Situation Cognition and Coherence in Personality
An Individual-Centred Approach

This 1990 volume was written to re-examine the long-standing controversy about consistency in personality from a social psychological perspective.

Barbara Krahé (Author)

9780521154987, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 August 2010

224 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.36 kg

This 1990 volume was written to re-examine the long-standing controversy about consistency in personality from a social psychological perspective. Barbara Krahé reconsiders the concept of consistency in terms of the systematic coherence of situation cognition and behaviour across situations. In the first part of the volume she undertakes an examination of social psychological models of situation cognition for their ability to clarify the principles underlying the perception of situational similarities. She then advances an individual-centred methodology in which nomothetic hypotheses about cross-situational coherence are tested on the basis of idiographic measurement of situation cognition and behaviour. In the second part of the volume, a series of empirical studies is reported which apply the individual-centred framework to the analysis of cross-situational coherence in the domain of anxiety-provoking situations. These studies are distinctive in that they extend over several months and use free-response data.

List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I. Theoretical Foundations: 1. Cross-situational consistency: an issue at the interface between personality and social psychology
2. The history of the consistency debate
3. P x S: the promise of modern interactionism
4. The cognitive representation of situations
5. Individual-centred strategies in the search for consistency
6. Reconceptualising consistency: the coherence of situation cognition and behaviour
Part II. Empirical Investigations: 7. An individual-centred approach to the study of cross-situational coherence in anxiety-provoking situations
8. Study 1: developing an individual-centred methodology
9. Study 2: coherence of situation cognition and behavioural ratings
10. Study 2: coherence of situation cognition and behavioural self-reports
11. Beyond the 'nomothetic vs. idiographic' controversy in the search for cross-situational consistency
References
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]