PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Personality psychology has enjoyed success with widely accepted and established taxonomies. This cannot be said for a psychology of situations, which has yet to establish a robust taxonomy of major dimensions of psychological situation characteristics across cultures and languages. We present 4 studies to uncover the dimensionality in the covariation patterns among characteristics with which participants describe situations. In Study 1, we conducted an emic lexical study in Hebrew, combined with an experience-sampling procedure using a closely representative sample of Hebrew-speaking Israelis. The procedure yielded six dimensions of situation characteristics that we call the Situational Six: Negativity, Positivity, Familiarity, Demandingness, Oddness, and Straightforwardness. We then confirmed in imposed-etic Studies 2 to 4 this 6-dimensional structure with adjectives in English among English-speaking U.S. participants. Relationships between the Situation Six and Big Five traits, emotions experienced in situ, the CAPTION model, and the DIAMONDS framework were analyzed to further interpret the meaning of the Situation Six dimensions. We discuss how this new taxonomy fits into and expands existing taxonomic models of situation characteristic dimensions.