Self-perception

Establishing and maintaining a clear and stable view of oneself is one of the major goals that human beings are motivated by. Individuals' environment is overflowing with a variety of self-relevant feedback. Yet, humans are able to generalize their experience into idiosyncratic self-concept, that despite being the largest, and most complex of all cognitive structures provides a good frame of reference for regulation of action, emotion, and cognition. This research project examined a dynamic model of self-regulation that explains how humans manage to arrive at and maintain a coherent understanding of who they are and what they are like despite the abundance and constant influx of often contradictory self-relevant information. The dynamic model of self-regulation emphasizes the role of selective attention to specific regions of the self-concept as a prerequisite for self-concept adaptive development and functional expression. From a dynamical systems perspective the self-concept is conceptualized as a dynamic cognitive structure of knowledge that becomes organized into meaningful self-aspects (i.e., identities, self-perceived traits, roles) that differ with respect to evaluative coherence. Some self-aspects are coherent and comprise exclusively positive or exclusively negative elements, while other do not achieve evaluative coherence and are comprised of self-beliefs with mixed evaluations. As the focus of conscious attention changes between coherent and incoherent areas, the experience of Self and implications of self-concept for ongoing processes change accordingly. The total number of 296 participants took part in four studies conducted in Poland and in the United States.

In this study, relationships between social networks and personality in a small liberal arts college were examined. Participants were asked to list members of their social networks, the activities in which they participated, and to complete the Sentence Completion Test (SCT), and the California Psychological Inventory (CPI). On the CPI, individuals with high scores on measures related to extraversion (particularaly the CPI Sociability scale) will have a greater network size and report a larger number of activities. In additon, the extent to which participants formed relationships with individuals with similar levels of ego development, and similar personality profiles, that is, the degree of homophily in relationships were evaluated. Finally, it was examined whether this homophily increased over time, that is, whether students increasingly gravitated towards others with similar personalities during the college years.