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 Krah 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.