A trait‐taxonomic project was conducted in the North‐East of Italy. Three studies were run. In the first study, a comprehensive set of terms appropriate for personality description (adjectives, and adjectives that can be used as type‐nouns) was selected, and a modified version of the German selection procedure (Angleitner, Ostendorf and John, 1990) was adopted. In the second study, self‐ and other ratings were collected for a set of 314 trait‐descriptive adjectives. Self‐ and other ratings were factor analysed separately, and the factor solutions were compared in order to establish dimensions that were stable across the two data sets. In the third study, the pool of adjectives was reduced to 243 which were administered to a new sample, which also provided self‐descriptions on Goldberg's 40 bipolar scales. The resulting indigenous dimensions were compared with the canonical Big Five. Altogether, our findings suggest that the traditional Big Five are not reproduced when an emic taxonomy of Italian trait‐descriptive adjectives is developed. In fact, the three‐dimensional solution was the most robust in our studies (the Big Three), and not more than four factors remained stable across the data sets we analysed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Intellect was missing and the remaining 4 of the Big Five had no literal counterparts. Benet-Martmez and Waller (1997) also concluded that a seven-dimensional solution was needed to represent the main personality dimensions in Spanish. As regards lexical studies in Asia, Yang and Bond (1990) and Yik and Bond (1993) observed a complex pattern of intercorrelations between indigenous dimensions in--Chinese and the Big Five, none of which was clearly replicated. In Filipino (Tagalog), Church, Reyes, Katigbak, and Grimm (1997) concluded that 7 factors were representative of the main personality dimensions, and they found no one-to-one correspondence between the emic dimensions and the Big Five. Similar results were found by Isaka (1990), who retained 10 factors to represent the indigenous dimensions of personality in the Japanese language.Given that samples were comparable across lexical studies, Almagor and colleagues (1995) and Ostendorf and Angleitner (1994b) pointed out that discrepancies between psycholexical taxonomies may be due to differences in the variable selection procedures that have been applied in the distinct studies. If evaluative and mood terms are included as personality variables, then the Big Seven are likely to emerge (Almagor et al., 1995); if abilities and talents are included as personality variables (see Angleitner, Ostendorf, & John, 1990), then the Fifth of the Big Five can emerge and be defined in terms of Intellect, Imagination, and Creativity. Saucier (1997) examined this question of divergencies in variablesampling in the American English language. He performed factor analyses, from 2 to 10 factors, on self-and acquaintance ratings provided on four item sets. The item sets were selected on the basis of different degrees of constraints in trait definition, that is, from prototypical disposition and state descriptors to the most familiar person descriptors. Saucier found that the selection criteria affected to some degree the factor analytic results. In fact, the Big Five were recovered in the set of prototypical disposition and state descriptors, and a Big Seven-like structure emerged from the set of person descriptors. Interestingly, Saucier found that the 3-factor solution, the Big Three of Peabody and Goldberg (1989), was the 451 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

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.

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