a lexical study of communication adjectives
TRANSCRIPT
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 1
A LEXICAL STUDY OF COMMUNICATION ADJECTIVES:
THE DIMENSIONALITY OF COMMUNICATION STYLES
Paper submitted to the annual International Communication Association conference,
New York, May 26-30, 2005
ABSTRACT
One of the main problems in current interpersonal communication research is the lack of an
encompassing framework in which to capture different communication styles. Additionally,
research to date has often used inadequate measures of interpersonal communication styles.
In this research, a multi-phase lexical approach was used to uncover the main communication
styles. In the first three phases, adjectives were selected based on their ability to describe a
communication style. In the fourth and final phase, 200 respondents provided self-rating on
749 communication adjectives. The adjectives were submitted to a Principal Component
Analysis, which provided evidence of seven main communication style dimensions. This
paper describes the lexical research process and the content and interrelations of the seven
main communication style dimensions.
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 2
INTRODUCTION
Interpersonal communication is vital to our daily well-being. Without interpersonal
communication, almost all people will tend to feel lost and lonely (Adler, Rosenfeld, &
Proctor, 2001). Surprisingly, there is a lack of adequate instruments to measure interpersonal
communication. Additionally, there is no integrated framework to capture the structure and
dimensionality of communication styles. The sourcebook on communication research
measures (Rubin, Palmgreen, & Sypher, 1994) lists two instruments that deal explicitly with
‘normal’ (e.g., not dealing with aggression or apprehension) styles of communication; the
Communicator Style Measure (CSM; Norton, 1978) and the Relational Communication Scale
(RCS; Burgoon & Hale, 1987). Since these instruments are well known, one would expect
them to contain scales that are reliable and valid. According to Nunnally (1981), a reliable
instrument is one that has a reliability >.70 for explorative research and >.80 for research in
which one tests hypotheses. Rubin, Palmgreen, and Sypher (1994) report reliabilities as low
as .37 for one of Norton’s CSM scales and .42 for one of Burgoon’s RCS scales, which is
clearly insufficient for explorative research, let alone for hypothesis testing.
Although recently, some better instruments to measure communication styles have
become available (Gudykunst et al., 1996), up until now, there has been no consensus on the
number of dimensions of communication styles and the exact content of these dimensions.
For instance, it has been suggested that communication styles may be captured by two main
dimensions (Dillard, Solomon, & Palmer, 1999; Sorenson & Savage, 1989) but no
fundamental research in communication science has been done to either confirm or falsify
this assumption. However, a similar assumption with respect to interpersonal relations has
been tested in psychology. In 1957, Leary proposed that the interpersonal relation domain can
best be represented using two dimensions, namely affiliation and control. These two
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 3
dimensions span the main axes of a circle that is known as the interpersonal circle or
circumplex (Figure 1). A lot of research has been conducted on the interpersonal circumplex
(e.g., Acton & Revelle, 2002; Gurtman, 2001; Tracey, Ryan, & Jaschik-Herman, 2001;
Wagner, Kiesler, & Schmidt, 1995), especially on the notion of circularity of measurement
instruments derived from the framework and the complementarity of behavioral responses in
interpersonal relations.
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Insert Figure 1 about here
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Although the instruments used to measure the two dimensions and its facets are more
advanced (e.g., Benjamin, 1996; Moskowitz, 1994; Wiggins, Trapnell, & Phillips, 1988) and
the two dimensional and circumplexical framework is more encompassing than the
instruments and framework in comparable interpersonal communication research, the
interpersonal relation notion in psychology is somewhat different from what communication
science scholars are looking for when studying interpersonal communication and its effects.
For instance, adjectives such as ‘neighborly’ and ‘antisocial’ load on the interpersonal
circumplex (De Raad, 1995), but can hardly be considered ‘communicative acts’. These
adjectives can be considered ‘transitive’ because they require another person (the neighbor or
the person one is being antisocial to) as an object of the interaction. Adjectives such as ‘loud’
(luidruchtig) and ‘businesslike’ can be considered communicative acts, but they are
considered non-interpersonal in the interpersonal circumplex. These adjectives can be
considered ‘intransitive’ because they do not require another person as an object of the
interaction. Adjectives such as ‘dominant’ and ‘jovial’ do load on the interpersonal
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 4
circumplex, are transitive, and they seem to provide a meaningful description of one’s
communication style.
From this we can infer that the interpersonal relations concept overlaps with
communication acts and styles, and is both somewhat ‘broader’ and ‘narrower’ than
communication acts and styles (Figure 2). The interpersonal circumplex shows overlap with
communication styles in the case both refer to communicative behaviors that are transitive.
However, the interpersonal circumplex is broader since it includes interpersonal behaviors
that are transitive but not communicative. On the other hand, the interpersonal circumplex is
narrower because it excludes communicative styles that are intransitive. Furthermore, it may
be true that the interpersonal circumplex is also somewhat restricted by focusing on two
dimensions only. It may be argued that these two are the main dimensions of transitive
behaviors, but some intransitive behaviors may also be said to constitute communicative
styles. For instance, emotionality is not part of the interpersonal circumplex, but emotional
(or the opposite: unemotional or businesslike) communication, can be considered an aspect of
somebody’s communication style. Additionally, conscientiousness is not part of the
interpersonal circumplex, but precise communication can be considered a communication
style. Thus, the interpersonal circumplex, although providing a starting point for discussion
on the framework for interpersonal communication styles, cannot be considered the ultimate
framework.
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Insert Figure 2 about here
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LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 5
The interpersonal circumplex is closely related to two of the main dimensions derived
from lexical personality research (Trapnell & Wiggins, 1990). Although the consensus
among personality psychologists for the last 20 years was that there are five major
dimensions of personality, recent re-analysis of data from the major lexical studies has
actually revealed that there are six instead of five main personality dimensions (Ashton, Lee,
Perugini, Szarota, de Vries, Di Blas, Boies, & de Raad, 2004). These six dimensions, known
by the acronym ‘HEXACO’, are: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion,
Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience. Of these six, extraversion
and agreeableness are commonly equated with the two main interpersonal circumplex
dimensions (i.e., respectively control and affiliation). Conscientiousness seems to be least
transitive, since it is primarily associated with the orientation of a subject towards an
(abstract) object (whether time, matter, or ideas; for instance: punctual, orderly, precise,
etc…). The three other dimensions fall somewhere in between the interpersonal and
noninterpersonal dimensions. According to Saucier, Ostendorf, & Peabody (2001) and
Hofstee, de Raad, & Goldberg (1992), the interpersonal circumplex may have to be expanded
to include (the Big Five) Emotional Stability. Thus, emotionality seems to be a prime
candidate as a communication dimension, notably since emotionality will often express itself
in interpersonal communication situations. However, openness to experience and
honesty/humility may be good candidates as well; especially humility, which in terms of
content seems to be related to unassuming (low on control & high on agreeableness) in the
interpersonal circumplex. The difference between emotionality, openness, and honesty (not
so much humility) on the one hand and extraversion and agreeableness on the other, is that
the former may be less ‘transitive’ than the latter. It is impossible to be extravert and
agreeable when nobody is present, but it is not impossible to be emotional, open to
experience, and honest when alone. However, as we said before, intransitive behaviors that
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 6
take part in the presence of others can be very communicative, i.e., intransitivity alone should
not be a criterion to consider a behavior as non-communicative.
To study the dimensional nature of interpersonal communication, we have conducted
research on adjectives in the tradition of the lexical approach (see Ashton et al., 2004; De
Raad, 1995). This type of research is relatively rare in communication science (but for an
exception see Burgoon, Johnson, & Koch, 1998). In personality psychology, however, this
type of research has been used to uncover the main personality dimensions. The principle
behind lexical research in the personality psychology tradition is that everything that can be
said about personality is represented in language and thus in any representative dictionary of
a language. The same argument that has been made for personality psychology can be applied
to communication styles. In fact, Burgoon et al. (1998) have used a similar approach to study
interpersonal dominance, although instead of deductively deriving communication style
adjectives, they used an inductive approach. This paper reports a large study, which tries to
deductively arrive at the adjectives that describe communication styles. The research question
that we try to answer in this study is: “What are the main dimensions of communication
styles?” Subsequent to investigating the dimensionality of communication styles, we will
derive scales from these dimensions and investigate whether men and women use different
communication styles.
METHOD
The research was conducted in four phases. In the first three phases a selection was
made of the adjectives that represented communication styles. In the fourth phase, 200
respondents provided self-ratings on the final list of 749 adjectives. The phases and the
methods we employed are described below.
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 7
Phase 1
In phase 1 we collected all relevant adjectives from the Dutch ‘Van Dale’ dictionary,
which is the most extensive and complete dictionary of the Netherlands. The following
criteria were used to select adjectives from the dictionary: 1) at least one of the meanings of
the adjectives, or none in the case of monosemes, did not contain a label referring to either
time, slang, or technical jargon, except for technical words referring to communication or
psychology; 2) selected adjectives have a frequency of two or higher in the previous five
years of five main national newspapers. The number of adjectives that fulfilled, which criteria
was 7765. Additionally, we included a list of 1203 Dutch personality adjectives of Brokken
(1978). A great number of words from this list showed overlap with the list from the Dutch
dictionary; of the 1203 adjectives only 153 were added to the Van Dale list of 7765
adjectives. Thus the final list at the end of phase 1 contained 7918 adjectives.
Phase 2
In phase 2, 7918 adjectives were rated twice, with an interval of 2 weeks, by three
raters based on the following criteria:
An adjective received a ‘1’ if:
- it referred to ‘the way someone communicates’ or somebody’s communication
style,
- it referred to non-verbal, para-verbal, or verbal aspects of a communication act,
- it referred to a situation in which someone communicates with someone else
(either face-to-face, through a letter or mail, through telephone, or through another
medium).
An adjective received a ‘0’ if:
- it did not refer to interpersonal interaction (e.g., ferrous),
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 8
- it only referred to (acts or transactions involving) physical goods or materials
(e.g., arrowy),
- it only referred to someone’s non-interpersonal personality (e.g., masochistic),
- it referred to interpersonal interaction, but did not refer to the communicative
aspects of the interaction (e.g., inseparable),
- the adjective was only evaluative and non-descriptive of communication (e.g.,
good)
- it was unknown, highly unusual, or the meaning of the word was ambiguous (e.g.,
infemal)
Since the three raters rated the adjectives twice, the range of scores was from 0 to 6.
Adjectives receiving a score of ‘3’ or higher (1931 adjectives) passed on to the next round.
Adjectives receiving a score of ‘0’ did not go on to the next phase. Adjectives that received a
score of 1 or 2 were submitted to an additional selection using the same three raters.
Adjectives were scored on a five-point scale, ranging from ‘5’ (adjective provides a clear
image of the way somebody communicates) to ‘1’ (adjective does not or provides an unclear
image of the way somebody communicates). Adjectives with a mean score ³ 3 or which
received from one of the three raters a score of ‘5’ were added to the next round. In total 283
adjectives were added to the next round, making for a total of 2214 adjectives for the third
phase.
Phase 3
In phase 3, the list of 2214 adjectives was submitted to a group of 40 students, of
which 20 students were in their final years of communication science and 20 were in their
final years of Dutch language studies. The respondents were asked to rate the adjectives on a
five-point (disagree – agree) scale using the following sentence: “Does this adjective summon
a clear image of somebody’s communication style?” The average correlation between the 40
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 9
raters was .31 and the inter-rater reliability was .82. Adjectives with a score ³ 3.5were
deemed to be sufficiently communicative. In this way 749 adjectives were selected to pass on
to phase 4.
Phase 4
Phase 4 constituted the final study. Through e-mail 700 people from a pool of
respondents of the University of Amsterdam were asked to participate in the research. In
return, a financial compensation was provided. Of the 700 people who received the e-mail,
200 (28.6%) participated. The sample consisted of 65 men and 135 women, with age ranging
between 18 and 56 years. Respondents provided self-ratings using the following sentence:
“During a conversation, I tend to communicate ….”, in which the dots had to be replaced
with each of the 749 adjectives. Answers were provided on a five-point (disagree – agree)
scale.
RESULTS
The data was ipsatized before being subjected to a principal component analysis.
Based on the scree plot, a 6- or 7-factor solution seemed preferable for the data. Based on the
content, a 7-factor solution, explaining 25,2% of the variance, was chosen. In Figure 2, a tree
diagram of the relation between the factors from the first to seventh factor solution is
provided. The final 7-factor solution appears to contain variants of the HEXACO scales
(Ashton & Lee, 2004) plus Incivility. For now we will use the better-known names of the
HEXACO scales to denote the communication styles, although they could also be described
with the acronym ‘PERFECT’ for Precise (Conscientiousness), Eloquent (eXtraversion),
Rude (Incivility), Friendly (Agreeableness), Emotional (Emotionality), Complex (Openness
to experience), and True (Honesty-Humility). Extraversion is the most consistent factor in all
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 10
of the factor solutions, already appearing as the main factor in the single factor solution,
although the factor is mainly defined by its negative, i.e., introversion, consisting of
adjectives such as shy, bashful, and closed, but also contains adjectives referring to an
extravert communication style, such as catchy, articulate, and talkative (see Appendix). In the
2-factor solution, a combination of agreeableness and incivility appears as a factor. In the 4-
factor solution these two split into separate factors. Although agreeableness contributes to
openness in the 5-factor solution and emotionality in the 6-factor solution, the core meaning
of agreeableness – the 3d factor in the 7-factor solution – remains the same in the 7-factor
solution, consisting of adjectives such as friendly, nice, and tolerant, and (negatively loading)
vehement, offensive, and reproachful. Incivility also remains virtually unchanged, with as its
main loading adjectives rude, mean, and unsociable, although in the 7-factor solution it splits
into an incivility and honesty factor.
In the 3-factor solution conscientiousness appears. Conscientiousness remains
unchanged up until the 7-factor solution and is defined by adjectives such as well-studied,
disciplined, and precise on the one hand and messy (-), chaotic (-), and incoherent (-) on the
other. In the 5-factor solution openness to experience appears as a new factor, although
receiving some contribution from agreeableness. It should be noted that openness (to
experience) has a somewhat negative connotation; apart from adjectives such as poetic,
philosophical, and analytical, it is also defined by adjectives that disturb proper
communication, such as complicated, abnormal, and secretive. Emotionality appears only in
the 5-factor solution after receiving some variance from Agreeableness. In the 7-factor
solution it contributes to the honesty factor. Emotionality is defined by adjectives such as
affected, emotional, and moody versus calm (-), stonesober (-), and cool (-). In the 7-factor
solution, honesty appears as a separate factor, receiving contribution from both incivility and
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 11
emotionality. The main defining adjectives of honesty are honest and sincere versus smooth
(-), cunning (-), and slick (-).
Beyond the first seven factors lie mainly smaller factors. The 8-factor solution
contains a ‘moodiness’ factor, which receives contributions from both agreeableness and
emotionality. It is defined by adjectives such as ill-tempered, pissed off, and whiny. As a
ninth factor, a separate ‘humorous’ factor emerges. Finally, in the 10-factor solution, a
‘calmness’ factor emerges.
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Using the 30 highest loading items of each of the seven factors, we constructed
adjective scales from the non-ipsatized (raw) item scores. In Table 1, the reliabilities and
intercorrelations of the scales formed from the factors are shown. As can be seen, all of the
scales have reliabilities exceeding .80; the first four factors (extraversion, conscientiousness,
agreeableness, and incivility) even have reliabilities exceeding .90. Except for three
correlations, those between agreeableness, incivility and honesty, none of the correlations
exceed .30. Incivility correlates -.63 with honesty and .52 with agreeableness. Agreeableness
correlates .52 with incivility. The means of incivility and honesty are respectively somewhat
lower (2.09) and higher (3.74) than the other means, reflecting social desirable answering
tendencies. Additionally, the standard deviations of these two adjective scales are somewhat
narrower than the others (except emotionality), reflecting the restriction of range associated
with these answering tendencies.
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 12
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Insert Table 1 about here
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To inspect possible differences between male and female communication styles, we
conducted a t-test on each of the seven adjectives scales (see Table 1). Except for the
adjectives scales incivility, honesty, and openness to experience, no differences between male
and female communication styles emerged. Generally, women exhibited a communication
style that was less rude (lower on incivility) than men (mw = 1.99,sdw = .34 versus mm =
2.29, sdm = .51;t = 4.91, p < .01), more true (higher on honesty-humility) than men (mw =
3.85, sdw = .33 versus mm = 3.51,sdm = .39; t = -6.56, p < .01), and less complex (lower on
openness to experience) than men (mw = 2.90, sdw = .44versus mm = 3.08,sdm = .46; t =
2.78, p = .01).
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
This research employed a lexical approach to deductively arrive at a framework of
communication styles. The study shows that communication styles are captured by seven
main style dimensions that resemble the HEXACO constructs (Lee & Ashton, 2004) in
personality psychology plus an additional dimension Incivility. In this study, the main
dimensions obtained the following labels: extraversion (or: eloquence), conscientiousness (or:
precision), agreeableness (or: friendliness), incivility (or: rudeness), honesty (or:
truthfulness), openness to experience (or: complexity), and emotionality. Scales derived from
these constructs are shown to have high to very high reliabilities, with all reliabilities
exceeding .80.
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 13
The intercorrelations between the adjective scales are lower than .30, with the
exception of three scales that highly intercorrelate, i.e., agreeableness, incivility, and honesty.
The relation between agreeableness and honesty has been observed in personality research as
well. According to Ashton and Lee (2001), agreeableness and honesty, along with
emotionality, can be interpreted as traits that involve prosocial versus antisocial tendencies.
Lee, Ashton, and de Vries (2004) observe that content associated with altruistic (prosocial
versus antisocial) tendencies may migrate between agreeableness, honesty-humility, and
emotionality. This is clearly the case in this research as well. In the five-factor solution, there
was no emotionality factor present, which only showed up in the six-factor solution as a
derivative from the general agreeableness factor. Emotionality, in its turn, shed some of its
content to honesty-humility in the seven-factor solution. In this seven-factor solution,
honesty-humility obtained additional content from the incivility factor. Thus, although the
factors extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience were relatively stable
between the five- and seven-factor solution, content of the four factors agreeableness,
incivility, honesty, and emotionality that have to do with the communication of altruism show
substantial migratory tendencies.
The resemblance between the six of the seven communication style factors and the
HEXACO personality factors is striking and confirm the link between personality and
interpersonal communication styles that has been suggested by other scholars (Leung &
Bond, 2001; McCroskey, Heisel, & Richmond, 2001). However, there are some differences
between personality and communication styles as well. The most notable differences occur in
the factors conscientiousness (precision) and openness to experience (complexity). As noted
in the introduction, the personality factor conscientiousness can be regarded as the least
transitive of the personality factors, since it describes the handling of (abstract) objects such
as time, matter, and ideas. Openness to experience involves the handling of ideas or
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 14
experiences. According to Ashton & Lee (2001), conscientiousness and openness to
experience, together with extraversion can be interpreted as traits that involve the active
engagement of tasks (conscientiousness), ideas (openness to experience), or social situations
(extraversion). It is not surprising that extraversion emerges as a primary factor in the factor
solutions and shows clear one-to-one mapping on the personality trait extraversion. However,
both conscientiousness and openness to experience do not primarily belong to the social
domain, and thus it is surprising that they emerge as communication style dimensions. The
conundrum can be resolved by regarding both conscientiousness and openness to experience
as involving the handling of ideas. In this sense, they are less transitive than the other five
factors in the seven-factor solution, but still describe a communication style. A conscientious
or precise communication style is one that involves the structure of one’s communication,
while openness to experience or a complex communication style involves the content of
one’s communication, such as poems, philosophy, or scientific analysis. Note that some
content-related adjectives, such as academic, theoretic, and scientific, that load highly on
conscientiousness, show substantial cross-loadings on openness to experience.
This research has also investigated whether there are differences between men and
women in communication styles. The outcomes show no differences between men and
women in extraversion/eloquence, conscientiousness/precision, agreeableness/friendliness,
and emotionality. Although the stereotype of women involves the communication of emotion
and emotionality while communication (Popp et al., 2003), this research does not confirm
differences between men and women with regard to emotional communication. This study
supports findings of Street (2002) and Aruguete & Roberts (2000) in the absence of
differences between men and women with respect to emotional communication. However,
the research does find significant differences between men and women with respect to
incivility/rudeness, honesty, and openness to experience/complexity. Whether these
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 15
differences hold up in other studies is an empirical question that needs to be addressed in
future research.
There are several other paths for future research. In the first place, studies should
investigate the relation between the personality constructs, such as measured by the
HEXACO-PI (Lee & Ashton, 2004) and the communication dimensions. Secondly, it is
worth testing the relationships between other communication style constructs, such as the one
proposed by Gudykunst et al. (1996) and the communication style dimensions presented here.
Gudykunst et al. (1996) distinguish between 8 communication styles, inferring meaning, use
of indirect communication, interpersonal sensitivity, dramatic communication, using feelings
to guide behaviors, openness and initiation of contact, preciseness of communication, and
positive perception of silence. Some of these show clear conceptual similarities with the
dimensions found in this study. Thus one would expect preciseness to correlate with
conscientiousness/precision and both dramatic communication and openness and initiation of
contact to correlate with extraversion/eloquence. However, the relationships of the seven
dimensions with some of the other constructs of Gudykunst et al. (1996) are not as clear-cut
and remain to be investigated.
A third issue is whether adjectives are the right word class to measure communication
styles. Maybe verbs constitute a better word class to investigate communication, since verbs
involve specific acts instead of broader styles (De Raad, 1992; 1999). Thus, if one would like
to measure narrow-band communication fragments, verbs may offer a better description.
However, for broader patterns of communication depicting the way someone communicates
with someone else, adjectives seem to be the right class of words. A fourth issue is whether
the communication style dimensions hold up in different languages. Personality research
shows that the main dimensions of personality are clearly replicable in lexical studies in
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 16
different countries and languages (Ashton et al., 2004). Based on these results, I expect the
same communication style dimensions to appear in different countries and languages as well.
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 17
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LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 20
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LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 21
TABLE 1
Descriptive statistics, correlations and reliabilities (on diagonal) of the scales derived from
the 7 factors (N=200; 135 women & 65 men)
1. eXtravert (Eloquent) 0.94
2. Conscientious (Precise) 0.18 0.923. Agreeable (Friendly) -0.16 0.03 0.90
4. Incivility (Rude) -0.03 -0.17 -0.52 0.925. Honesty (True) -0.04 0.04 0.52 -0.63 0.88
6. Openness (Complex) -0.06 0.05 -0.29 0.18 -0.24 0.887. Emotionality (Emotional) -0.07 -0.26 -0.15 0.21 -0.09 0.12 0.81
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Overall mean 3.54 3.33 3.51 2.09 3.74 2.96 2.61Overall st.dev. 0.56 0.47 0.44 0.43 0.38 0.45 0.33
Male mean 3.55 3.35 3.45 2.29 3.51 3.08 2.59Male stdev. 0.49 0.53 0.43 0.51 0.39 0.46 0.43Female mean 3.54 3.32 3.54 1.99 3.85 2.90 2.62Female stdev. 0.60 0.43 0.44 0.34 0.33 0.44 0.28
t-value 0.16 0.33 -1.40 4.91 -6.56 2.78 -0.53p-value 0.87 0.74 0.16 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.60
Note: Correlations >|.18| are significant at p<.01
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 22
FIGURE 1
The Interpersonal Circumplex
Warm-Agreeable
Cold-Hearted
Assured-Dominant
Unassured-Submissive
Gregarious-Extraverted
Arrogant-Calculating
Unassuming-Ingenuous
Aloof-Introverted
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 23
FIGURE 2
Overlap and non-overlap of the domains of the Interpersonal Circumplex and the
communication styles
Non-communicative transitive adjectives
Communicative intransitive adjectives
Communicative transitive adjectives
Interpersonal Circumplex
Communication styles
E.g.:Neighborly, Antisocial
E.g.: Dominant, Jovial
E.g.: Businesslike, Loud
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 24
FIGURE 3
A tree diagram of the first 7 factor solutions of the communication adjectives
1.00 .90
.84
-.40.54
.99 .99
.99
.94
.99
.99
.98
.82
.99
1.00
1.001.00
.81
-.58
.32-.50
.97
.84
-.48
.98
-.33
.94
.95
-X -X -X -X -X -X -X
C
C C C C
A A
A
A
I I
I
I
H-O
-O -O
E
E
A/-I A/-I
eXtraversion
Conscientiousness
Agreeableness
Incivility
Honesty
Openness
Emotionality
LEXICAL COMMUNICATION DIMENSIONS 25
APPENDIX
The 30 highest loading defining adjectives of the first 7 principal factors
Factor Adjectives 1. eXtraversion (Eloquent)
shy, bashful, closed, ponderous, reserved, boring, silent, catchy, introvert, articulate, having the gift of the gab, restrained, awkward, extravert, unsure, talkative, high-spirited, energetic, smooth, inhibited, eloquent, ill at ease, chatty, listless, passive, exuberant, speechless, expressive, timid, contagious
2. Conscientiousness (Precise)
well-studied, messy, long-threaded, disciplined, chaotic, precise, charming, crystal-clear, professional, lucid, incoherent, perceptive, well-considered, thoughtless, mature, expert, consistent, substantive, accurate, meticulous, confused, well thought-out, heated, clumsy, functional, academic, lax, theoretic, scientific, nonchalant
3. Agreeableness (Friendly)
piqued, vehement, friendly, nice, reproachful, offensive, contrary, rock-hard, short-tempered, pissed off, worked up, peeved, amusing, heated, touchy, stubborn, hot-headed, accommodating, venomous, obstinate, hard, suave, tactical, social, peremptory, patient, insincere, vicious, recalcitrant, tolerant
4. Incivility (Rude)
rude, mean, unsociable, subtle, impolite, loutish, bad-tempered, reassuring, vulgar, indecent, bad-mannered, coarse, aggressive, callous, sadistic, pitiful, loving, denigratory, concerned, sneaky, conciliatory, obliging, rascally, uncivilized, daft, cheering, insulting, compassionate, complimentary, unfriendly
5. Honesty (True)
smooth, cunning, sincere, sly, honest, empathetic, boastful, arrogant, cold-blooded, sly, hard as nails, amicable, conceited, bluffing, interested, sympathetic, heartfelt, intuitive, grandiloquent, attentive, self-congratulatory, personal, incessant, fake, involved, sensitive, supercilious, instinctive, moved, clearly
6. Openness to experience (Complex)
poetic, philosophical, poetic, busy, mysterious, strange, analytic, clear, complicated, abnormal, secretive, intellectual, contemplating, rebellious, predictable, complex, diplomatic, short-sighted, ironic, thorough, optimistic, idealistic, woolly, positive, profound, self-willed, cynical, simple, provocative, in-depth
7. Emotionality (Emotional)
affected, emotional, pedantic, calm, moody, upset, dejected, sentimental, oversensitive, stonesober, overanxious, hypersensitive, narrow-minded, cool, quick-witted, teasing, good-humoured, resentful, sensitive, short-tempered, cross, frustrated, passionless, humoristic, unmoved, hysteric, stern, critical, attentive, cocky