Lexical, Morphological and Semantic Correlates of the Dark Triad Personality Traits in Russian Facebook Texts

The presented project is intended to make use of growing amounts of textual data in social networks in the Russian language, in order to find linguistic correlates of the Dark Triad personality traits, comprising non-clinical Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy. The background for the investigation includes, on the one hand, psychological research on these phenomena and their measurement instruments, and on the other hand, recent advances in computational stylometry and text-based author profiling. The measures for these psychological phenomena are provided by recognized self-report psychological surveys adapted to Russian. Morphological and semantic analysis are applied to investigate the relationship between the Dark traits and their linguistic manifestation in social network texts. Significant morphological and semantic correlates of Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy are identified and compared to respective advances in English author profiling. In order to deepen our understanding of the relation between these psychological characteristics and natural language use, the identified linguistic features are interpreted in terms of the fine-grained factor structure of the Dark traits. Identifying correlated features is a step towards automatic Dark trait prediction and early detection of the potentially harmful mental states.