La Personnalité Comme Construction Sémantique Universelle et Culturelle

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Personality was approached by tracing back common usage terms, easily available to the layman, to their latent semantic organization — traits — which is supposedly revealed by their inter‐correlations and subsequent factorization, that is, the usual semantic differential methodology. The measuring instrument is composed of 40 concepts and 40 scales, nine of which are pan‐cultural and 31 are resulting from a genuine elicitation, and was applied to a sample of 100 male and female subjects. Strong similarities are found, as expected, between personality structure and the more fundamental affective EPA meaning structure. But even when the affective component of the meaning structure, which is nevertheless the main feature of personality ratings, is mathematically neutralized by partializing the nine pan‐cultural scales out of the 31 genuine personality scales, the remaining personality structure is still universal enough, beyond its fundamental affective component. It is suggested that those unique and culture‐bound factors appear as they do as a result of the limited number of scales selected and not as a result of a culture‐determined personality structure.