The Circumplex model for interpersonal trait adjectives in Italian

In this study, we test the hypothesis that the Circumplex model may be valid to represent the structure of interpersonal trait adjectives in everyday spoken Italian. A subset of interpersonal trait words was selected within a 314-trait list (Di Blas & Forzi, Scienze dellʹ Interazione, in press). Self- and otherratings on the subset of 205 interpersonal trait adjectives were subjected to PCA and Varimax rotation, and the two-factor solution was employed to develop eight interpersonal scales. To this aim, the criteria used by the Dutch taxonomers to distribute the trait terms in a bi-dimensional space ordered into partitions of 30 ° (Hofstee, De Raad & Goldberg, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 146–163) were adapted and applied to a bi-dimensional space subdivided into octants of 45 °. Principal Component analysis and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) were performed on the intercorrelation matrix among the eight Italian scales, and a number of tests were applied to the resulting bi-dimensional matrices in order to determine the degree to which the empirical locations of the scales agreed with the theoretical circular ordering. The results showed a good correspondence between the Italian and the English interpersonal scales. The Circumplex model is confirmed to represent an adequate configuration of the interpersonal trait adjectives in natural language.