On the organization of a psycho-lexical study of the Russian personality trait taxonomy

According the psycho-lexical hypothesis, any substantial individual differences in human behavior, emotions, cognition and motivation are supposed to be reflected in the language, which means that by analyzing the language one will be able to identify these differences. Further, using the factor analysis of self-reported individual differences, it is possible to identify the structure of personality traits. For example, based on a psycho-lexical study of English descriptors, the Big Five has been articulated. Meanwhile, the Russian taxonomy of personality traits has remained understudied. In the present article, we discuss some aspects of the organization of a psycho-lexical study. First, we analyze possible sources for the initial analysis of a language: free self-descriptions, everyday talks, dictionaries, etc. A conclusion is made about the advantage of using lists, normally dictionaries, compiled by professional linguists. In our future study, we also plan to use a similar list, namely, a corpus of the Russian language. Second, possible parts of speech taken as a basis for the analysis of words are discussed. Usually researchers focus on adjectives, less often they add nouns to the list. However, the analysis of scientific literature shows the need to use all possible parts of speech for such a study. In our research, we plan to use adjectives, nouns, adverbs, and verbs. Third, features of German and Dutch word selection methodologies are analyzed. We conclude that the German methodology may be preferable to the Dutch methodology in some aspects; therefore, we plan to employ the former in our study. Finally, the need for a psycho-lexical study in Russian and its blueprint are discussed.