication of the Big Five (Szarota, 1996) and so did the Croatian study (Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005). The Czech study (Hřebíčková, 2007) showed similarities to the Big Five, with a notable exception for the fifth factor, which formed a blend of ability and manual dexterity.
In order to arrive at a Serbian structure, Smederevac, Mitrović, and Čolović (2007) followed the Tellegen and Waller (1987) approach, with a more relaxed admission of evaluative words. The trait adjective-based structure was not equivalent to but reminiscent of Tellegen and Waller’s structure, with an explicit mentioning of Negative Valence and Positive Valence. A study in Russian (Shmelyov & Pokhil’ko, 1993) deviated from most other psycholexical studies, in that it was based on judgments of similarity between traits instead of on self- or peer-ratings. Notwithstanding the difference in approach, substantial congruences between Russian factors and Big Five markers were found.
Deviations from the Big Five as observed among the Slavic studies repeated themselves but more emphatically among the Romance languages. The first two trait taxonomies in Romance languages were both in Italian, one performed in Rome following the Dutch methodology (Caprara & Perugini, 1994) and the other performed in Trieste following the German methodology (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998). The Roman taxonomy (Caprara & Perugini, 1994) formed a version of the the Big Five, with the fifth factor labeled as Conventionality and the opposite pole having a “critical” and “rebellious” connotation, similar to the fifth Dutch factor (De Raad, 1994). Moreover, there was a rotation of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, giving factors with the names Selfishness versus Altruism and Quietness versus Irritability.
The Triestean five-factor structure (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998) contained clear representations of Big Five Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness but lacked an Intellect factor and had an Emotional Stability factor split into two, a factor with assured and decisive versus indecisive and insecure as traits and a factor with sensitive and romantic versus insensitive and rough as traits. A study combining the two Italian taxonomies (De Raad, Di Blas, & Perugini, 1998) concluded that four of the Big Five factors were recovered in both taxonomies, with the fifth factor more expressive of the Honesty-Humility dimension (Ashton et al., 2004).
The Canadian-French taxonomic study (Boies, Lee, Ashton, Pascal, & Nicol, 2001) confirmed the six-factor model, which was also found in Korean (Hahn, Lee, & Ashton, 1999), with the additional Honesty-Humility factor beyond the Big Five.
The Spanish taxonomy (Benet-Martínez & Waller, 1997) was conducted according to the Tellegen and Waller (1987) procedure. The structure consisted of seven factors with versions of the Big Five and two additional factors, Negative Valence and Positive Valence. Besides the explicit inclusion of evaluative (and state) terms, another issue makes this Big Seven difficult to compare with trait structures in other languages: they sampled the dictionary and selected the first trait adjective they encountered on every fourth page. This may have resulted in a relative exclusion of certain terms, for example, those with a prefix of “in” or “un,” with the possibility of smaller sizes of the negative poles of certain factors.
Of the remaining Indo-European taxonomies, Greek and Lithuanian border the south and north of Western Europe, and Hindi and Persian are geographically closer to each other. The latter two languages are both oriental and sometimes said to be culturally linked in Proto-European times.
The five-factor structure in Greek (Saucier, Georgiades, Tsaousis, & Goldberg, 2005) was presented with names that suggested more deviation from the Big Five than there actually was: Negative Valence, Agreeableness/Morality, Conscientiousness, Prowess/Heroism (related to Intellect), and Positive Affect/Sociability. With six factors, the Morality/Agreeableness factor split into Honesty and Even Temper. A study in Lithuanian (Livaniene & De Raad, in press) gave a five-factor solution with the Big Five factors Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness—another factor that had Intellect traits on the one pole and Neurotic traits on the other and finally a factor called Toughness.
While the previous two studies still partially revealed Big Five factors, Persian and especially Hindi factors diverge more. The Persian taxonomy, using a modified German methodology (Farahani et al., 2016), revealed a five-factor solution, labeled as Morality, Positive versus Negative Emotionality, Achievement, Thoughtfulness, and Affection, a structure somewhat resembling the Big Five, without giving a simple one-to-one correspondence. Thoughtfulness showed some clear Intellect characteristics, notwithstanding the fact that the category with ability terms was not included in the study. The Hindi personality taxonomy (Singh, Misra, & De Raad, 2013) gave a quite surprising structure, expressed in six factors. The first three factors represented the ancient Indian cultural concept of Triguna, with Rajasic (hypocrite, brutish, cruel), Tamasic (shrewd and crooked versus honest and optimistic), and Sattivic (well behaved and courteous versus aggressive and angry). The second three factors somewhat reflected facets of the Big Five. Rajasic looked very much like NegativeValence.
The first non-Indo-European study was conducted in Hungarian (Szirmák & De Raad, 1994) and produced the Big Five in a six-factor solution, with factor five, called Integrity, splitting off from Agreeableness. In retrospect, the Integrity factor forms a first manifestation of the Honesty-Humility factor (Ashton & Lee, 2001, 2007).
In Turkish (Goldberg & Somer, 2000; Somer & Goldberg, 1999), the Big Five factors were replicated, with the Intellect factor featuring conventionality versus unconventionality. The first Chinese study (Yu et al., 2009) opted for a five-factor solution, with three factors having Big Five meaning with accompanying names (Intelligent, Conscientious, Agreeable). A fourth factor was called Unsocial, being presented as the negative pole of Extraversion. However, the variables with high loadings could express Negative Valence, and the factor also contained negative Intellect traits. The remaining factor was called Emotional and was defined by terms such as “aggressive” and “neurotic.”
The Korean taxonomy (Hahn et al., 1999), with a six-factor solution, gave the Big Five plus an additional Truthfulness factor related to Integrity and Honesty-Humility. The remainder of the non-Indo-European taxonomies identified seven factors, with Hebrew (Almagor et al., 1995) presenting versions of the Big Five (including two versions of Extraversion) plus Negative Valence and Positive Valence. The Positive Valence factor covered the Intellect domain quite well.
Studies in Tagalog, the primary basis for the national language of the Philippines (Church, Katigbak, & Reyes, 1998; Church, Reyes, Katigbak, & Grimm, 1997), also produced a seven-factor structure with versions of the Big Five, including a Positive Valence factor blending with Intellect, Negative Valence, and a split of Neuroticism into two factors emphasizing different facets of Neuroticism.
A second Chinese study (Zhou, Saucier, Gao, & Liu, 2009) also opted for a seven-factor solution but with a different flavor. The factors were labeled as Extraversion, Conscientiousness/Diligence, Unselfishness, Negative Valence, Emotional Volatility, Positive Valence/Intellect, and Dependence/Fragility. One must note the coalescence of Positive Valence with Intellect again.
The Vietnamese study (Mai, 2014) concluded that the most interpretable structure was found in the eight-factor solution, with factors Warm-hearted/Virtue, Talented/Intellect, Straightforward/Genuineness, Orderly/Industriousness, Trustworthiness, Courage, Vivaciousness, and Modesty.
Comparisons of factors from different languages or cultures are generally done in two ways, based on content and psychometrics. Previously, the content-based comparisons have been referred to implicitly in giving brief descriptions of lexical findings. It is of interest to summarize comparisons in relation to procedural and methodological characteristics. It seems that the Big Five are best identified in Indo-European languages in Europe and in the United States. A regular additional finding is an Integrity/Honesty-Humility/Truthfulness factor as a split-off from Agreeableness.
There are obvious differences in procedures for selection of trait terms, in terms of the comprehensiveness of the dictionaries; the criteria of selection, especially regarding the explicit inclusion or exclusion of evaluative terms and state terms; and the reduction of the lists of traits to make the ratings a feasible task for respondents. Factors tend to change in content emphasis with the rotation of more factors.
Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism are often not difficult to identify, although Neuroticism (or Emotional Stability) may emerge with an emphasis on stability and certainty, on sensitivity, or on aggression and irritation. Honesty-Humility is less frequently identified, possibly depending partly on the strength of the reduction of trait words, but where it is identified, it is a split-off from Agreeableness.
The more inclusive selections of traits, especially with an explicit allowance of evaluative terms, may lead to splits of factors, such as for Agreeableness into Honesty (or Negative Valence) or IR, and a Positive Valence dimension, which seems to be related to Intellect. Of course, languages may certainly differ in the extent to which they cover certain domains with a sufficient number of pertaining trait words to allow for a narrow factor or a broad factor. In general it seems that there is a stronger chance for Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness to appear, mainly related to the amounts of variance they explain.
Peabody and De Raad (2002) classified trait variables from several taxonomies using both empirical and conceptual considerations. The result was an extensive system with classes of trait variables, including the Big Five and the many facets distinguished in the taxonomies. The two studies supported the cross-cultural recurrence of the Big Three factors of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientious.
Psychometric comparisons were first done with the three Germanic languages. Hofstee, Kiers, De Raad, Goldberg, and Ostendorf (1997) compared the Big Five structures in Dutch, English and German, using an innovative procedure in which they identified 126 adjectives that had unambiguous translations in all three languages and then compared the structures based on those adjectives in self- and peer-ratings for the three languages involved. Hofstee et al. (1997) found the strongest congruences for the first four of the Big Five factors, with a weak congruence for the Intellect/Imagination/Unconventionality factor. De Raad, Di Blas, et al. (1998) analyzed the congruencies of factors from five taxonomies: two in Romance languages (Roman and Triestian Italian) and three in Germanic languages (English, Dutch, and German). They found that only Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness, which were common Italian factors, could also be identified in Germanic structures. De Raad, Perugini, Hřebíčková, and Szarota (1998) compared structures from seven languages: English, Dutch, German, Czech, Polish, Italian (Roman), and Hungarian. That study identified the Big Five factors in each of the seven taxonomies but only in terms of general characteristics, and, once again, the best fit across languages was obtained for the Big Three factors.
There have been several research streams focusing on the relevance and cross-cultural replication of structures with only one, two, and three factors. This was done especially in relation to the development of hierarchies of factors. Here we review briefly regularities across languages/cultures for one up to seven factors. A general problem is that with a smaller number of factors, less total variance is explained, while at the same time, the separate factors tend to capture a more comprehensive domain of semantics. With more factors, more variance is explained, but factors tend to be narrower and more specific in meaning.
The past years witnessed a surge of interest in the “Big One” personality model, or the General Factor of Personality (GFP), with both its proponents (e.g., Musek, 2007; Rushton & Irwing, 2008, 2009) and critics (Muncer, 2011; Revelle & Wilt, 2013). In numerous psycholexical studies (e.g., Boies et al., 2001; Di Blas & Forzi, 1999; Goldberg & Somer, 2000; Mai, 2014; Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005; Saucier et al., 2005; Zhou et al., 2009), the single-factor solution was interpreted as a general factor of Evaluation, gathering at opposite poles the desirable and undesirable personality characteristics. Hofstee (2001) suggested that this factor describes adequacy of reaction in a variety of situations. Although this Big One was claimed to be universally replicable across languages (Saucier & Goldberg, 2003; Saucier et al., 2014), it never took much root in the psycholexical approach, perhaps because the lexical approach across cultures generally aims at a certain level of differentiation among the semantics of the many traits.
The Big Two higher-order model (DeYoung, 2006; Digman, 1997) stands prominent in the assessment of trait hierarchy, with the factors α comprising Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability and β comprising Extraversion and Intellect. Also a two-factor solution was frequently investigated in psycholexical studies (Boies et al., 2001; Di Blas & Forzi, 1999; Farahani et al., 2016; Goldberg & Somer, 2000; Mai, 2014; Zhou et al., 2009), and Saucier and his colleagues have suggested that the two-factor solution provides the best chance for cross-cultural replicability (Saucier et al., 2005, 2014). DeYoung (2006) provided a biological explanation for the two factors, where Plasticity (β) should reflect involvement of the dopaminergic system, and Stability (α) is related to the functions of the serotonergic system. Saucier et al. (2014) analyzed nine distant languages (Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Turkish, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Maasai, and Senoufo) and interpreted the two factors as Social Self-Regulation and Dynamism. Saucier et al. (2014) found these two factors to relate clearly to the interpersonal circumplex dimensions Nurturance and Dominance, respectively. They also found some relation to Communion and Agency as distinguished in, for example, Wojciszke, Abele, and Baryla (2009), as dimensions of social perception.
In recent years, the Big Three model started to take a dominant position, especially in relation to its replication in studies involving more than one culture. Peabody may be considered as the father of the Big Three (Peabody, 1987; Peabody & Goldberg, 1989). The Big Three were reported, or at least commented on, in most, if not all, psycholexical studies (e.g., Benet-Martínez & Waller, 1997; Di Blas, 2005; Di Blas & Forzi, 1998, 1999; Hahn et al., 1999; Mai, 2014; Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005; Ostendorf, 1990; Saucier, 1997; Szirmák & De Raad, 1994). The Big Three model shows its strength even more if one considers the results from cross-cultural psycholexical comparisons (De Raad et al., 2010, 2014; Peabody & De Raad, 2002).
De Raad et al. (2010) pairwise compared the resulting factor structures from each of 14 psycholexical studies and found that the optimal structure in terms of cross-cultural replicability was the Big Three. Following this between-languages corroboration of the Big Three, De Raad et al. (2014) conducted a study in which all the data from 11 languages were assembled in a single matrix, with almost 2,000 trait-descriptive terms and over 7,000 participants. The results of simultaneous component analysis (Kiers & ten Berge, 1994) again confirmed the cross-cultural tenability of the Big Three. De Raad et al. (2014) interpreted those three factors as broad versions of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, relabeling them as Dynamism, Affiliation, and Order, respectively. These two studies accentuated the three factors as strong candidates for the “Pan-cultural” personality dimensions. One limitation of the Big Three model is that there are no evolutionary bio-physiological underpinnings of those factors yet, and much further work is needed on those issues.
Many psycholexical studies commented on four-factor solutions (e.g., Benet-Martínez & Waller, 1997; Boies et al., 2001; De Raad, 1992; De Raad, Di Blas, et al., 1998; De Raad, Perugini, et al., 1998; Di Blas & Forzi, 1998, Hahn et al., 1999; Mai, 2014; Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005; Saucier et al., 2005; Somer & Goldberg, 1999; Szirmák & De Raad, 1994). There have been inconsistencies in those four-factor structures, however, with the fourth factor sometimes representing Emotional Stability (Hahn et al., 1999; Szirmák & De Raad, 1994), sometimes Intellect (Mlačić & Ostendorf, 2005; Somer & Goldberg, 1999), and sometimes Quietness or Tender-mindedness (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998). Moreover, a four-factor solution is just a little step away from the generally expected Big Five, leaving a Big Four model only a footnote in the psycholexical research.
The five-factor structure has been discussed throughout this chapter. Close replications for the Big Five were found in languages in Europe and in the United States. At a larger distance from Western countries, the Big Five generally seem harder to replicate. Nevertheless, the Big Five model has had great impact on personality psychology, especially in bringing a level of consensus to this disjointed field and by proving nomologically and practically useful (De Raad & Mlačić, 2015). Moreover, the work on the neuro-bio-evolutionary underpinnings of the Big Five is well developed now (cf. Allen & DeYoung, in press).
A model with six factors has been suggested as an alternative to the Big Five and to function similarly well as a shared model in personality research. The model exists in two versions, the best known of which is presented in the HEXACO model (Ashton & Lee, 2001, 2007) and the less known in Saucier’s Big Six (Saucier, 2009). In the HEXACO model, a sixth factor of Honesty-Humility is added to the Big Five factors. The precursor of Honesty can be found in the Hungarian “Integrity” (Szirmák & De Raad, 1994), Italian “Trustworthiness” (Di Blas & Forzi, 1999), and Korean “Truthfulness” (Hahn et al., 1999) factors. The sixth factor was labeled as Honesty in the Canadian French psycholexical study (Boies et al., 2001) and later proposed by Ashton and Lee (2007) to augment the existing Big Five.
Saucier (2009) suggested Negative Valence as the sixth factor, and he argued that Ashton and Lee’s Big Six was based on a narrow selection of personality-descriptive variables, with no evaluative and emotional state terms. Saucier (2009) used a wider selection of variables, including emotional states and highly evaluative terms, analyzed seven languages, and interpreted six factors in terms of Big Five-related dimensions plus Negative Valence. He called the model a “wideband cross-language six.”
Apart from these two six-factor models, structures with six factors were also interpreted and commented upon in Hungarian (De Raad & Szirmák, 1994), Korean (Hahn et al., 1999), Greek (Saucier et al., 2005), and Persian (Farahani et al., 2016). A recent Vietnamese taxonomy (Mai, 2014) explored the six-factor structure but failed to replicate either the HEXACO or the Big Six models.
The seven-factor structure, discussed in Tellegen and Waller (1987) as a result of an explicit inclusion of evaluative and state terms, was first investigated outside the United States in Hebrew (Almagor et al., 1995). A structure was presented with four of the Big Five, including two versions of Extraversion, plus two additional factors, Negative Valence and Positive Valence. An Intellect factor was lacking, but Positive Valence also included clear Intellect characteristics. Benet-Martínez and Waller’s study in Spanish (1997) produced Positive and Negative Valence and versions of the Big Five. Filipino studies (Church et al., 1997, 1998) brought still a different set of seven factors, and so did a Chinese study (Zhou et al., 2009). It seems that the consensus at the seven-factor level involves the number of factors rather than the content. Nevertheless, Saucier (2003) constructed a Multilanguage Seven (ML7) model based on the similarities between Filipino and Hebrew. This ML7 model included the factors Gregariousness, Self-assurance, Even Temper versus Temperamentalness, Concern for Others, Conscientiousness, Originality/Virtuosity, and Negative Valence or Social Unacceptability. Saucier (2003) tried to replicate the ML7 in English and Italian but only partially succeeded. The Vietnamese study (Mai, 2014) also failed to replicate the ML7. Structures with seven factors were also explored in Turkish (Goldberg & Somer, 2000) and in English (Saucier, 1997), resulting in versions of the Big Five, plus Negative Valence and Attractiveness. Both these latter studies were based on a wider selection of variables, including variables describing physical characteristics and appearance.
In the previous review of cross-cultural trait-taxonomic studies, a number of issues persist especially in relation to obtaining cross-culturally comparable sets of data. These pertain to different steps in the taxonomic process, including the choice of the tangible representation of the lexicon, usually and most practically dictionaries; the selection of personality-relevant descriptors; the reduction of the set of descriptors to manageable proportions; the data collection procedures; and the choice of participants. The assessment of replicability of factors across borders is often complicated by decisions related to one or more of these issues.
Generally it is important to select a dictionary that is unabridged, comprehensive, and nonrestrictive with respect to the inclusion of words with certain connotations. The ultimate target of a full trait lexicon is not well served by early decisions in favor of a practically useful but restricted dictionary.
The Dutch and the German procedures have often been mentioned to characterize the ways trait-relevant words are selected from the dictionary. One important principle is not to ignore or remove possibly relevant words on the basis of a single criterion. If certain types of trait words tend to be avoided because of a definition, it is generally wise to find related criteria that do include those types of descriptors (see, e.g., Brokken, 1978).
There are clear differences of opinion with respect to the inclusion of evaluative and state words. For purposes of documentation and later analyses it is important that in the process of selection such types of descriptors are not avoided. Moreover, it is not clear yet which other types of concepts are personality descriptive (e.g., values, virtues, needs, roles, attitudes; cf. Angleitner et al., 1990; Saucier, 2000). Thus, it becomes important to follow a conservative procedure and to give full account of all such types of descriptors. Examples of psycholexical studies on, for example, values are Renner (2003), De Raad and Van Oudenhoven (2008), and Morales-Vives, De Raad, and Vigil-Colet (2012).
The majority of psycholexical studies have made use of personality-descriptive adjectives. There is, however, no psychologically theoretical reason not to make use of other word categories (e.g., nouns, verbs, adverbs) for the description of personality. Several studies have been performed to show that excluding other word categories may lead to a loss of relevant trait semantics (e.g., Barelds & De Raad, 2015; De Raad et al., 1988; De Raad & Hoskens, 1990; Henss, 1995; Hřebíčková, Osecká, & Čermák, 1999).
The reduction of trait descriptors to arrive at a feasible list for participants is possibly a necessary step in the development of psycholexical trait taxonomies. There are different ways to arrive at such reduction. One of these is the clustering of words into groups with virtually indistinguishable semantics. Redundancy can thus be removed without loss of trait content (e.g., Goldberg, 1982). The more frequently followed approach involves reductions on the basis of unfamiliarity and infrequent usage. Certainly, if nobody understands a certain word, it does not make sense to administer it to participants. However, such procedures are often applied too strictly, resulting in the removal of large numbers of relatively unfamiliar words. It would be wise not to overapply those criteria and instead to take care that educated participants are selected with a good understanding of language.
The choice of participants in psycholexical work is most often done in the university context, which helps indeed to find people who have an educated level of language comprehension. Yet, the restriction to students is narrow and should be complemented with reasonable numbers of educated people in various professional contexts. Once a structure of traits is accepted and an assessment instrument is constructed to measure the accepted dimensions, it makes sense to turn to the more general public, and for that purpose it would be adequate to formulate items in a clear and simple style (cf. Hendriks, Hofstee, & De Raad, 1998).
Most often the data in psycholexical work consist of self-ratings only, sometimes of both self- and peer-ratings. Because of the more objective viewpoint of the other, especially through the capacity of using multiple raters, it is generally advised to make use of peer-ratings, eventually complemented by self-ratings (cf. Hofstee, 2003).
The psycholexical approach has certain limitations that need to be dealt with in the process of execution. These pertain to the exploitation of ordinary language for scientific purposes (Block, 1995), the ambiguity of everyday language terms, and the contextual influences on trait meanings related to cultural characteristics. However, if properly applied, taking into account the suggestions made in the discussions previously, ordinary language, forming an enormously rich trait-semantical resource, has shown to provide nuanced trait structures that may form a great starting point for and aid in the construction of personality assessment instruments.
One important task ahead for the psycholexical approach is to cover a good representation of languages in some branches of the Indo-European languages (e.g., Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian) but especially outside the confines of the Indo-European family (e.g., Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, and Austronesian). This is important in order to validate existing personality models, especially in relation to claims of universality. This is also important to determine what characteristics affect the factor positions in the many languages. Goldberg (2008) speaks of the “next big challenge” for the psycholexical approach, which is opening the black box of exploratory factor analyses of indigenous personality taxonomies and to learn about what their similarities and differences are.
Goldberg (2008) invites researchers worldwide to embark on an endeavor for a deeper and substantial application of the lexical hypothesis and the lexical approach in general. One possible answer is given with the introduction of the consensual model of personality traits (De Raad, in progress). The studies by De Raad et al. (2010, 2014) may be considered to proceed from a proto-consensual conception, the first involving comparisons of factors from various languages and the second involving merging all data from the pertaining languages in a joint matrix. These two studies both pointed to the Big Three model with factors Dynamism, Affiliation, and Order as a candidate for a cross-culturally replicable model.
Knowing that each new language adds its own peculiarities to the international trait vocabulary and realizing that it is not feasible to carry out empirical studies in all languages, certain issues can only be solved by reaching a level of consensus. A beginning aim of the consensual approach is to build a super masterpool or joint catalog of trait terms from a large set of languages representative of the languages and cultures of the world and to exploit the central set of that pool of terms to obtain ratings in the many languages or cultures involved.
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