Personality coherence in acts and texts: Searching for coherence within and beyond trait categories

Abstract

This paper reports two studies that explore complementary aspects of personality coherence. Study 1 addressed cross-situational coherence in contextualized psychological response. Idiographically-tailored methods assessed individuals’ (i) beliefs about their personal attributes, (ii) subjective “mappings” of these attributes to everyday circumstances, and (iii) self-reported contextualized action tendencies. A novel index of idiographic–nomothetic relations gauged the degree to which the idiographic methods yield unique information. Participants’ mappings commonly deviated from the structure of nomothetic trait categories; people often grouped together contextualized action tendencies traditionally associated with different trait categories. The idiographic mappings predicted cross-situational coherence in action tendencies. Study 2 asked whether the contextualization of personal qualities would be evident when people merely are asked to describe their personal attributes in natural language. Participants wrote narratives describing 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. People who recognize that they possess inconsistent personal qualities may nonetheless attain a coherent understanding of themselves by spontaneously developing a contextually-embedded sense of self.

Personality coherence: Advances in theory, assessment, and research

“…Previous research conducted within the KAPA model does not use mixed methodologies (quantitative and qualitative data) to study personality coherence. This gap is filled by the work of McKenna, Burkett, and Cervone (2022). They administered two studies examining two aspects of personality coherence that reflect the process of meaning construction (cf.…”

“…Across three empirical papers in this special issue (McKenna et al, 2022; Scott et al, 2022; Beck & Jackson, 2022; Fournier et al, 2022), nomothetic, idiographic, and integrative (nomothetic-idiographic) approaches are used to derive knowledge on personality coherence based on evidence. In addition, these papers demonstrate studies across different situations and from a cross-sectional or long-term perspective.…”

“…Precisely, McKenna et al (2022) claim that idiographically-tailored data collection methods (e.g., subjective “mappings” of people’s beliefs about their personal attributes to everyday circumstances) and analyses (e.g., coding of participants narratives describing their personal attributes in natural language) allowed them to reveal individual personality coherence patterns that would have been obscured if participants had been studied solely through the lens of a nomothetic approach. Next, Scott et al (2022) provided a step-by-step description of the “social cognitive” personality coherence assessment method, which consists of five tasks where self-report measures are combined with, for example, written narratives, the Q-sort procedure, or other-report collateral measure.…”

“…Accordingly, to advance the field of personality coherence, this special issue of the European Journal of Personality 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 (Cervone, 2022; Qurin & Kuhl, 2022; Kandler & Rauthmann, 2022) and four empirical (Beck & Jackson, 2022; FournierDong et al, 2022; McKenna et al, 2022; Scott et al, 2022). 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.…”

Validation and Validity: Self-Efficacy, Metacognition, and Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA)

“…However, Borsboom, Mellenbergh and Van Heerden (2004) suggest demonstrating validity through ontological relationships. McKenna et al (2021) discuss the theoretical underpinning of KAPA, specifically considering the relevance of measuring person-centred personality, instead of imposing an external structure. They facilitated that discussion by designing 30 items loosely aligned with Big-Five factors.…”