The structure of Japanese personality-descriptive terms

Abstract

A lexical approach was employed to investigate the personality structure of Japanese personality-relevant descriptors. The vocabulary in this study comprised 463 words extracted from Japanese dictionaries using a broad word-selection strategy, identified as suitable for expressing personality based on a separate study involving respondents in their 20s. The analysis was based on self-ratings from 755 individuals aged 20 and older for 463 words, including 325 adjectives and adjectival verbs, 24 nouns, 97 verbs and compound words, and 17 adverbs. All surveys were conducted online. Ipsatized data was subjected to principal component analysis with equamax rotation, and the content of components was examined at each hierarchical level, ranging from one- to ten-component levels. The results supported the replicability of the personality structure models derived from multi-language analyses, such as Big Two, Big Three, Big Six, and Multi-language Seven. However, this support does not extend to the Big Five model. Its characteristic lies not in the emergence of unique and novel components exclusive to Japanese language but in the combinations of subcategories classified in previous studies at each hierarchical level when forming components.

Plain language summary

Different languages have various words to describe personality traits, such as “kind”, “cold”, “nervous”, and “serious”. Studies across various languages have been conducted to collect these words and see how they can be grouped. By comparing findings from studies in different languages, we can start to answer questions about how many aspects personality can be divided into, whether personality traits are universal across cultures, or if they differ, how they differ.

In our study, we focused on the Japanese language. We first gathered 463 words related to personality traits from previous studies and dictionaries. Then, we conducted an online survey to see how much people felt these words described them, collecting responses from 755 individuals. Based on these responses, we explored how these 463 words could be grouped, increasing the number of groups from 2 to 10. When divided into 10 groups, the words fell into categories like “Social Moral,” “Talk-Sociability,” “Orderliness,” “Emotional Toughness,” “Intellect,” “Social Trustworthiness,” “Endearingness,” “Calmness-Irritableness,” “Helpfulness,” and “Persistence.”

The results of this study can be a valuable resource when examining whether there are personality traits common across cultures or not.

Our analysis showed that in Japanese, “Intellect” and “Orderliness” did not split up until the very end, the trait of being lovable formed its own group “Endearingness”, and traits like perseverance formed a group called “Persistence”.