Personality traits, natural language and cognitive development

After previous research that confirmed the validity of the descriptive five-dimensional model of personality (Goldberg, 1990) in Croatia (Mlačić and Ostendorf, 2005), the goal of this project is to systematically expand research into the structure of personality to include word types and categories of individual differences that have so far been neglected and mostly unexplored. The first general goal of this research is to determine a descriptive model of personality for the whole language formed according to the principles of the lexical approach in the Croatian language and on respondents from Croatian culture. Also, the goal of this research is to compare that model with the dominant Big Five personality model, as well as with equivalent research in the world, which constitutes the cross-cultural dimension of this research. Previous research has also shown that the elements of the Big Five personality model are also applicable to children, but the results do not have the same level of consistency as on adult subjects. Current knowledge in the field of developmental changes in data processing, intelligence and personality traits is also relatively limited. Therefore, the second general goal of this research is to investigate the reproducibility of the Big Five personality model on children and adolescents and to connect it with cognitive development. The specific goals of this part of the research are setting up and evaluating new models of human data processing systems, setting up and evaluating a complete model of intellectual functioning and personality traits. The research results will be verified using standard psychology methodology from three different research traditions – cognitive, differential and developmental. The significance of the proposed research is that no research in the world has systematically realized all three phases of research as part of the lexical approach when investigating the dimensionality of other types of words except adjectives and in the cross-cultural search for universal dimensions of personality description. Also, the significance of the research is that complete models of personality traits, personality development and cognitive development have been studied extremely rarely, and it is necessary to validate them. Likewise, the significance of this research lies in the development of a series of applicable instruments for the assessment of various aspects of the personality of adults, as well as instruments for the assessment of personality and intellectual functions in the population of children and young people.