The common ground of natural language and social interaction in personality description

The "Big Five" personality factors, and arguably a "Big Seven" superset, provide broad coverage of the traits represented in natural language in both American and Spanish settings (Benet & Waller, 1995). Three "SYMLOG" dimensions (Bales, 1999) cover major individual differences in social interaction. Participants (207 British students, mainly undergraduates) responded to both sets of measures-and also to a General Survey of personality (Kritzer, Hare, & Blumberg, 1974). Results provide a further cross-cultural replication of the Big Five (and, arguably, the Big Seven) dimensions as well as of the General Survey. Moreover, each of the Seven factors showed at least a modest correlation (about .35 or more) with one, and only one, of the SYMLOG dimensions-suggesting that the two domains, natural language and social interaction, cover similar "territory," a view supported by higher order factor analysis. (C) 2001 Academic Press.