Contextualizing personality: Personality within and across social roles and conceptual levels

Abstract

Objective Personality psychologists have begun to consider the predictive ability of comparable personality characteristics at the levels of traits, goals, and narrative identity. Here, we build upon and extend this work by adopting a contextualized personality approach. Doing so entailed exploring the implications of personality characteristics within three social roles and at each level of personality in relation to role‐specific and generalized measures of psychological adjustment. Methods Undergraduates (N = 155) rated traits and specified goals and narratives pertaining to their roles as friends, students, and sons/daughters. Measures of trait‐based, goal‐based, and narrative‐based approach orientation were subsequently derived. Results Within personality levels, mean‐levels of approach orientation differed significantly across social roles. Goal‐based and narrative‐based approach orientation showed inconsistent associations with role‐specific psychological adjustment. When approach orientation was aggregated across roles, however, it demonstrated positive relations with adjustment at each personality level. Conclusions There exists contextual variability among and between personality characteristics and adjustment. In addition, in certain cases, aggregating across contextualized personality measures (within conceptual levels) may provide a more reliable indicator of the underlying psychological construct. These results contribute to an evolving understanding of personality coherence and the relation between personality characteristics and context.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Filial Piety and Palliative Care Knowledge: Moderating Effect of Culture and Universality of Filial Piety

“…Several factors may explain the finding that filial piety (both reciprocal and authoritarian) did not correlate with palliative care knowledge. First, according to the contextualized personality theory ( Heller et al, 2007 ; Dunlop, 2015 ; Dunlop and Hanley, 2019 ), different roles (e.g., an adult child and a caregiver) can activate different cognitive-affective mental representations and different associated meanings, people thus act differently in different roles ( Fisher et al, 2017 ). For instance, as children, people sometimes become preoccupied with the fear of their parent’s death.…”

“…The primary idea behind this concept is that while personality characteristics are inclined to be stable within a specific context, they may differ considerably across different social roles and contexts because of psychological prompts or demands that are unique to certain contexts ( Dunlop, 2015 ; Fisher et al, 2017 ). As such, personality characteristics are manifested within the recurring social roles and contexts ( Dunlop and Hanley, 2019 ). Consequently, a person may display a certain personality characteristic within one context and a completely opposite characteristic within another context, dependent on varying contextual circumstances that bring about different response tendencies ( Fisher et al, 2017 ).…”

The Redemptive Story from the Perspective of Challenge and Resolution, Self and Situation, and Stability and Change: Considering the Model, the Method, and the Possibility of Maturation

“…Thus, in the case of each story, this system generates 2 ratings, one for the self and one for environment. Once these ratings are made, researchers have the potential to keep these continuous ratings separate or, "if the scores for the 2 dimensions proved to be highly correlated to the point of redundancy, then one might conclude that the 2 indices should be collapsed into one" (p. 173; see also Dunlop & Hanley, 2019). Such analytical flexibility carries with it certain advantages.…”

The narrative identity approach and romantic relationships

“…Alternatively, more than one coder may be tasked with rating all relevant narrative materials (again allowing for determination of the reliability of this coding), and then the responses of these coders would be averaged. These averaged responses would then be considered in all subsequent analyses (e.g., Dunlop & Hanley, ; Dunlop, Hanley, McCoy, & Harake, ).…”