Evaluative and descriptive dimensions from Italian personality factors

The lexical approach assumes that the important traits of personality become encoded in language as single terms. Research using Italian trait terms has not confirmed the Big Five factors found in American English, but only the first three of these factors (the ‘Big Three’). Earlier, Peabody has emphasized the possibility of separating descriptive and evaluative aspects which are usually combined (confounded) in trait adjectives. Peabody and Goldberg showed that the Big Three factors could be transformed into three unconfounded dimensions: general evaluation, and two descriptive dimensions called Tight–Loose and Assertive–Unassertive. The present paper uses the Italian data of Di Blas and Forzi to replicate this finding. The evaluative and descriptive dimensions are defined in two ways: by deliberate rotation, and by using the unrotated factors. These two versions were closely related to each other. The transformations to these dimensions from the Big Three Italian factors were highly successful, replicating previous results in American English. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.