Lexical Study Research Articles

What Are the Most Important Dimensions of Personality?Evidence from Studies of Descriptors in Diverse Languages

AbstractProgress is reviewed with respect on how attributes of personality and character can best be organized and structured. Key insights on this important scientific issue have been gained by a lexical approach, which posits that the degree of representation of an attribute in language corresponds substantially with the general importance of the attribute in real‐world transactions. The rationale for studying the language of personality is explained, followed by a review of the most salient findings from lexical studies of person‐descriptors in 16 languages. In these studies, one‐ and two‐factor structures are found to be not only the most parsimonious but also the most easily replicated across variable selection procedures, and across languages and cultures. Structures with more factors are likely to show a comparative predictive advantage, but replicate more unevenly. Lexical studies appear to support a six‐factor model at least as well as the Big Five. Future research attention should be directed toward inclusion of a wider range of individual differences, integration with models of temperament, and the search for causal factors and underlying mechanisms that are associated with the best‐replicated personality dimensions.

Sensation seeking, risk-taking, and the HEXACO model of personality

Previous research has related sensation seeking and risk-taking to the Big Five or Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. Recently, based on a reanalysis of the main lexical studies, a six-dimensional HEXACO model of personality has been proposed. In three studies, the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) and the IPIP Risk-Taking scale are related to the factor and selected facet scales of the (Revised) HEXACO Personality Inventory. In agreement with the FFM, sensation seeking and risk-taking are significantly related to Openness to Experience, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness. However, sensation seeking and risk-taking are also significantly related to HEXACO Honesty–Humility and Emotionality. Based on the findings, a HEXACO Sensation Seeking Scale is designed from the facets Fearfulness, Unconventionality, Creativity, Fairness, Prudence, Social Boldness, and Sociability, which is found to have strong convergent correlations with the SSS and IPIP Risk-Taking in all of the studies.

Reanalysis of the Structure of the Greek Personality Lexicon

We investigated the structure of the Greek personality lexicon, based on a reanalysis of the data reported by Saucier, Georgiades, Tsaousis, and Goldberg. To facilitate comparisons with previous lexical studies of personality structure, our factor analyses were based on ipsatized (i.e., within-subject standardized) ratings on the Greek adjective variable set, after the removal of “negative valence” (or low base rate) adjectives. Results showed a six-factor solution that was very similar to those obtained in a diverse array of other languages, and thus suggest that this six-dimensional structure of personality variation does generalize to the Greek culture.

The Content and Dimensionality of Communication Styles

A multiphase lexical study was conducted to uncover the key dimensions of communication styles. In the first two phases, adjectives and verbs were selected on the basis of their ability to describe communication styles. In the third phase, a study was conducted using 441 respondents who provided self-ratings on 744 adjectives and 837 verbs. Adjectives and verbs were submitted to principal components analysis, followed by orthogonal Procrustes rotation to establish within-sample replicability, which provided evidence of four to seven main communication style dimensions. The seven communication style dimensions form the acronym PRESENT, for preciseness, reflectiveness, expressiveness, supportiveness, emotionality, niceness, and threateningness. As expected, scales based on the seven dimensions were meaningfully related to the interpersonal but not the intrapersonal scales from the Communication Style Scale. The results are discussed in light of existing communication style scales, the interpersonal circumplex, and personality structure.

Lexical Studies for Writing Instruction

Lexical Studies for Writing Instruction

The Lexical Study of Modern Japanese Conjunction

The Lexical Study of Modern Japanese Conjunction

Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research papers

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that have been published in five applied linguistics journals, namely, Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, Second Language Research, and TESOL Quarterly. Results show that AWL words account for 11.17% of the entire ALC. Using both frequency and range as the criteria for word forms selection, this study identifies 475 AWL and 128 non-AWL word forms that are used more than 50 times in the ALC and at least five times across the five journals. Most of the AWL word forms belong to the word families included in Coxhead’s first and second sublists. The non-AWL word forms are specialized terms in applied linguistics, terms related to language education and research methodology, and adjectives/nouns indicating countries/languages. Pedagogical implications are made for both teachers and learners of academic English as a foreign language.

The HEXACO Personality Factors in the Indigenous Personality Lexicons of English and 11 Other Languages

Two studies tested the correspondence between six dimensions obtained in lexical studies of personality structure and the proposed HEXACO personality framework. Study 1 examined the English personality lexicon using 449 adjectives selected according to rated frequency of use in personality description. Six validimax-rotated factors derived from adjective self-ratings showed strong convergent and weak discriminant correlations with questionnaire markers of the HEXACO factors; the six adjective dimensions were also recovered from peer ratings. In Study 2, lay judges rated the conceptual similarity between HEXACO factor descriptions and adjective lists summarizing the six indigenous lexical personality factors of each of 12 languages. Across languages, a pattern of strong convergent and weak discriminant similarity ratings was observed; similarity ratings for the English factors of Study 1 were comparable to those for other languages' factors. Results indicate that the six dimensions of the HEXACO framework are recovered from the personality lexicons of various languages.

Psychopathy traits and the processing of emotion words: Results of a lexical decision task

Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals. However, these investigations have not examined processing of discrete affective categories and their relation to the callous/unemotional (F1) and impulse control/antisocial (F2) factors of psychopathy. Sixty undergraduate men completed a self-report measure of psychopathy traits and a lexical decision task assessing response latencies to anger, sadness, fear, and happiness words. Results reflected an association between F2 and a heightened experience of anger, whereas F1 was associated with a diminished experience of sadness. Findings are discussed in terms of the relation to existing research using alternative methods of processing affect.

Lexical studies of Filipino person descriptors: adding personality‐relevant social and physical attributes

Lexical studies have focused on traits. In the Filipino language, we investigated whether additional dimensions can be identified when personality-relevant terms for social roles, statuses, and effects, plus physical attributes, are included. Filipino students (N = 496) rated themselves on 268 such terms, plus 253 markers of trait and evaluative dimensions. We identified 10 dimensions of social and physical attributes-Prominence, Uselessness, Attractiveness, Respectability, Uniqueness, Destructiveness, Presentableness, Strength, Dangerousness, and Charisma. Most of these dimensions did not correspond in a one-to-one manner to Filipino or alternative trait models (Big Five, HEXACO, ML7). However, considerable redundancy was observed between the social and physical attribute dimensions and trait and evaluative dimensions. Thus, social and physical attributes communicate information about personality traits, and vice-versa.

The Self-conscious emotions: theory and research

Part 1. Theoretical Perspectives: Social, Cognitive, and Neural Mechanisms Underlying Self-Conscious Emotions. Tracy, Robins, The Self in Self-Conscious Emotions: A Cognitive Appraisal Approach. Tangney, Stuewig, Mashek, What's Moral about the Self-Conscious Emotions? Leary, How the Self Became Involved in Affective Experience: Three Sources of Self-Reflective Emotions. Beer, Neural Systems for Self-Conscious Emotions and Their Underlying Appraisals. Gruenewald, Dickerson, Kemeny, A Social Function for Self-Conscious Emotions: The Social Self Preservation Theory. Part 2. Developmental Contexts and Processes. Lagattuta, Thompson, The Development of Self-Conscious Emotions: Cognitive Processes and Social Influences. Hart, Matsuba, The Development of Pride and Moral Life. Lewis, Self-Conscious Emotional Development. Part 3. Cultural Influences. Goetz, Keltner, Shifting Meanings of Self-Conscious Emotions across Cultures: A Social-Functional Approach. Fessler, From Appeasement to Conformity: Evolutionary and Cultural Perspectives on Shame, Competition, and Cooperation. Edelstein, Shaver, A Cross-Cultural Examination of Lexical Studies of Self-Conscious Emotions. Wong, Tsai, Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt. Li, Fischer, Respect as a Positive Self-Conscious Emotion in European Americans and Chinese. Part 4. Specific Emotions: Function and Conceptualization. Miller,Is Embarrassment a Blessing or a Curse? Tracy, Robins, The Nature of Pride. Gilbert, The Evolution of Shame as a Marker for Relationship Security: A Biopsychosocial Approach. Elison, Harter, Humiliation Causes, Correlates, and Consequences. Ferguson, Brugman,White, Eyre, Shame and Guilt as Morally Warranted Experiences. Part 5. Special Topics and Applications. Lickel, Schmader, Spanovic, Group-Conscious Emotions: The Implications of Others' Wrongdoings for Identity and Relationships. Stuewig, Tangney, Shame and Guilt in Antisocial and Risky Behaviors. Roberts, Goldenberg, Wrestling with Nature: An Existential Perspective on the Body and Gender in Self-Conscious Emotions. Bosson, Prewitt-Freilino, Overvalued and Ashamed: Considering the Roles of Self-Esteem and Self-Conscious Emotions in Covert Narcissism. Scheff, Runaway Nationalism: Alienation, Shame, and Anger.Part 6. Assessment. Robins, Noftle, Tracy, Assessing Self-Conscious Emotions: A Review of Self-Report and Nonverbal Measures.

The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (review)

Reviewed by: The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology Marianne Djuth A. N. Williams The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007 Pp. xi + 252. $85. In The Divine Sense A. N. Williams provides an insightful and much needed account of the role of the intellect in patristic theology. Struck by the ease with which early Christian writers move back and forth in their works between theology and spirituality, she focuses her energy on a twofold task: uncovering the contemplative aspects of texts regarded as dogmatic and polemical and making explicit the theological dimension of works deemed solely ascetical. Crucial to this undertaking is Williams's contention that patristic authors use the intellect as a connective principle to bind together the various elements in the texts that comprise their vision of Christianity. For Williams, then, early Christian texts are systematic in that their authors exhibit a concern for different forms of reasoning, coherence, and organization that revolve around the intellect as a principle of unity and relation. As a result of her meticulous attention to detail, what emerges from the first book-length treatment of this subject is a portrait of patristic theology that is radically distinct from pagan philosophy, contemplative and hierarchical in orientation, and dynamic and relational at its core. In order to accomplish this task, Williams selects a representative sampling of texts drawn from a wide range of authors from the beginning of the patristic era up to the fifth century. The scope of her inquiry includes the apostolic fathers together with Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian (chapter 1), Clement and Origen (chapter 2), Nazianzen and Nyssen (chapter 3), Augustine (chapter 4), and Cassian and Evagrius (chapter 5). Because her approach to these texts is largely comparative in nature, Williams is able to provide a clear sense of the various ways in which these authors are able to harmonize the construction of a theological vision of the divine with the promotion of the spiritual life. Her skepticism regarding the fruitfulness of undertaking a lexical study of these texts, however, leaves the reader in the dark with regard to the precise meanings of terms, such as nous or mens, and their relation to other technical terms that constitute the lens through which ancient authors expressed their understanding of the intellect. Consequently, the core of her argument rests on the assumption that, generally speaking, patristic authors were as reluctant to define terms as they were to incorporate pagan ideas into their texts. By short circuiting the search for pagan philosophical influences on Christian texts, Williams envisions patristic theology as encapsulating a uniquely Christian vision of reality uncontaminated by pagan notions of the intellect. The thematic nature of her analysis focuses largely on a common set of themes that enables her to demonstrate the relevance of the intellect for understanding patristic texts. In the chapter on Nazianzen and Nyssen, for example, Williams begins the discussion by commenting on the divine attributes and connecting the cosmic ordering of human beings in relation to God and the rest of creation with the presence of the imago dei in the human mind. She then turns her attention [End Page 124] to the psychosomatic unity that is a person in order to explore various themes pertaining to the person: soul and body, mind and will, virtue and passion, wisdom and knowledge, contemplation and asceticism. In other authors she replicates these themes while at the same time respecting the particularities of their thought (e.g., the notion of order in Augustine's thought). Williams concludes her analysis of the intellect by reflecting on two concerns: the lack of emphasis on the divine intellect during the patristic era and the implications of secularism for the study of theology. The answer to the latter question lies perhaps in Williams's own analysis of patristic texts. As she singles out the human intellect and the intellect's relation to God, the relevance of the Incarnation and the love of God and neighbor as conduits of salvation fail to retain their full value in the here and now. To her credit Williams does at times recognize this fact. But if a renewed interest...

The Dutch HEXACO Personality Inventory: Psychometric Properties, Self–Other Agreement, and Relations With Psychopathy Among Low and High Acquaintanceship Dyads

The HEXACO model (Lee & Ashton, 2004, 2006) of personality structure is based on 6 dimensions that have been recovered in lexical studies of personality in various languages. In this study, we examined a Dutch version of the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO–PI; Lee & Ashton, 2004) and found it to have satisfactory psychometric properties. Additionally, we examined the level of self–other agreement for the HEXACO–PI variables and the relation of HEXACO–PI Honesty-Humility with the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (Williams, Paulhus, & Hare, 2007) at varying levels of self–other acquaintanceship. Self–other agreement was found to be high, especially among dyads with high levels of acquaintanceship. Self-reported and other-reported Honesty-Humility and Emotionality were the strongest predictors of psychopathy. The relation between other-reported Honesty-Humility and self-reported psychopathy was near zero for dyads with low levels of acquaintanceship but was moderately strong for dyads with high levels of acquaintanceship.

¿Cómo se relacionan los vocablos en un estudio de la disponibilidad léxica?

Los estudios léxicos no sólo permiten establecer resultados y análisis de carácter estadístico sobre el estudio de disponibilidad y variación léxica. Sino también, puede desarrollar relaciones del tipo redes y constelaciones léxico-semánticas. Los objetivos de esta investigación consisten en determinar, a partir de los resultados de una investigación mayor acerca de variación léxica, 1) ¿Cómo se relacionan los vocablos en un estudio de disponibilidad léxica? 2) ¿Cómo se estructuran estos vocablos en redes léxicas para formar constelaciones? y 3) ¿Cuáles son las relaciones asociativas que las rigen? Para este artículo tomaremos el centro de interés "La naturaleza". Con el cual se podrá obtener: a) La selección de vocablos de acuerdo con los resultados léxico-estadísticos, b) La relación que los vocablos guardan en la muestra y c) Las asociaciones léxicas que se generan en el sistema lingüístico y que se verán reflejadas en la misma constelación. La relación entre los vocablos tiene su base en el léxico mental. Éste se da por la frecuencia de aparición de cada una de las voces participantes en el discurso lingüístico y por los resultados de los vocablos de acuerdo a la disponibilidad léxica.

Establishment of a Medical Academic Word List

This paper reports a corpus-based lexical study of the most frequently used medical academic vocabulary in medical research articles (RAs). A Medical Academic Word List (MAWL), a word list of the most frequently used medical academic words in medical RAs, was compiled from a corpus containing 1 093 011 running words of medical RAs from online resources. The established MAWL contains 623 word families, which accounts for 12.24% of the tokens in the medical RAs under study. The high word frequency and the wide text coverage of medical academic vocabulary throughout medical RAs confirm that medical academic vocabulary plays an important role in medical RAs. The MAWL established in this study may serve as a guide for instructors in curriculum preparation, especially in designing course-books of medical academic vocabulary, and for medical English learners in setting their vocabulary learning goals of reasonable size during a particular phase of English language learning.

German lexical personality factors: relations with the HEXACO model

We correlated the scales of the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO‐PI) with adjective scale markers of factors previously obtained in indigenous lexical studies of personality structure in the German language. Self‐ratings obtained from a sample of 323 German participants showed a pattern of strong convergent and weak discriminant correlations, supporting the content‐based interpretation of the German lexical factors in terms of the HEXACO dimensions. Notably, convergent correlations were strong for both the broader and the narrower variants of the Honesty‐Humility factor as observed in German lexical studies. Also, convergent correlations for HEXACO Openness to Experience were, as expected, stronger for German adjectives describing a creative and intellectual orientation than for German adjectives describing intellectual ability. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A corpus-based lexical study on frequency and distribution of Coxhead’s AWL word families in medical research articles (RAs)

We conducted a lexical study on the word frequency and the text coverage of the 570 word families from Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) in medical research articles (RAs) based on a corpus of 50 medical RAs written in English with 190 425 running words. By computer analysis, we found that the text coverage of the AWL words accounted for around 10.07% in English medical RAs, that 292 (51.2%) out of the 570 AWL word families were frequently used in English medical RAs and that the academic words used in English medical RAs distributed dispersedly throughout a whole RA, accounting on the average for around 10% text coverage with slight difference among the five sections of a medical RA ( Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, and Discussion). From these findings, we conclude that: (a) academic vocabulary, with a high text coverage and dispersion throughout a medical RA, is an important set of word items in medical RAs; (b) the AWL, a list of academic vocabulary representing academic word families across a wide range of subject disciplines, is far from complete in representing the academic words frequently used in medical RAs; and (c) the different coverage of academic words in the different sections in a medical RA, together with the role each section is supposed to play in a medical RA, indicates that academic words to a great extent serve some rhetorical functions in academic texts, as seen in the medical RAs in our study.

Caligae and Other Items of Medieval Religious Dress: A Lexical Study

Caligae and Other Items of Medieval Religious Dress: A Lexical Study

The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model

Recently, Lee and Ashton (2004) described the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO-PI), a new instrument designed to assess the six dimensions observed in lexical studies of personality structure of various languages. Here, we describe the development of an alternative measure of the HEXACO factors and their facets, using the items of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). The scales of the resulting IPIP–HEXACO inventory showed satisfactory psychometric properties, as assessed by internal-consistency reliability, convergent and discriminant correlations with the original HEXACO-PI scales, and factor structure. We discuss the potential usefulness of the new IPIP–HEXACO inventory and its strengths and limitations.

External Evidence and the Semitic Root

This article reviews the external evidence bearing on the internal structure of words in Semitic languages. This evidence comes mostly from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and lexical studies. Most of these studies have concluded that the mental lexicon of Semitic decomposes words into consonantal roots combined with other morphological units. While some studies in formal linguistics have also reached this conclusion on the basis of internal evidence, others have argued that Semitic roots must contain both consonants and vowels. This article reviews the theoretical and empirical motivations behind these two conclusions. It is proposed that i) convergences between external and internal types of evidence are theoretically significant, and ii) such convergences currently favor formal models of morphology that regard the consonantal root as a legitimate morphological unit in Semitic languages.