Taxonomy and structure of Persian personality‐descriptive trait terms

Abstract

We described the development of a taxonomy of Persian personality-descriptive terms in two studies. In Study 1, judges scanned Persian dictionaries and several Persian novels for person-descriptive terms. The resulting set of person-descriptive terms was classified into different categories of description, including the category of dispositional trait-descriptive adjectives. Of the 544 most familiar traits, 126 traits were selected to collect self-ratings. In Study 2, self-ratings were provided by 2400 students. Ratings were factor analysed (Principal Components Analysis) followed by Varimax rotation. Factor structures with two to six factors were discussed. The two-factor structure and the three-factor structure confirm the Big Two and the Big Three, respectively. Of the structures with five and six factors, the five-factor structure appears to be the more appropriate choice, with the factors labelled Morality, Positive versus Negative Emotionality, Achievement, Thoughtfulness and Affection. Gender differences were measured on both the five-factor structure and the six-factor structure. The discussion section emphasised both cross-cultural commonalities and cultural deviations in reference to the Big Five.

The Personality Lexicon in Brazilian Portuguese: Studies with Natural Language

“…Some scholars combined the examination of dictionaries with the analysis of literary and scholarly texts of languages such as Persian (Farahani, De Raad, Farzad, & Fotoohie, 2016), Hindi , and Russian , among others . Another set of studies adopted as sources free descriptions made by laypersons, such as semistructured interviews, as did researchers in South Africa Valchev, Van de Vijver, Nel, Rothman, & Meiring, 2007).…”

“…While the traditional psycholexical strategy has historically focused on dictionaries as the primary source for the identification of personality descriptors (Cheung et al, 2011;, there are alternative sources that were not explored as intensely. Alternative sources can include journalistic, literary, and scholarly texts (e.g., Farahani, De Raad, Farzad, & Fotoohie, 2016), semi-structured interviews , free-descriptions of the self or of other people , flow of consciousness reports (Lee, Kim, Seo, & Chung, 2007), conversations records , blogs , and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook Peres & Laros, 2018b;.…”

Personality traits in the Serbian language: Structure and procedural effects

“…This led to a reduction with 370 words to a set of 1044. The further reduction was done on the basis of synonymity, a procedure used, for example by Norman (1967), and later by Engvik (1993) in Norwegian, by Livaniene and De Raad (2017) in Lithuanian, and by Farahani, De Raad, Farzad, and Fotoohie (2016) in Persian. The technique is a logical one, in which a large set of lexical terms is reduced to manageable proportions while preserving the kernel semantics of the set.…”

The relations between conscientiousness and mental health in a North-European and a West-Asian culture

“…Morally loaded clusters, such as negative valence and religiousness have been found to be clear trait clusters besides the Big Five (Paunonen & Jackson, 2000). The conscientiousness-related factor in a five-factor solution of the Persian trait taxonomy (Farahani et al, 2016) is called Morality (with such terms as religious, dutiful and truthful). Saroglou ( 2010) argued religiousness to be partly a cultural adaptation of agreeableness and conscientiousness.…”

“…We used two measures of Conscientiousness, a subscale of the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and a subscale of an Iranian Big Five traits measure (Farahani & Farzad, 2008).…”