PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Factor Structure of English-Language Personality Type-Nouns

Although type-nouns (e.g., idiot, hero) are important in person description, lexical studies of personality have concentrated on adjectives. This study tested structural hypotheses using 372 highly familiar English-language type-nouns and descriptions by 607 participants of either themselves, a liked, or a disliked target person. One-and 2-factor structures were most robust, and replicated similar structures found in previous adjectival studies. Additionally, the structure with 8 orthogonal factors had good replicability and applicability within single-gender subsamples; as in previous studies of type-nouns, it included factors corresponding directly to Extraversion and Intellect/Openness, but also to Attractiveness and Masculinity (or Ruggedness). The Big Five was only weakly replicated. Personality taxonomies based on adjectives are unlikely to be comprehen-sive, because type-nouns have different content emphases. Scholarly belief has it that over 2,300 years ago, Theophrastus (Theophrastus, 1909), a pupil of Aristotle, composed a catalog of 30 types of persons in a work entitled X (The Char-acters). For example, the types included o ́ (the flatterer