Personality traits, adjectives and gender
integrating corpus linguistic and psychological approaches
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jld.40370Keywords:
adjectives, personality traits, gendering mechanisms, corpus linguistics, psychology, trait desirabilityAbstract
There have been linguistic studies on the gendering mechanisms of adjectives and psychological studies on the relationship between personality traits and gender, but the two fields have never entered into a dialogue on these issues. This article seeks to address this gap by presenting an interdisciplinary study that explores the gendering mechanisms associated with personality traits and personality trait-denoting adjectives. The findings of earlier work in this area and basic gendering mechanisms relevant to adjectives and personality traits are outlined. This is followed by a linguistic and a psychological analysis of the usage patterns of a set of personality trait adjectives. The linguistic section draws on corpus linguistics to explore the distribution of these adjectives with female, male and gender-neutral personal nouns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The psychological analysis relates the usage frequencies of personality trait adjectives with the nouns man, woman and person in the Google Books corpus to desirability ratings of the adjectives.
References
Allport, G. and Odbert, H. (1936) Trait names: a psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs 47(1): 1–171. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093360
Arro, G. (2013) Peeking into personality test answers: inter- and intraindividual variety in item interpretations. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 47(1): 56–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9216-9
Bäcklund, I. (2006) Modifiers describing women and men in nineteenth-century English. In M. Kytö, M. Rydén and E. Smitterberg (eds) Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and Change 17–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bäckström, M. and Björklund, F. (2012) Social desirability in personality inventories: symptoms, diagnosis and prescribed cure. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 54(2): 152–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12015
Baker, P. (2010) Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language 4(1): 125–49. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v4i1.125
Baker, P. (2015) Two hundred years of the American man. In T. M. Milani (ed.) Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations 34–52. New York: Routledge.
Bian, L., Leslie, S.-J. and Cimpian, A. (2017) Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science 355(6323): 389–91. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6524
Boucher, J. and Osgood, C. E. (1969) The Pollyanna hypothesis. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 8(1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(69)80002-2
Braun, F. (1995) Making men out of people. The MAN principle in translating genderless forms. Working Papers on Language, Gender and Sexism 5(2): 5–38.
Broverman, I. K., Broverman, D. M., Clarkson, F. E., Rosenkrantz, P. S. and Vogel, S. R. (1970) Sex-role stereotypes and clinical judgments of mental health. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 34(1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0028797
Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. and Moon, R. (2010) ‘Curvy, hunky, kinky’: using corpora as tools for critical analysis. Discourse & Society 21(2): 99–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509353843
Carroll, D. and Kowitz, J. (1994) Using concordancing techniques to study gender stereotyping in ELT textbooks. In J. Sunderland (ed.) Exploring Gender: Questions and Implications for English Language Education 73–82. New York: Prentice Hall.
Costa, P. T. Jr., Terracciano, A. and McCrae, R. R. (2001) Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(2): 322–31. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.2.322
Crawford, J. T., Leynes, P. A., Mayhorn, C. B. and Bink, M. L. (2004) Champagne, beer, or coffee? A corpus of gender-related and neutral words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers 36(3): 444–58. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195592
Davies, M. (2010) The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 25(4): 447–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq018
Feingold A. (1994) Gender differences in personality: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 116(3): 429–56. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.3.429
Gesuato, S. (2003) The company women and men keep: what collocations can reveal about culture. In D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson and T. McEnery (eds) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference, Lancaster University (UK), 28–31 March 2003 253–62. Lancaster: Lancaster University.
Goldberg, L. R. (1990) An alternative ‘description of personality’: the Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59(6): 1216–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216
Grimm, A. (2008) ‘Männersprache’ – ‘Frauensprache’? Eine korpusgestützte empirische Analyse des Sprachgebrauchs britischer und amerikanischer Frauen und Männer hinsichtlich Geschlechtsspezifika. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac.
Hamilton, M. C. (1991) Masculine bias in the attribution of personhood: people = male, male = people. Psychology of Women Quarterly 15(3): 393–402. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1991.tb00415.x
Hampson, S. E., Goldberg, L. R. and John, O. P. (1987) Category-breadth and socialdesirability values for 573 personality terms. European Journal of Personality 1(4): 241–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2410010405
Hellinger, M. and Bußmann, H. (2001) Gender across languages: the linguistic representation of women and men. In M. Hellinger and H. Bußmann (eds) Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men.
Volume 1 1–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.9.05hel
Herriman, J. (1998) Descriptions of woman and man in present-day English. Moderna Språk 92(2): 136–42.
Klages, L. (1929) The Science of Character. London: Allen and Unwin.
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.
Lee, J. and Collins, P. (2015) Gender representation in Hong Kong primary Englishlanguage textbooks: a corpus study. In A. S. Mustapha and S. Mills (eds) Gender Representation in Learning Materials: International Perspectives 37–51. London: Routledge.
Leising, D., Scharloth, J., Lohse, O. and Wood, D. (2014) What types of terms do people use when describing an individual’s personality? Psychological Science 25(9): 1787–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614541285
Macalister, J. (2011) Flower-girl and bugler-boy no more: changing gender representation in writing for children. Corpora 6(1): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2011.0003
Michel, J.-B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., Google Books Team, Pickett, J. P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J., Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A. and Aiden, E. L. (2011) Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014): 176–82. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644
Moon, R. (2014) From gorgeous to grumpy: adjectives, age, and gender. Gender and Language 8(1): 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v8i1.5
Motschenbacher, H. (2010) Female-as-norm (FAN): a typology of female and feminine generics. In M. Bieswanger, H. Motschenbacher and S. Mühleisen (eds) Language in its Socio-Cultural Context: New Explorations in Gendered, Global and Media Uses 35–67. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Motschenbacher, H. (2015) Some new perspectives on gendered language structures. In M. Hellinger and H. Motschenbacher (eds) Gender Across Languages, Volume 4 27–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.36.02mot
Motschenbacher, H. (2020) Gay people and homosexual persons: a co-occurrence analysis of the usage patterns of adjectival sexual descriptors in COCA. (forthcoming)
Pearce, M. (2008) Investigating the collocational behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC using Sketch Engine. Corpora 3(1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.3366/E174950320800004X
Pechenick, E. A., Danforth, C. M. and Dodds, P. S. (2015) Characterizing the Google Books corpus: strong limits to inferences of socio-cultural and linguistic evolution. PLOS One 10(10): e0137041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041
Piper, A. (2000) Some have credit cards and others have giro cheques: ‘individuals’ and ‘people’ as lifelong learners in late modernity. Discourse & Society 11(4): 515–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926500011004004
Roivainen, E. (2011) Gender differences in processing speed: a review of recent research. Learning and Individual Differences 21(2): 145–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2010.11.021
Roivainen, E. (2013) Frequency of the use of English personality adjectives: implications for personality theory. Journal of Research in Personality 47(4): 417–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.04.004
Roivainen, E. (2014) Personality adjectives in Twitter tweets and in the Google Books corpus. An analysis of the facet structure of the openness factor of personality. Current Psychology 34(4): 621–5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9274-x
Roivainen, E. (2015) The Big Five factor marker adjectives are not especially popular words: are they superior descriptors? Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49(4): 590–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-015-9311-9
Roivainen, E. (2016) A folk-psychological ranking of personality facets. Current Issues in Personality Psychology 4(4): 187–95. https://doi.org/10.5114/cipp.2016.62698
Roivainen, E. (2020). Generational changes in personality: the evidence from corpus linguistics. Psychological Reports 123(2): 325–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118805937
Roivainen, E., Veijola, J. and Miettunen, J. (2015) Careless responses in survey data and the validity of a screening instrument. Nordic Psychology 68(2): 114–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/19012276.2015.1071202
Sankis, L. M., Corbitt, E. M. and Widiger, T. A. (1999) Gender bias in the English language? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6): 1289–95. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1289
Saucier, G. and Goldberg, L. R. (1996) Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives. European Journal of Personality 10(1): 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0984(199603)10:1<61::AID-PER246>3.0.CO;2-D
Schmitt, D. P., Realo, A., Voracek, M. and Allik, J. (2008) Why can’t a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94(1): 168–82. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168
Sczesny, S., Formanowicz, M. and Moser, F. (2016) Can gender-fair language reduce gender stereotyping and discrimination? Frontiers in Psychology 7: 25. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00025
Sigley, R. and Holmes, J. (2002) Looking at girls in corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2): 138–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/007242030002004
Silveira, J. (1980) Generic masculine words and thinking. In C. Kramarae (ed.) The Voices and Words of Women and Men 165–78. Oxford: Pergamon. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-0685(80)92113-2
Sinclair, J. (1991) Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sveen, H. A. (2005) ‘Honourable’ or ‘Highly-Sexed’: Adjectival Descriptions of Male and Female Characters in Victorian and Contemporary Children’s Fiction. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.
Taylor, C. (2013) Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(1): 81–113. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2013.0035
Weisberg, Y., DeYoung, G. C. and Hirsh, J. B. (2011) Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five. Frontiers in Psychology 2: 178. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
Wood, D. (2015) Testing the lexical hypothesis: are socially important traits more densely reflected in the English lexicon? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(2): 317–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038343
Ye, S., Cai, S., Chen, C., Wan, Q. and Qian, X. (2018) How have males and females been described over the past two centuries? An analysis of Big-Five personality-related adjectives in the Google English Books. Journal of Research in Personality 76(5): 6–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2018.06.007
Younes, N. and Reips, U. D. (2019). Guideline for improving the reliability of Google Ngram studies: evidence from religious terms. PLOS One 14(3): e0213554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213554
