A Russian Taxonomy of Personality Traits: Preliminary Findings from the Word Selection Stage1

The psycholexical approach is a basic option for identifying the structure (taxonomies) of individual differences in personality. All personality traits assumed to be important for the individual may be reflected in the language; They thus can be detected by analyzing the language. Psycholexical research has given rise to many popular models such as the Big Five and HEXACO. So far, the psycholexical studies have been performed on the basis of over 30 languages. The first Russian taxonomy by A. Shmelev and his colleagues was revealed well over 30 years ago. This study differed methodologically from existing practice of performing the psycholexical research, which makes cross-cultural comparisons of the Russian taxonomy difficult. In this context, a new study of the Russian taxonomy of personality traits remains a relevant research endeavor today. The article describes the first step of a new psycholexical study, whereby we have compiled a global dictionary of the personality descriptors. We employed a corpus of Russian words, comprising four parts of speech: adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs. The initial total list contained 140,189 words. We then selected personality-relevant words in three stages. Consequently, the word list was reduced to 26,124 units. At the second, classification stage, we retained 4,089 words describing human personality. The third stage of final cleaning the dictionary has ended up with two dictionaries of the Russian personality descriptors. The former, advanced dictionary includes 2,384 words (600 adjectives, 753 nouns as attributes, 184 nouns as types, 501 verbs, and 346 adverbs); the latter, abridged dictionary includes 1,253 words (591 adjectives, 231 nouns as attributes, 62 nouns as types, 320 verbs, and 49 adverbs). In the abridged dictionary, synonyms and antonyms of the different parts of speech were removed. At the next stage of the study, we plan to investigate an empirical structure of the Russian personality taxonomy.