[The gitaigo personality scale for description of self and others]

Gitaigo is a subtype of mimetic words (onomatopoeia) in the Japanese language, which can be regarded as words that imitate actions or states. This study develops a personality scale, with six subscales, using 60 gitaigo words as items for rating the personality of the self and others. We asked 1 054 participants to rate their own personality and 905 participants to rate a close friend's personality, using 158 gitaigo words as items to describe personality. We found that a six-factor model, found in our previous study, was also applicable to the present study of ratings of participants' own personality. We also found six groups of words in the ratings of close friends' personality, although the factor structure is slightly different from the self-rating factors. We selected ten words that exhibited high loadings for each of the six factors to develop a personality scale with six subscales showing high reliability. We named those factors: cowardliness, slowness, preciseness, irritableness, candidness, and frivolousness. The average scores for self-ratings were significantly lower for two subscales (preciseness and candidness) and higher for other four subscales compared to the rating of others.