Psycho-lexical Studies of Personality Structure across Cultures

De Raad and Mlacic (Volume 1, Chapter 6) in "Psycho-lexical Studies of Personality Structure across Cultures" provide a historical perspective on the psycholexical research, summarize findings from the still growing numbers of psycholexical studies, and consider the potential of moving toward a consensual structure. The psycholexical approach provides a natural method to investigate indigenous personality structure but has typically focused on testing the universality of models with different numbers of dimensions, especially the Big Five. Although cross-language replication of factors for the most promising models (arguably those of two, three, five and six factors)is frequently imperfect, the considerable resemblance of psycholexical trait dimensions across most cultures is impressive, given the range of cultures and languages investigated thus far. The authors acknowledge, however, that some languages families and parts of the world are still underrepresented. In summary, both etic and emic studies suggest that Big Five-like dimensions can be identified in most cultures. However, at least in psycholexical studies, two or three broad dimensions may replicate better across cultures than models with five or six dimensions. (From Editor's Overview).