English/Japanese literal and free translation versions of the M-G Personality Questionnaire

Abstract

Each Form S represented self-cultural context (SCC) and Form H hetero-cultural context (HCC). Americans exhibited social-maladjustment in SCC and personal-adjustment in HCC whereas Japanese exhibited positive, dissimulating and socially-adjusted-tendencies differently in HCC and SCC. Among Americans, personal-maladjustment tendency decreased and social-adjustment tendency increased when Forms H and S were repeated. American personality characteristic (positivism) correlated negatively with Japanese mode of behavior, and Japanese personality characteristic (cooperativeness) with Western mode of behavior. A distance (D) calculated in each subject between the profiles of the scores in the 13 scales of J-H and J-S, or E-H and E-S constituted a measure of the level of intercontextual matching of responses (ICM). Pearsonian correlations indicated that the smaller the D (i.e., the greater the ICM) of Americans and Japanese, the greater the selfefficacy for behaving in HCC. Such an ICM (or flexibility) increased through repeated alternate experiences in SCC and HCC. Americans were more stereotyped, whereas Japanese were more flexible, intercontc_xtually.