European Journal of Personality

We have developed a comprehensive list of Filipino person descriptive adjectives, organized them into Angleitner, Ostendorf and John's (1990) person descriptive categories, obtained college students' (N = 1048) trait prototypicality judgments, and compared the Filipino trait lexicon to an English trait (Goldberg, 1990) taxonomy based on the Big Five personality domains. Differences in the relative size of different person descriptive categories were noted between the Filipino and German languages. The Filipino person descriptive lexicon appears to be roughly comparable in size to the person descriptive or personality relevant lexicons in the German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian languages, but substantially smaller than the English person descriptive lexicon. Nonetheless, the Filipino trait lexicon makes distinctions comparable to those encompassed by the English taxonomic categories. As in the English language, the Big Five Agreeableness domain is the most lexically elaborated in Filipino, followed by Surgency and Conscientiousness, Intellect, and Emotional Stability. That is, the largest trait domains may be those with the most direct interpersonal reference.

This study covers the methodological approach of a large investigation to verify the universal lexicon hypothesis and the construction of a taxonomy of descriptors of personality in the Spanish language. The Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española, 1992) has been the main reference and source to obtain natural, everyday language about personality. In this study, we followed the same approach as adopted by researchers in other languages. The procedure for assessing validity and reliability is explained. The quantitative and qualitative results are discussed, together with their systematization and the possibilities of further replication. The present research has mainly a heuristic value given the scarcity of studies in this line of investigation in Spain. Our aim is to underline the relevance of this model for the understanding of the close relationships between language and personality.

The present study investigates whether monitoring (i.e. vigilant) and blunting (i.e. avoidant) coping styles are associated with cognitive symptoms of dental fear. Results show that monitoring is positively related to the frequency and believability of negative thoughts about dental treatment, and negatively with the ability to control such thoughts. The opposite pattern is found for blunting. That is, blunting correlates negatively with the frequency and believability of negative thoughts, whereas a positive association emerges with cognitive control. These findings are in line with the Monitoring Process Model which proposes that ‘monitors’ (compared to ‘blunters’) generally show greater distress and arousal because of the way in which they cognitively elaborate threat.

In this paper we refute Henss' (1995) conclusion that the German language does not contain far more personality descriptive adjectives than type nouns. Since Henss' paper touches in passing some of the most sensitive aspects of the psycholexical approach, we address some of the tendencies in his paper that are not quite on target. In particular, we discuss distinctions between personality‐relevant and personality‐descriptive terms, between lexicon and dictionary, between adjectives and nouns. We also discuss the effects of choice of dictionary, and the definition of personality relative to coverage of the lexicon of personality. Moreover, seven European taxonomies are reviewed in order to provide an empirical basis for our arguments.

In this reply to Eysenck, we attempt to clarify why we have criticized Eysenck's Psychoticism model and have found it necessary to introduce our own alternative model. It is concluded that the validity of the P scale as a measure of Psychoticism has not been demonstrated and that the P construct itself is untenable.

Studies of the natural language are a prime source of the Big‐Five model, yet the factor analysis of a large, representative, and non‐clustered set of English‐language personality adjectives in a large sample has not yet been published. In order to test the hypothesis that finding the Big Five depends on biasing the variable selection with an investigator's preferred non‐familiar terms, we present the factor analysis of 435 familiar adjectives in a combined sample (N=899) of 507 self‐ and 392 peer ratings. The five‐factor solution reproduced the Big Five with high clarity, demonstrating generally very high correlations with Goldberg's adjective markers of the Big Five. The Intellect factor had a more moderate correlation, due to its de‐emphasis of the creativity components of Factor V, a phenomenon that may occur commonly with the lexical Intellect factor.