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.