Premium
The Non‐Evaluative Circumplex of Personality Adjectives
Author(s) -
Saucier Gerard,
Ostendorf Fritz,
Peabody Dean
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6494.694155
Subject(s) - psychology , extraversion and introversion , personality , adjective , social psychology , interpersonal communication , assertiveness , orientation (vector space) , adjective check list , openness to experience , big five personality traits , linguistics , noun , philosophy , geometry , mathematics
In judgments about personality, descriptive and evaluative aspects are ordinarily combined; separating them can be important both theoretically and practically. Study 1 showed that two similar descriptive factors can be found in analyses of personality terms, selected independently in English and in German and using different methods to control for evaluation. The factors relate to two pairs of independent axes suggested by previous work: Assertive‐Unassertive and Tight‐Loose, or alternatively, Interactional Orientation (Extraversion Introversion) and Affective Orientation. These two pairs of axes are shown to be rotations of each other, and to form the prime non‐evaluative circumplex. As in previous studies, non‐evaluative scales elicited higher levels of self‐peer agreement than did more typical evaluation‐confounded scales. Study 2 showed that adjective scales for the octants of this circumplex have circular ordering, can fit even very stringent constraints of a circumplex model, have mild to strong isomorphism with the interpersonal circumplex, but represent somewhat broader constructs, and are systematically related to the Big Five and the Big Three personality factors.