Edited by Yavor Dragostinov and Lisanne de Moor
Welcome to the ninth edition of the EJP Newsletter! This edition features summaries of the published work from EJP’s Special Issue on Personality Coherence and Incoherence. IF you have the time, make sure to check out the full manuscripts!
From the abstract of guest editor Małgorzata Fajkowska:
This special issue of the European Journal of Personality, entitled Towards conceptualizing and assessing personality coherence and incoherence, was designed to call for new approaches to the understanding and assessment of personality coherence. Seven papers have been brought together as a result: three theoretical and four empirical. Although these papers are devoted to portraying novel or expanded existing conceptual and methodological approaches to personality coherence, they also share a historic commitment to studying this phenomenon. Based on those contributions, I refer to the four topics: (1) novel, extended, validated models of personality coherence, (2) personality coherence and related constructs, (3) functional/adaptive meaning of personality coherence, and (4) assessment-related issues that help display advances in the theory, measurement, and research on personality coherence. In addition, I present four areas that have been identified as avenues for future research: (1) potentials for further developing the personality coherence field, (2) personality coherence, self, and character, (4) personality coherence and development, and (4) personality coherence across different cultures.
The concert of personality: Explaining personality functioning and coherence by personality systems interactions
Markus Quirin And Julius Kuhl
Personality systems interactions (PSI) theory explains personality functioning on the basis of interactions among cognitive and affective-motivational personality systems. In other words, the dynamic psychological processes and mechanism that render personality as a coherent whole can be considered a “well-sounding concert”. This analogy was largely inspired by Gordon Allport, who viewed personality as a symphony.
Allport believed the descriptive factor-trait approach is incapable of explaining personality coherence. With this article, Quirin and Kuhl reflect on how the discipline can move from studying a great variety of isolated phenomena and underlying processes toward understanding how various targets of personality research can come together to form a coherent whole. To do so, the authors describe interactions among four cognitive personality systems considered to underlie and optimize two principles of personality functioning—self-growth (in terms of the integration of adverse experiences) and action control (in terms of goal pursuit). These principles establish different subtypes of personality coherence differentially focused on by psychological perspectives.
Three decades ago, the various themes and movements in research on personality and motivation may still have sounded more like “tuning the instruments” than a concert. Quirin and Kuhl believe that the present account of PSI theory’s view of the dynamics underlying personality coherence may, along with other theoretical and methodological advances, bring us closer to performing the harmonious type of symphony that Allport envisaged.
Conceptualizing and Studying Characteristics, Units, and Fits of Persons and Environments: A Coherent Synthesis
Christian Kandler and John F. Rauthmann
Personality is most commonly defined as a system of all characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, striving, and acting that are relatively stable and useful to distinguish a person’s uniqueness from others. The extent to which these personality characteristics are differentiated (i.e., distinct and specified) and integrated (i.e., organized and unified) within the individual has been originally defined as personality coherence. The field of personality psychology, however, has produced varied concepts of personality characteristics (e.g., traits, motives, values, or narratives) and structurally organized systems to describe personality differences and individual uniqueness. Not surprisingly, different approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing personality coherence have also been proposed. Thus, there is no general consensus of what personality and a coherent person’s uniqueness comprises. To avoid misunderstandings and jingle-jangle fallacies, clearly defined and empirically testable conceptualizations are needed.
In this synthesis, Kandler and Rauthmann define traits as characteristics of the person, adaptations as characteristics of the person-in-contexts, and states as characteristics of the person-in-situations. Next, the authors provide testable criteria to differentiate characteristics of persons from characteristics of person-environment units and to identify dispositional traits that are consistent across situations and contexts. They raise awareness of the importance of fit between (profiles of) person and environment characteristics for an understanding of the integrated uniqueness of persons in their environments. They outline implications of this broader perspective on personality coherence for personality development, self-regulation, social integration, well-being, and psychological interventions.
Taken together, Kandler and Rauthmann believe that personality coherence as a many-sided unity of personality can be extended by and harmonized under the umbrella of person(ality)-environment units and fit. Studying personality coherence will only be possible when attending to both persons, environments, and their interplay.
Five paths to personality coherence: Integrative implications of the Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture
Daniel Cervone
Do the inconsistencies and contradictions expressed by individuals about their characteristics make their personalities “incoherent”? The answer depends on what “coherent” means. What is a valid explanation of an individual person’s psychological tendencies? Do we want to know whether personality is understood coherently by personality scientists or by the people we study? In this paper, Cervone evaluates these questions, drawing on the Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA) model.
The KAPA model principles are distinguished by three classes of social-cognitive knowledge structures: beliefs, goals, and evaluative standards. These distinctions, in turn, provide a foundation for understanding five aspects of personality coherence: 1) Belief-Based, 2) Goal-Based, 3) Evaluative Standards-Based, 4) Intra-Psychic (coherent functional interrelations among personality systems), and 5) Phenomenological. The author reviews the research of each of these five paths to personality coherence. Furthermore, the strengths and limitations of 20th century theories examining social-cognitive processes are also reviewed.
Cervone takes the reader on a fascinating journey in this paper, as the work of some of psychology’s most familiar figures is revisited – from Freud’s characterisation of psychological tendencies to Allport’s considerations of the social environment. He discusses Costa and McCrae’s trait theory and Mischel and Shoda’s issues with it, Bandura’s pioneering work on Social Cognitive Theory, and Rogers’ denial of experience theory.
At the end, Cervone emphasizes the importance and need for measurement strategies that are grounded in a model of personality architecture. By doing so, we may enhance our understanding of the who – and the when, the where, and the why.
Personality coherence in acts and texts: Searching for coherence within and beyond trait categories
Mairéad McKenna, Daniel Cervone, Aninda Roy, and Candice Burkett
In 1961, Gordon Allport said that personality “is an individual’s unique way of perceiving his environment, including himself”. Following this passage, “perceiving” must be central to personality coherence and incoherence. That is, when people perceive different environments to be similar, their thoughts, emotions, and actions across those situations should relate coherently.
To Allport, “perceiving” was not merely visual perception but “sensation plus meaning”. Allport thus placed processes of meaning construction at the heart of personality dynamics and coherence. He did so, however, without an intellectual resource: the contemporary cognitive science of cognition and meaning. Allportian formulations thus deserve a rethinking.
In this paper, McKenna and colleagues report two studies that explored personality coherence. Study 1 assessed individuals’ 1) beliefs about their personal attributes, 2) subjective “mappings” of these attributes to everyday circumstances, and 3) categorization of relevance of situational beliefs. Participants’ mappings commonly deviated from the structure of trait categories – people often grouped together contextualized action tendencies usually associated with different trait categories. The idiographic mappings predicted cross-situational coherence in perception of situational beliefs. Study 2 asked whether the contextualization of personal qualities would be evident when people are asked to describe their personal attributes in natural language. Participants wrote narratives describing their positive and negative qualities. Narratives were coded for the presence of three linguistic features: conditional statements, probabilistic statements, and personality trait inconsistencies. All three occurred frequently. Furthermore, they co-occurred – among participants who described trait-inconsistent attributes, the large majority spontaneously cited conditions in which these attributes are manifested.
In closing, the authors note a challenge for future research. There may exist subgroups of persons who—in the Allportian language from the start — perceive the world in a similar manner and thus display similar situational beliefs across similar situations for similar reasons.
Clinical Application of Social Cognitive Theory: A Novel Personality Assessment Procedure and a Case Study of Personality Coherence
Walter D. Scott, Stephen Paup, and Cornelia Kirchhoff
Previous clinical approaches that capitalized on contemporary models of personality structure (e.g., Freud’s model of dynamically interacting mental structures; Kelly’s model of a hierarchically organised personal construct system; Rogers’ self-theory) have been at the forefront of developing assessment methods and applications. Such approaches might also shed light on questions of personality coherence. In clinical settings, one obtains in-depth information about an individual, which is less common in research settings, and therefore may reveal aspects of personality coherence and incoherence that are overlooked in lab studies with relatively brief interactions with any given individual.
In the present article, Scott, Paup, and Kirchhoff present a new method of personality assessment that yields descriptions of coherent personality functioning. Based on insights from contemporary personality science, particularly social cognitive theory (e.g., works of Bandura; Cervone; Mischel and Shoda), this personality assessment procedure generates descriptions of how personality produces characteristic personality processes (referred to as “if–then” personality signatures). Identification of these personality signatures and the personality structure–situation interactions that produce them influences our understanding of clinical treatment. After describing the theoretical foundations and methods of this approach, including the definitions of personality coherence and incoherence, the authors present a case study to further illustrate the personality assessment procedure and to provide examples of personality coherence yielded by the personality assessment method. The authors conclude by discussing potential future directions and limitations of their personality assessment method.
Idiographic personality coherence: A quasi experimental longitudinal ESM study
Emorie D. Beck and Joshua J. Jackson
The tension between persons and environment within the psychological field came to a head in the latter half of the 20th century in the so-called Person-Situation Debate. On the one hand, nomothetic trait approaches to personality emphasized that personality coherence is exhibited in tendencies to exhibit similar types and degrees of trait-relevant behaviours across situations over longer time periods. On the other, some social cognitive approaches to personality emphasized that coherence is exhibited in the stability of personality within specific situations – that is, in the if…then relationships that characterized an individual across behaviours and contexts. Since the debate began, there have been declarations of its end as well as retrospectives of it. However, at least one central question remains unaddressed: if a person’s situation changes, does their personality coherence change or does it remain consistent over the long term?
The current study used the COVID-19 pandemic as an exogenous situation to examine how changing situations influence consistency and change in idiographic personality coherence.
Beck and Jackson examined longitudinal consistency in idiographic personality coherence. Personality coherence was assessed up to one year before the COVID-19 pandemic and again during lockdown. The authors also tested antecedents and consequences of consistency, examining both what prospectively predicts consistency and what consistency prospectively predicts. Overall, consistency was modest but there were strong individual differences, indicating some people were quite consistent despite environmental upheaval.
Moreover, there were relatively few antecedents and consequences of consistency, with the exception of some goals predicting consistency and consistency predicting some domains of satisfaction, leaving open the question of why changes in coherence occur.
Components and Correlates of Personality Coherence in Action, Agency, and Authorship
Marc A. Fournier, Mengxi Dong, Matthew N. Quitasol, Nic M. Weststrate, and Stefano I. Di Domenico
People’s personalities can be considered to be built up out of their traits, their goals, and their life stories. Given the complexity of human personality, it is perhaps not surprising that some people feel at odds with themselves, and describe their sense of personhood as compartmentalized, fragmented, and conflicted, while others in contrast feel that the varied aspects of their personalities are coordinated, unified, and integrated. Although ideas relating to the coherence of personality date back to the origins of the field, scholars have approached the problem of personality coherence from different theoretical perspectives. The purpose of the present investigation was to organize the various construals of personality coherence into an integrative framework wherein the following questions could be answered. First, do indicators of personality coherence all significantly inter-correlate? And second, do indicators of personality coherence all contribute significantly and incrementally to the prediction of important outcomes, such as well-being, autonomy, and ego development, above and beyond the Big Five?
The authors examined these questions among 446 midlife adults. Coherence indicators loaded onto four components: actor coherence, which captured the extent to which people were consistent in their interpersonal values, traits, and behaviour; agent coherence, which captured the extent to which people’s goals were coordinated and need-congruent; author coherence, which captured the extent to which people’s self-defining stories were well composed and theme laden; and controlled coherence, which captured the extent to which people experienced their goals as pressured or compelled and as leading them to need-detracting futures. Although actor coherence correlated with both agent and author coherence, agent and author coherence were not correlated. Nevertheless, the actor-, agent-, and author-coherence composites each predicted at least one of the outcome variables (i.e., well-being, autonomy, and ego development) over and above the Big Five. The present findings suggest that the coherence of personality constitutes an important individual difference domain beyond the established content dimensions of personality such as the Big Five.
Do you have any questions or comments regarding this Newsletter or its contents? Please contact:
Lisanne de Moor (Research Communications Editor; e.l.demoor@gmail.com) or Yavor Dragostinov (Research Communications Assistant; y.dragostinov@sms.ed.ac.uk)