Abstract
The concept of personality coherence refers to the extent of psychological unity and wholeness embodied within each individual. In the present research, we examined the extent to which the narrative, functional, and organismic conceptualizations of personality coherence interrelate, as well as their associations with psychological abilities and personal adjustment. College students (N = 391) narrated accounts of three personal memories; listed five personal strivings that they subsequently compared and evaluated; completed performance measures of their intelligence, wisdom, and creativity; and rated their hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Individuals who coherently organized their autobiographical memories were protected against feeling pressured or compelled in their personal strivings and against being steered toward need-detracting futures. Narrative indicators of coherence were otherwise independent of the functional and organismic indicators, although all indicators of personality coherence correlated with personal adjustment. Wisdom and creativity predicted narrative coherence, which partially mediated the associations they demonstrated with eudaimonic well-being.
Keywords
A central quality of being a person is the sense of unity and wholeness that all people experience to varying degrees despite the varieties and inconsistencies that regularly manifest in their cognitions, motivations, emotions, and actions. The capacity for each person to reconcile a range of contradictory qualities reflects the phenomenon of personality coherence, defined here as the extent to which the personality characteristics of an individual are coordinated, unified, and integrated (Fournier, in press; Fournier & Di Domenico, 2016; Fournier, Di Domenico, Weststrate, Quitasol, & Dong, 2015). Allport (1937, 1961) was among the first scholars to formulate an abiding interest in personality coherence, which he viewed in terms of the progressive differentiation and integration of a person’s characteristics. Since then, the study of personality coherence has been suggested to represent “the central, unique charge” of personality psychology (Cervone & Shoda, 1999, p. 3). However, the field of personality psychology is conceptually and methodologically more differentiated than it was during Allport’s time. As researchers have been studying personality coherence at different levels of analysis using widely differing definitions and operationalizations of the construct, it remains to be seen whether they have been studying different aspects of the same phenomenon. Therefore, the purpose of the present research was to determine the extent to which the signs of personality coherence interrelate, and to assess their significance vis-à-vis their associations with both psychological abilities (i.e., intelligence, wisdom, and creativity) and indicators of personal adjustment (i.e., hedonic and eudaimonic well-being).
To these ends, we organize and systematize the various conceptualizations of personality coherence using McAdams’ distinction between the person-as-agent and the person-as-author (e.g., McAdams, 2013). As agents, people are intentional beings characterized by volition and purpose, who seek to bring about states of affairs in the world that are aligned with their personal goals, values, and needs. From this standpoint, we can speak of the coherent agent as someone whose goals and values are intraindividually coordinated and psychologically need fulfilling, qualities of functioning to which Sheldon and Kasser (1995) referred as functional coherence and organismic congruence. As authors, people are self-reflective beings who seek to organize their recollections of the past into an integrated narrative that imbues life with a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning. From this standpoint, we can speak of the coherent author as someone whose personally significant memories are comprehensible and thematically unified (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Given that a critical idea embedded within McAdams’ (2013) framework is that organizing the significant events from one’s past into an integrated autobiographical narrative (i.e., coherence of authorship) should enable one to strive into the future with a sense of unity (i.e., coherence of agency), the primary purpose of the present research was to determine the extent to which three different formulations of coherence are interrelated within and across levels of personality: two that concern people’s coherence as agents (functional coherence, organismic congruence) and one that concerns people’s coherence as authors (narrative coherence).
An additional purpose of the present research was to assess the significance of personality coherence in terms of its adaptive correlates. Here, we distinguish conceptually between the abilities that serve to scaffold personality integration and the outcomes that emerge from those integrative processes. First, to the extent that personality coherence constitutes a psychological problem for the individual, as numerous scholars have repeatedly speculated (e.g., Allport, 1937; McAdams, 2006), we might predict that problem-solving abilities would correlate with personality coherence. Indeed, Allport (1937) referred to both memory and imagination as unifying capacities of the self, enabling people to link disparate life experiences from the past as well as to link the past with the future. Consequently, in the present research, we examined the extent to which personality coherence relates to three core human abilities (Sternberg, 2003): intelligence (i.e., conventional problem solving), creativity (i.e., original problem solving), and wisdom (i.e., balancing conventional and original problem solving). Second, to the extent that personality coherence represents a problem of psychological consequence, we might predict that personality coherence would correlate with indicators of personal adjustment. Indeed, well-being has been frequently examined in relation to goal conflict (Gray, Ozer, & Rosenthal, 2017) and narrative identity (Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe, & Houle, 2016). Consequently, in the present research, we examined the extent to which personality coherence relates to personal adjustment. Below, we summarize the extant literature on these coherence-relevant personality constructs (for an overview, see Figure 1), with a focus on how coherence has been conceptualized and measured and on what adaptive correlates of coherence have been identified.
The levels, constructs, and indicators of personality coherence used in the present research.
Integrating Personal Strivings: The Coherent Agent
From the standpoint of the person-as-agent, two theoretical perspectives that have considered the problem of coherence are the cybernetic perspective, which has focused on the extent to which a person’s goals have been functionally organized to be mutually facilitative or interfering, and the organismic perspective, which has focused on the extent to which people’s goals are congruent or in conflict with their basic psychological needs. Although the concept of innate needs serves to specify an important class of developmental constraints and vulnerabilities that distinguish the cybernetic and organismic perspectives, the two standpoints have empirically demonstrated that they can provide complementary perspectives on the goal-relevant aspects of personality coherence.
From a cybernetic perspective, a central aspect of personality concerns the organization and regulation of goal-directed behavior (Carver & Scheier, 1998). From this vantage point, the problem of personality coherence concerns how to coordinate one’s goals and values so that they are all internally consistent and mutually supportive, a state referred to as functional coherence (Sheldon & Kasser, 1995). Goals are conceptualized as negative feedback loops, which operate to reduce the discrepancy between the current state of a system and its target state or reference value. Negative feedback loops can be nested within one another to form a functional hierarchy, whereby the more abstract goals at the top of the hierarchy provide the reference values for the more concrete goals underneath, and all goal-directed behavior can be viewed as occurring in the service of discrepancy reduction down the hierarchy of goal regulation (Carver & Scheier, 1998). The cybernetic perspective provides two approaches to conceptualizing the extent of integration in people’s goal hierarchies: vertical coherence, which concerns the extent to which lower level goals or plans facilitate the attainment of higher level goals or values; and horizontal coherence, which concerns the extent to which goals at some level of the hierarchy facilitate the attainment of other goals at the same level. Importantly, the vertical and horizontal dimensions of functional coherence are not sensitive to what goals have been aligned; rather, these integrative constructs are only sensitive to how goals have been aligned in the goal hierarchy.
From an organismic perspective, however, not every goal is amenable to integration. From this vantage point, the problem of personality coherence concerns the extent to which an individual’s personal goals are consistent with their basic psychological needs, a state referred to as organismic congruence (Sheldon & Kasser, 1995). Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2017) is a contemporary organismic theory of personality and motivation that posits that all people have basic psychological needs for autonomy (i.e., to feel volitional), competence (i.e., to feel efficacious), and relatedness (i.e., to feel connected to others). The organismic congruence between people’s personal goals and their universal needs becomes evident in both the content of the goals that people pursue and their reasons for pursuing those goals. With regard to the content of what people want, individuals are expected to experience organismic congruence to the extent that they are oriented toward intrinsic goals such as personal growth, community contributions, or close relationships. These goals afford more direct fulfillment of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness than extrinsic goals such as wealth, fame, or outward attractiveness, which can detract from need fulfillment. With regard to people’s reasons for wanting, individuals are expected to experience organismic congruence to the extent that they pursue goals because they are perceived to be either interesting or important (i.e., autonomous) and not because they feel either internally or externally pressured or compelled to do so (i.e., controlled). To the extent that someone feels autonomous and self-determined while pursuing a goal rather than under some form of control, the goal is said to be self-concordant (Sheldon & Kasser, 1995).
Findings from numerous studies attest to the adaptive psychological correlates of both functional coherence and organismic congruence. Horizontal coherence has been found to correlate with higher levels of life satisfaction (Emmons, 1986), with lower levels of negative affect and somatization (Emmons & King, 1988), with fewer illnesses and visits to health centers (Emmons & King, 1988), and with greater commitment and success in one’s goal strivings (Sheldon & Emmons, 1995). Sheldon and Kasser (1995) found that functional coherence and organismic congruence were significantly interrelated, and in related work provided additional support for the adjustment- and performance-related benefits of organismic congruence (Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996; Sheldon & Elliot, 1998, 1999). Numerous studies since then have found that intrinsic versus extrinsic goal contents and autonomous versus controlled strivings are associated with personal adjustment and performance in varied contexts (Ryan & Deci, 2017). Sheldon and Kasser (1995) explicitly acknowledged the difference between these types of goal strivings and separately examined vertical coherence in relation to the intrinsic and extrinsic value domains. They found that intrinsic vertical coherence was positively related to autonomous functioning, psychological health (i.e., self-actualization and life satisfaction), and openness to experience (a personality trait associated with both creativity and wisdom; McCrae, 1987; Staudinger, Maciel, Smith, & Baltes, 1998). These findings suggest that there are psychological benefits associated with adopting goals that are functionally coherent within and across levels of one’s goal hierarchy and organismically congruent with one’s basic psychological needs.
Integrating Personal Stories: The Coherent Author
From the standpoint of the person-as-author, personality can be conceptualized in terms of the unique stories that people craft from their personal experiences. Today, the personological perspective is championed by McAdams (2001) and others committed to the narrative study of lives (e.g., Adler et al., 2017). According to McAdams’ (2001) life story model of identity development, personal identity can be construed as an internalized and evolving life story, the central function of which is to integrate the recollected past and the anticipated future so as to imbue one’s life in the perceived present with a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning. McAdams’ narrative approach focuses on highly influential autobiographical memories, such as high points, turning points, and low points, and how these memories have been integrated into a narrative identity. Difficult life events have long been of particular interest to personologists because events that disrupt the individual’s sense of self-integration can serve to illuminate the self-reflective processes through which the individual restores a sense of personal coherence.
For personologists, the problem of narrative coherence concerns “the problem of being understood in a social context” (McAdams, 2006, p. 111), and personologists have articulated a range of attitudes toward the prospect of establishing a sense of coherence in postmodern times. Gergen (1991), for instance, has argued that people are simply unable to construct a coherent narrative account of themselves amid the chaos and confusion of contemporary life, whereas McAdams (2006) has argued that people are still able to craft stories from their lived experiences that are intelligible and meaningful. These differences of opinion raise the question of how coherent the life story needs to be to be life-like and believable, and attest to the cognitive demands on those attempting to craft a coherent life story. Given these cognitive demands, Habermas and Bluck (2000) proposed that the consolidation of a global narrative identity depends on four distinct cognitive capacities, including the capacity to sequence events into beginning, middle, and ending; the capacity to draw causal connections between the momentous events in a life; the capacity to extract an overarching theme from a series of events; and an implicit understanding of the normative life course and the timing of life transitions, which enables each individual to recognize his or her own life as a unique variation on a culturally sanctioned script.
The coherence of a personal narrative has been proposed to arise from a set of three contributing dimensions: contextual coherence, which concerns the extent to which the story orients the listener with respect to time and place; chronological coherence, which concerns the extent to which the listener can infer the ordering of events in the story; and thematic coherence, which concerns the extent to which the story’s meaning is developed through causal linkages, elaborations, and interpretations (Reese et al., 2011). Reese and colleagues (2011) have argued that narrative coherence should not be conceptualized as a unitary construct, both because the dimensions may contribute to overall narrative coherence in different ways at different ages and because the dimensions may differentially predict various outcomes of interest. Consequently, the contextual, chronological, and thematic dimensions are routinely analyzed separately, even though nontrivial associations are often found in practice between the three dimensions (e.g., Reese et al., 2011; Waters, Shallcross, & Fivush, 2013).
Indicators of narrative coherence have since been linked to a number of positive outcomes. Among emerging adults, levels of narrative coherence have been associated with having a sense of purpose and meaning (Waters & Fivush, 2015). Among middle-aged adults, levels of narrative coherence have been associated with lower levels of depression and higher levels of life satisfaction (Baerger & McAdams, 1999). Among clinical samples, levels of narrative coherence have been found to distinguish between the life stories of individuals with features of borderline personality disorder from those of individuals without the disorder (Adler, Chin, Kolisetty, & Oltmanns, 2012). Two studies found that the coherence of clients’ psychotherapy narratives was associated with their levels of ego development (Adler, Skalina, & McAdams, 2008; Adler, Wagner, & McAdams, 2007) and another has associated the coherence of clients’ psychotherapy narratives to sudden gains in their mental health (Adler, Harmeling, & Walder-Biesanz, 2013). These findings suggest some degree of association between crafting a coherent life story and cultivating a fulfilling life. Consistent with this suggestion, indicators of narrative coherence have been associated with both self-report and performance measures of wisdom among middle-aged adults (Weststrate, Ferrari, Fournier, & McLean, 2018).
The Present Study
“The problem of unity,” Allport (1937) noted, “is many-sided” (p. 344), as the present review of the literature attests. Each person can be described at multiple levels of functioning (e.g., McAdams, 2013), and each level of functioning provides its own conceptualization of what personality coherence could mean. Consequently, the primary purpose of the present research was to determine the extent to which these different signs of personality coherence interrelate. Participants recounted three personal memories (i.e., a high point, a low point, and a turning point), which were coded for contextual, chronological, and thematic coherence. Participants then listed five personal strivings and rated the extent to which each striving helped them to attain each of their other strivings (i.e., horizontal coherence), the extent to which each striving helped them to attain six intrinsic and extrinsic values (i.e., vertical coherence), and the extent to which they pursued each striving for autonomous versus controlled reasons (i.e., self-concordance). We predicted that indicators of narrative coherence, functional coherence, and organismic congruence would be significantly interrelated within and across levels of personality.
A secondary purpose of the present research was to consider what psychological factors or abilities might help scaffold people’s integrative processes. Given a long line of scholarship suggesting that personality coherence constitutes a psychological problem for the individual (Allport, 1937; McAdams, 2006), we focused our attention on Sternberg’s (2003) three core human abilities—that is, intelligence, wisdom, and creativity—given their general relevance to problem solving. Participants completed performance-based measures of these three abilities. We advanced the following three hypotheses: first, because each life presents its own unique conflicts that require an original solution, indices of coherence should correlate with creativity; second, because resolving the conflicts in a life requires some understanding of the fundamental pragmatics of living, indices of coherence should correlate with wisdom; and finally, because resolving life conflicts requires breadth of knowledge and general problem-solving abilities, indices of coherence should correlate with intelligence.
Finally, as the present review of the literature attests to how the various signs of personality coherence appear to converge on a common set of adaptive correlates, we also planned to assess whether the narrative, functional, and organismic indicators of coherence would each contribute to personal adjustment. Participants in the present study thus completed a series of measures regarding their current levels of well-being, both from the hedonic perspective that focuses on happiness and life satisfaction and from the eudaimonic perspective that focuses on fulfillment and self-realization (Ryan & Deci, 2001). We predicted that all coherence-based measures would be significantly correlated with both the hedonic indicators (i.e., positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction) and the eudaimonic indicators (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness fulfillment) of well-being.
Method
Undergraduate students were invited to participate in a 2-hr laboratory session, either for course credit in their introductory psychology course or for Can$25 financial remuneration. We set out to obtain a sample of N = 400 participants, knowing that at least N = 391 participants would be needed to detect an effect of r = .18 (the lower bound of the middle third of correlation coefficients in psychology; Hemphill, 2003) with 95% power. The sample consisted of N = 391 participants (76% female) who ranged in age from 17 to 37 years (M = 20.58 years, SD = 2.26 years): 32% identified as East Asian, 31% identified as South Asian, 13% identified as White, 10% identified as Black, 9% identified as Southeast Asian, 6% identified as Arabic/Middle Eastern, 3% identified as West Asian, 3% identified as Latin American/Hispanic, and 4% identified as having some Other ethnic background, with 10% to 11% of the sample indicating multiple ethnicities.
Measures
Participants completed (a) narrative measures, in which they were asked to describe three significant personal memories; (b) goal-relevant measures, in which they were asked to list five personal strivings and then compare and evaluate these strivings along a number of dimensions; (c) performance measures of intelligence, wisdom, and creativity; and (d) self-report measures of personal adjustment from both hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives. Descriptive statistics for all variables can be found in Table 1. Reliabilities for the narrative variables were indexed using the intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC(2, k), which we describe in greater detail below. Reliabilities for all other variables were indexed using omega totals (McNeish, 2017). Omega totals were calculated using polychoric correlation matrices for all variables except creativity and intelligence, for which Pearson correlation matrices were used (McNeish, 2017).
Descriptive Statistics.
Note. N = 391.
Narrative measures
Autobiographical memory tasks were modeled after McAdams’ (2008) Life Story Interview. Participants provided written accounts of three personally significant autobiographical memories: a high point (i.e., a positive experience), a low point (i.e., a negative experience), and a turning point (i.e., a transitional or life-changing experience). Memories were then coded using Reese et al.’s (2011) Narrative Coherence Coding System to score the level of narrative coherence in each memory along three dimensions: contextual coherence, defined as the extent to which the narrator established a specific time and place for the story; chronological coherence, defined as the extent to which the story events could be placed on a timeline; and thematic coherence, defined as the extent to which the narrative remained on topic and lacked digression. Each dimension of narrative coherence was scored on a scale ranging from 0 to 3, with higher scores indicating higher levels of narrative coherence.
Nine coders were trained to score narrative coherence using standard practices in the field of narrative psychology (Adler et al., 2017; Syed & Nelson, 2015). Coders were split into three equal groups and then trained to code a single dimension of narrative coherence using narrative practice materials drawn from an unrelated data set that contained the same three memory types. Once their training was complete, they proceeded to code participants’ narratives in six waves, with reliability computed after each wave to assess for coder drift. The order of narratives within each wave was randomized across coders. Reliabilities were indexed using ICC(2, k), a two-way random effects model that is appropriate for instances when each participant is rated by each rater, all raters have been randomly sampled from a population of raters, and the average measurement across k raters is to be used.
Adequate levels of reliability were obtained at each wave for contextual coherence (Wave 1: ICC(2, 3) = .94, Wave 2: ICC(2, 3) = .91, Wave 3: ICC(2, 3) = .93, Wave 4: ICC(2, 3) = .91, Wave 5: ICC(2, 3) = .91, Wave 6: ICC(2, 3) = .91), for chronological coherence (Wave 1: ICC(2, 3) = .73, Wave 2: ICC(2, 3) = .75, Wave 3: ICC(2, 3) = .80, Wave 4: ICC(2, 3) = .77, Wave 5: ICC(2, 3) = .85, Wave 6: ICC(2, 3) = .79), and for thematic coherence (Wave 1: ICC(2, 3) = .88, Wave 2: ICC(2, 3) = .90, Wave 3: ICC(2, 3) = .89, Wave 4: ICC(2, 3) = .87, Wave 5: ICC(2, 3) = .87, Wave 6: ICC(2, 3) = .88). Levels of reliability were consistently high across the three memory types for contextual coherence (high-point ICC(2, 3) = .93, low-point ICC(2, 3) = .91, turning-point ICC(2, 3) = .92), chronological coherence (high-point ICC(2, 3) = .79, low-point ICC(2, 3) = .76, turning-point ICC(2, 3) = .80), and thematic coherence (high-point ICC(2, 3) = .89, low-point ICC(2, 3) = .89, turning-point ICC(2, 3) = .88). Scores for each of the three dimensions of narrative coherence were calculated by averaging raters’ scores across high-point, low-point, and turning-point memories, which in turn evinced adequate reliability (contextual coherence ICC(2, 3) = .92, chronological coherence ICC(2, 3) = .79, thematic coherence ICC(2, 3) = .88).
Goal-relevant measures
Functional coherence and organismic congruence were assessed using procedures modeled after Sheldon and Kasser (1995). Participants were first asked to provide written descriptions of five personal strivings, defined as “something that you are typically or characteristically trying to do in your everyday behavior.” Participants were then asked to rate the extent to which they pursued each striving for each of four reasons, on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (completely): “because it matches my values and interests” (intrinsic), “because I believe it would be an important and meaningful concern” (identified), “because I would feel bad (guilty, ashamed, or anxious) if I didn’t” (introjected), and “because it is expected of me or I am receiving something in return for pursuing it” (external). Scores for autonomous and controlled striving were calculated by averaging together participants’ intrinsic and identified scores on the one hand and participants’ introjected and external scores on the other. Satisfactory reliabilities were obtained for both autonomous striving (omega total = .90) and controlled striving (omega total = .87).
Next, participants were presented with each of their five personal strivings and asked to consider whether being successful in each striving would have a helpful or harmful effect on each of their other strivings on a scale ranging from −2 (very harmful) to 2 (very helpful). These 20 ratings were then averaged together to produce an index of horizontal coherence (omega total = .89). Finally, participants were asked to rate the extent to which each striving would help take them toward possible futures in six culturally endorsed value domains on a scale ranging from 1 (not helpful at all) to 7 (very helpful). Participants were presented with the following three intrinsic futures: self-acceptance and personal growth (i.e., “being happy and having a very meaningful life”), intimacy and friendship (i.e., “having many close and caring relationships with others”), and societal contribution (i.e., “working to make the world a better place”). Participants were presented with the following three extrinsic futures: financial success (i.e., “having a job that pays very well and having a lot of nice possessions”), fame and recognition (i.e., “being known and admired by many people”), and physical appearance (i.e., “looking good and being attractive to others”). These 15 intrinsic ratings and 15 extrinsic ratings were then averaged together to produce separate indices of intrinsic vertical coherence (omega total = .91) and extrinsic vertical coherence (omega total = .93).
Intelligence
The 16-item version of the International Cognitive Ability Resource (Condon & Revelle, 2014), a public-domain measure that has been shown to correlate with commercial tests of cognitive ability, was used to assess participants’ levels of intelligence. Items were equally divided into four categories: the letter and number items asked participants to identify the next position in a sequence from among six alternatives; the matrix reasoning items asked participants to identify the shape that would best complete a 3 × 3 array of geometric shapes in which one of the shapes was missing; the verbal reasoning items asked participants to answer a variety of logic, vocabulary, and general knowledge questions; and the three-dimensional rotation items asked participants to identify which of six alternatives represented the rotation of a target stimulus. The order in which the items were presented was randomized across participants. Participants gained one point for each correct answer, which were summed to form an intelligence score for each participant (omega total = .78).
Wisdom
A variation of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Baltes & Smith, 1990; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), a think-aloud protocol wherein wisdom is conceptualized as a form of expertise in “the fundamental pragmatics of life” (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000, p. 124), was used to assess participants’ levels of wisdom. Participants were presented with a hypothetical life dilemma (i.e., “A 15-year-old girl wants to get married right away. What should one take into consideration and do in such a situation?”), and were asked to type down their thoughts as they worked through the problem. We used the Spearman–Brown prophecy formula to determine that 20 coders would provide an aggregated reliability estimate exceeding .70 (i.e., the commonly accepted benchmark for reliability; Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994), assuming a single-rater interrater reliability estimate of .15 (i.e., the aggregated single-rater interrater reliability estimate for traits that have been rated from text/electronic communication; Connelly & Ones, 2010). Twenty undergraduate coders were thus asked to rely on their own implicit theories of wisdom to rate the perceived wisdom of each response on a scale ranging from 1 (very unwise) to 6 (very wise), an approach that has been used previously in the wisdom literature on the basis that wisdom-related knowledge is recognizable to naïve and expert raters alike (e.g., Smith & Baltes, 1990). Coders’ ratings were then averaged to form a wisdom score for each participant (omega total = .95).
Creativity
The Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1967), a commonly used test of divergent thinking, was used to assess participants’ levels of creativity. Participants were presented with three objects (i.e., a brick, a lipstick, and a wire coat hanger) and given 3 min to list as many creative uses for each object as possible. Two trained undergraduate coders then rated the uses listed by the participants on each of four dimensions. To score fluency, the coders counted the total number of uses listed by each participant, excluding uses that were nonsensical or impossible. To score flexibility, the coders first read through all the uses listed in the sample to come up with an exhaustive list of categories for the uses of each object, and then assigned flexibility scores based on the number of categories that participants used with regard to each object. To score originality, the coders first identified unusual responses appearing less than 5% of the time in the sample, and then summed the number of original uses that the participant listed. To score elaboration, the coders rated the amount of detail in each response on a scale from 1 (not elaborate) to 3 (very elaborate). Interrater agreement (aggregated across tasks) was very high for fluency, r(389) = .98, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.98, 0.98], p < .001; for flexibility, r(389) = .94, 95% CI = [0.92, 0.95], p < .001; and for elaboration, r(389) = .95, 95% CI = [0.94, 0.96], p < .001. Interrater agreement was predictably lower for originality, r(389) = .62, 95% CI = [0.56, 0.68], p < .001, given that most participants receive an originality score of 0, resulting in range restriction. Coders’ ratings for each of the four dimensions were averaged across the three test objects, and then the four dimension scores were standardized and averaged to form a creativity score for each participant (omega total = .92).
Adjustment measures
Participants completed a series of measures concerning their personal adjustment from both hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives, including the 5-item Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), which asked them to rate the extent to which they agree with a series of statements (e.g., “I am satisfied with my life”) on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree); the 12-item Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (Diener et al., 2010), which asked them to rate how often they experienced various positive feelings (e.g., “happy,” “joyful,” and “contented”) and negative feelings (e.g., “sad,” “afraid,” and “angry”) over the last 4 weeks on a scale ranging from 1 (very rarely or never) to 5 (very often or always); the 21-item Basic Psychological Needs Scale (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Gagné, 2003), which asked them to rate a series of statements that concerned the extent to which their needs for autonomy (e.g., “I feel like I am free to decide for myself how to live my life”), competence (e.g., “Most days I feel a sense of accomplishment from what I do”), and relatedness (e.g., “People in my life care about me”) were fulfilled on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all true) to 7 (very true); and the 10-item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), which asked them to rate the extent to which they agree with a series of statements concerning their self-worth (e.g., “I feel that I have a number of good qualities”) on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 4 (strongly disagree). Satisfactory reliabilities were obtained for the three hedonic indicators (life satisfaction, omega total = .92; positive affect, omega total = .93; negative affect, omega total = .88), for the three eudaimonic indicators (autonomy fulfillment, omega total = .75; competence fulfillment, omega total = .77; relatedness fulfillment, omega total = .88), and for self-esteem (omega total = .93).
Results
Analyses were carried out using R 3.1.0 (R Core Team, 2016) with the psych (Revelle, 2017) and lavaan (Rosseel, 2012) packages. First, we examine how the coherence indicators correlate within and across levels of personality. Then, we examine how the coherence indicators relate to participants’ psychological abilities and their personal adjustment. Finally, in a set of ancillary analyses, we examine the extent to which the coherence indicators account for the associations observed between participants’ psychological abilities on the one hand and their personal adjustment on the other.
The Indicators of Personality Coherence
We predicted that indicators of coherence would be significantly correlated within both levels of personality. As predicted, all three indicators of narrative coherence were found to be significantly correlated, range in r = .42 to .78 (see Table 2). Also as predicted, all five indicators of functional coherence and organismic congruence were found to be significantly correlated, range in r = .17 to .58 (see Table 2). The indicators of organismic congruence varied in the extent of their intercorrelation in theoretically predictable ways, with autonomous striving correlating more with intrinsic than extrinsic vertical coherence and with controlled striving correlating more with extrinsic than intrinsic vertical coherence.
Correlations and Principal Component Loadings for the Personality Coherence Indicators.
Note. N = 391. C1 = Component 1; C2 = Component 2. Principal component loadings > .40 are presented in boldface. Correlations are presented below the diagonal; 95% confidence intervals are presented above the diagonal.
*p < .05, two-tailed. **p < .01, two-tailed.
We furthermore predicted that the narrative, functional, and organismic indicators of coherence would be significantly correlated across levels of personality. Although one third of these correlations were statistically significant (see Table 2), all the significant correlations involved negative associations between the indicators of narrative coherence and the need-detracting indicators of organismic congruence. Specifically, those individuals whose personal memories demonstrated higher levels of contextual and thematic coherence also tended to report lower levels of both controlled striving and extrinsic vertical coherence. In other words, those individuals who organized their personal memories in coherent ways, particularly with regard to where and when events occurred and why those events were meaningful, were less likely to report feeling pressured or compelled in their personal strivings and less likely to link their personal strivings to need-detracting futures.
Given the large number of coherence-relevant constructs, we also sought to test our hypotheses in terms of the broader components presumably underlying the observed variation in these measures. We thus submitted the narrative, functional, and organismic indicators of coherence to a principal components analysis (PCA) with an oblique (i.e., promax) rotation. A comparison of the eigenvalues from this PCA (i.e., 2.58, 2.01, 0.96, 0.70, 0.63, 0.57, 0.34, and 0.21) with the eigenvalues obtained from a parallel analysis with 100 replications (i.e., 1.22, 1.14, 1.08, 1.02, 0.97, 0.91, 0.86, and 0.79) indicated that only the first two components (explaining 58% of the total variance) should be retained. The rotated componential loadings are presented in Table 2. As can be seen, functional and organismic indicators loaded onto the first component, and narrative indicators loaded onto the second component. The two components were modestly negatively correlated, r(374) = –.10, 95% CI = [–0.20, –0.00], p = .049, a finding that we can attribute to the aforementioned negative correlations between the narrative and organismic indicators.
The Correlates of Personality Coherence
Next, we examined the extent to which the narrative, functional, and organismic indicators of coherence were associated with the core human abilities of intelligence, wisdom, and creativity (see Table 3). Intelligence was positively correlated with thematic coherence, and was negatively correlated with controlled striving and both the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of vertical coherence. Wisdom was positively correlated with all three narrative indicators, range in r = .21 to .52, but was essentially unrelated to the functional and organismic indicators, range in r = –.09 to .06. Creativity was also positively correlated with all three indicators of narrative coherence, range in r = .11 to .26; furthermore, creativity was associated with higher levels of autonomous striving, lower levels of controlled striving, and lower levels of extrinsic vertical coherence.
Performance Correlates of Personality Coherence.
Note. N = 391. CI = confidence interval.
*p < .05, two-tailed. **p < .01, two-tailed.
In turn, we examined the extent to which the narrative, functional, and organismic indicators of coherence were associated with hedonic and eudaimonic indicators of personal adjustment (see Table 4). The three narrative indicators were most strongly correlated with the eudaimonic aspects of personal adjustment, with virtually all (8 of 9) the correlations reaching statistical significance; smaller, nonsignificant associations were found between the narrative indicators and the hedonic aspects of personal adjustment. The functional and organismic indicators were correlated with both the hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of personal adjustment, with almost two thirds (21 of 35) of the correlations reaching statistical significance; increasing levels of coherence were generally associated with improved personal adjustment, except for controlled striving, which was negatively correlated with autonomy fulfillment and life satisfaction and was positively correlated with negative affect.
Adjustment Correlates of Personality Coherence.
Note. N = 391. CI = confidence interval.
*p < .05, two-tailed. **p < .01, two-tailed.
Ancillary Analyses
Intelligence, wisdom, and creativity were each associated with their own profile of adjustment correlates. For instance, intelligence was unexpectedly but significantly negatively correlated with life satisfaction, r(387) = –.11, 95% CI = [–0.21, –0.02], p = .024. Wisdom and creativity, both of which were associated with all three indicators of narrative coherence, were in turn significantly associated with all three eudaimonic indicators of basic psychological need fulfillment (for wisdom, range in r = .13 to .25; for creativity, range in r = .10 to .18). Given the correlations between wisdom and creativity on the one hand and narrative coherence and need fulfillment on the other, we decided to examine the extent to which the indicators of narrative coherence mediated the associations that creativity and wisdom demonstrated with need fulfillment. We calculated scores for narrative coherence and need fulfillment by averaging their respective indicators (unit weighted). Mediation analyses were then conducted in which (a) narrative coherence was predicted from both creativity and wisdom and (b) need fulfillment was predicted from the combination of creativity, wisdom, and narrative coherence. Bootstrapped estimates for all SEs were obtained from 500,000 iterations. Both creativity, b = 0.06, SE = 0.023, 95% CI = [0.02, 0.11], Z = 2.67, p = .007, and wisdom, b = 0.22, SE = 0.028, 95% CI = [0.17, 0.28], Z = 8.13, p < .001, contributed significantly to the prediction of narrative coherence. In turn, narrative coherence incrementally predicted need fulfillment, b = 0.28, SE = 0.087, 95% CI = [0.11, 0.45], Z = 3.27, p = 0.001, over and above creativity, b = 0.09, SE = 0.046, 95% CI = [0.00, 0.18], Z = 1.98, p = .048, and wisdom, b = 0.08, SE = 0.046, 95% CI = [–0.01, 0.17], Z = 1.76, p = .078. The indirect effect of narrative coherence in the prediction of psychological need fulfillment was significant for creativity, Sobel’s Z = 2.02, SE = 0.009, p = .043, and for wisdom, Sobel’s Z = 2.99, SE = 0.021, p = .003. These findings suggest that narrative coherence partially mediates the relationships that both creativity and wisdom hold with need fulfillment (see Figure 2).
Unstandardized regression coefficients (and standard errors) describing how narrative coherence partially mediates the associations that creativity and wisdom have with need fulfillment.
Discussion
The fundamental purpose of the present research was to examine the nature of personality coherence and the psychological unity and wholeness that all individuals experience to some degree. As different research communities have provided distinct perspectives on personality coherence, the primary purpose of the present research was to determine the extent to which indicators of coherence interrelate both within and across levels of personality. Ancillary purposes of the present research were to assess the significance of the personality coherence-relevant indicators vis-à-vis their associations with the psychological abilities of intelligence, wisdom, and creativity as well as with both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of personal adjustment. A key strength of the present research was the multimethod design, which enabled us to accurately determine the degree of interrelation among the various indicators of personality coherence by avoiding the artificially large associations that arise from shared methods (Campbell & Fiske, 1959).
The Signs of Personality Coherence
We began by bringing together three different formulations of personality coherence (narrative coherence, functional coherence, and organismic congruence) to examine the extent of their intercorrelation. We predicted that indicators derived from all three formulations would be significantly interrelated, a finding that we believed would move the field toward a more unified conceptualization of personality coherence. We instead found that the coherence indicators were relatively independent across two of the three levels of personality detailed by McAdams (2013). The narrative (i.e., contextual coherence, chronological coherence, and thematic coherence) and goal relevant (i.e., horizontal coherence, the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of vertical coherence, and the autonomous and controlled aspects of self-concordance) were largely uncorrelated across the person-as-agent and person-as-author levels. The only exception to this pattern was our finding that the contextual and thematic components of narrative coherence appeared to provide a protective factor in relation to personal strivings; specifically, those individuals who coherently organized their personal memories were less likely to feel pressured or compelled in their personal strivings and less likely to link their personal strivings to need-detracting futures.
We were somewhat surprised that the coherence indicators were not more significantly and positively related across levels. However, it might have been ambitious to expect such strong correlations from a sample of emerging adults. Within McAdams’ (2013) framework, people are only expected to begin manifesting their capacities as autobiographical authors in adolescence and emerging adulthood, and it may have been premature to expect the levels of coherence that young adults demonstrate in how they story the past to influence the levels of coherence that they demonstrate in how they strive toward the future. It may take time for the coherent agent to grow into a coherent author, and for the successful integration of the past to give rise to sense of unity and purpose, suggesting that we may need to venture later on in the life course to find significant associations between the coherence of agency and the coherence of authorship. Testing these ideas in older adults thus stands out as a direction for future research.
The Significance of Personality Coherence
We moved on to examining the correlates of personality coherence. We found that creativity and wisdom were both associated with all three indicators of narrative coherence; furthermore, creativity was associated with higher levels of autonomous striving, lower levels of controlled striving, and lower levels of extrinsic vertical coherence. We found that the narrative indicators of personality coherence were narrowly associated with the eudaimonic indicators of need fulfillment, perhaps due to the particular key scenes from which narrative coherence was scored, whereas the functional and organismic indicators of personality coherence were broadly associated with indicators of personal adjustment in both its hedonic and eudaimonic forms. Well-adjusted individuals adopted personal strivings that were more consistent with one another (i.e., horizontal coherence), with their sense of self (i.e., autonomous striving), and with their psychological needs (i.e., intrinsic vertical coherence), whereas less well-adjusted individuals reported feeling pressured or compelled in their personal strivings (i.e., controlled striving). Although the signs of coherence may not be strongly interrelated across levels of personality (at least, among emerging adults), they do seem to share a common adaptive significance, with higher levels of coherence tending to be associated with adjustment-relevant benefits.
We closed by considering whether indicators of personality coherence could account for any of the associations that the problem-solving abilities demonstrated with personal adjustment. We found that creativity and wisdom were both associated with need fulfillment, and that the link between these cognitive abilities and narrative coherence accounted for at least part of these associations. Creativity and wisdom are both variables at the personality–intelligence interface, notably sharing an association with the personality trait dimension of openness to experience (McCrae, 1987; Staudinger, Lopez, & Baltes, 1997). However, both abilities were found in the present research to make independent contributions to the prediction of narrative coherence, suggesting that creativity and wisdom each bring a unique set of benefits to the problem of how to render an intelligible and meaningful story out of the past. Crafting a coherent life story thus appears in some respects to constitute a fundamental problem in living that calls on people’s expertise in how to live (i.e., wisdom), and in other respects to constitute a problem unique to each life that calls for an imaginative and original solution (i.e., creativity).
Limitations and Future Directions
The most profound limitation of the present research was its reliance upon a cross-sectional design, which precluded any determination of the causal sequencing of the observed effects. Future research would ideally involve the collection of longitudinal data, through which the antecedents and consequences of personality coherence could be prospectively evaluated. The present data were furthermore limited in four noteworthy respects, each of which suggests a promising direction for future research: (a) the age-restricted sample of undergraduate students (mostly female) from whom the present data were collected, (b) the limited selection of life story scenes from which the narrative indicators of coherence were derived, (c) the limited selection of strivings from which the functional and organismic indicators were derived, and (d) the limited assessment of coherence variables at only two of the three levels in McAdams’ (2013) framework. We discuss on each of these limitations in greater detail below.
A key limitation of the present research was its reliance upon an age-restricted sample of (mostly) emerging adults, which raises the question of whether and how the observed pattern of findings might change among samples of individuals from different backgrounds and age ranges. Future research would ideally involve the collection of data from midlife adults, among whom we might expect indicators of personality coherence to demonstrate stronger associations. Given preliminary evidence to suggest that the thematic dimension of narrative coherence continues to develop into middle adulthood (Köber, Schmiedek, & Habermas, 2015), as well as recent meta-analytic evidence to suggest that goal conflicts are more emotionally consequential among older adults than among adolescents or university students (Gray et al., 2017), there is some reason to believe that personality coherence may become more pervasive and problematic by midlife. Consequently, whether the present findings define the lower or upper bound on the validity of personality coherence remains an important question for future research.
The present research relied on participants’ written accounts of their high-point, low-point, and turning-point memories to assess their levels of narrative coherence. In doing so, we assumed that the levels of coherence inferred from these representative narratives could serve as a proxy for the coherence of the life story as a whole. However, although these scenes are among the most often studied types of event memories (Adler et al., 2016), they represent less than half of the key scenes from McAdams’ (2008) Life Story Interview. The extent to which these scenes can approximate the life story as a whole remains an open empirical question. We then coded these key scenes using Reese and colleagues’ (2011) Narrative Coherence Coding System, which we selected for its explicitly developmental approach to coherence, which is in keeping with Allport’s (1937) view of coherence as a sign of maturation. However, this coding system is but one of several such systems (cf. Baerger & McAdams, 1999), and it remains to be seen whether similar results would be obtained using different coding methods. Future research could benefit from soliciting a broader range of life story scenes and coding them for narrative coherence using multiple methods.
The present research relied on participants to rate the extent to which their personally specified strivings were congruent with six culturally specified values across the intrinsic and extrinsic content domains. Although these assessment procedures were modeled after those used by Sheldon and Kasser (1995), an alternative and potentially superior approach to the assessment of vertical coherence would be to ask participants to specify both their short- and long-term goals. Participants could then provide ratings of the extent to which they perceive their short-term goals as helping them to achieve their long-term goals, which would permit researchers to assess people’s levels of vertical coherence in a way that is idiographically comparable with the assessment of horizontal coherence. People’s long-term goals could, in turn, be coded for their intrinsic and extrinsic contents, to preserve the important distinction between need-fulfilling and need-detracting futures. Goal content ratings could be obtained either from the participants or from independent coders, and then used as weights to calculate domain-specific scores for intrinsic and extrinsic vertical coherence.
Finally, a goal for future research should be to extend the present research from the coherence of authorship and agency to the coherence of action. Within McAdams’ (2013) integrative framework, personality can be understood from three different standpoints or levels, each of which layers upon the next to afford an incrementally more detailed understanding of human development. People first enter the world as social actors, with behavioral consistencies that become elaborated into general, internal, and comparative personal dispositions we later recognize as personality traits. By the end of childhood, people have become motivated agents, with goals and values that become consolidated through the exploration and commitment to various personal life projects. By adolescence and emerging adulthood, people have become autobiographical authors, with organized recollections of the past that give rise to a sense of personal identity. Each standpoint provides a different understanding of personality coherence, from the coherent actor with a unified configuration of trait attributes (Biesanz & West, 2000) to the coherent agent with a unified sense of volition and purpose (Sheldon & Kasser, 1995) to the coherent author with a unified understanding of the past (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). The time-intensive demands of the procedures used in the present research precluded us from including a range of measures across all three levels of personality. Consequently, the logical next step in this line of research would be to refine the current assessment procedures so as to determine the extent to which indicators of personality coherence correlate across all three of McAdams’ levels.
Conclusion
Allport (1937, 1961) believed personality coherence to be a significant individual difference and a sign of psychological maturity. The present research attests that the extent of integration in our personal stories from the past and the extent of integration in our personal strivings into the future contribute to our feelings of happiness and fulfillment while appearing to demand both imagination and insight. Those individuals who coherently reconstructed and thematically unified the past appeared to be protected from having their goals co-opted by forces outside the self or steered toward need-detracting futures. Although we found that the narrative and functional/organismic domains of personality coherence were in other respects unrelated, this may have been due to our age-restricted sample of emerging adults, who, in many ways, have only just begun to reflect on their lives. By midlife, people’s self-reflective and reconstructive tendencies may have begun to organize and unify their sense of purpose. Subsequent research should thus venture later on in the life course in an effort to find more significant associations between the coherence of agency and the coherence of authorship.
Supplemental Material
fournier_online_appendix – Supplemental material for The Signs and Significance of Personality Coherence in Personal Stories and Strivings
Supplemental material, fournier_online_appendix for The Signs and Significance of Personality Coherence in Personal Stories and Strivings by Marc A. Fournier, Mengxi Dong, Matthew N. Quitasol, Nic M. Weststrate, and Stefano I. Di Domenico in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support for this research was provided by the University of Toronto Scarborough Research Competitiveness Fund.
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Supplementary material is available online with this article.
References
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