Elizaveta B. Berezina

Background. Although the Big Five model (BFM) of personality has been the dominant paradigm in personality research since the mid-1990s, it has recently been challenged by the HEXACO model, which contains an additional factor called Honesty-Humility. Since both these models of personality were developed using the same factor analytic techniques, there has been an ongoing but inconclusive debate about the relative merits of these competing models. 

Objective. This paper assesses the robustness of the Honesty-Humility trait using a technique based on the semantic relationships between personality trait adjectives.

Design. Trait marker adjectives for the HEXACO Honesty-Humility and BFM Agreeableness and Neuroticism personality domains in the English language are translated into, and back-translated from, six Asian languages to generate lists of closely related trait terms known as schedonyms. The numbers of schedonyms found within and across the three personality domains are then compared, to determine whether the HEXACO Honesty-Humility factor is semantically distinct from the BFM traits of Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Results. Our findings indicate that the Honesty-Humility trait domain is semantically distinct from the BFM traits of Agreeableness and Neuroticism, and therefore that there is at least one more personality trait beyond the BFM. The implications of these findings, and the potential applications of this semantically-based technique for establishing the universal structure of the human personality, are briefly discussed.

Conclusion. Our semantic analysis provides clear evidence that there is an Honesty-Humility trait domain in addition to the Agreeableness and Neuroticism traits, and therefore that HEXACO provides a better description of human personality than the BFM.

The official statistics reveal a steady growth of drug use in Russia and epidemiological estimations indicate that the real prevalence of intravenous drug users may be 4-5 times higher than the official figure. This fact highlights the importance of effective preventive programmes for young people. Each preventive programme in the field of public health should be based on the results of socio-psychological studies on a given problem (Gurvich, 1999). In this paper, we discuss the results of a two-stage study based on the ideas presented by social representations theory (Moscovici, 1961). Our purpose was to analyze the lay thinking about drugs among different groups of young Russians. A total of 257 respondents (162 males and 95 females) aged 16 to 35 participated in the study (the median age was 24 years). At the first stage, the ‘map’ of shared common views about drugs was revealed. At the second stage, different social positions (as a function of different experience with drugs) on this ‘map’ were analyzed. The reported results give support to our predictions.