The Lexical Foundation of the Big Five Factor Model

Abstract

A dictionary is the tangible repository of the common stock of words, although dictionaries comprise at best 10% of the full lexicon. Part of the lexicon is made up of the words used to describe what people do and what people are like. The psycholexical approach to personality focuses on this subset of words and on its exploitation, or what can be said to be the glossary of personality. This chapter is concerned with the history of the psycholexical approach to personality description, from ancient history to the more recent efforts, albeit focusing in particular on its modern history. Psycholexical taxonomies from around the world will be considered, as well as taxonomies based on nouns, verbs, adverbs, and their combinations. Ongoing controversies, difficulties, and disputes regarding alternative psycholexical personality structures will be considered, as well as recommendations for future research.

Open Peer Commentary and Author's Response

“…The Big Five have been reported in a variety of Indo-European languages, sometimes with deviations. With more languages, especially non-Indo-European, deviations increased (De Raad & Mlačić, 2017). Replicability, using congruence coefficients, of factors from different languages, repeatedly and systematically showed decreasing replicability, especially beyond three factors (De Raad et al, 2010.…”

Personality Measurement Design for Ontology Based Platform using Social Media Text

“…Our research also applies the lexical hypothesis as a basis for analyzing textual content in social media. Based on research of Raad and Mlacic [17], the lexical hypothesis is a process of understanding the meaning of textual data. The lexical hypothesis is qualified to map the personality traits through words in a language [18].…”

The Lexical Approach to the Taxonomy of Emotions

“…Only a few languages used lexical analysis to identify the structure of the worldview (Chen, Hsu, Zhou, Saucier, 2018;Krauss, 2006;Saucier, 2000), social reactions (Mlačić, Ostendorf, 2005) and appearance (Imperio, Church, Katigbak, Reyes, 2008;Ostendorf, Angleitner, 1994). However, despite more than a century of history of psycholexical research (De Raad, Mlačić, 2017), no attempt has been made to create a psycholexical taxonomy of emotions.…”