Self generated personal goals have been shown to provide routes to positive adaptation, increased mental health, and new personality development. However, recent studies have found a crucial moderating factor in this process, namely the fit or concordance of listed goals with the person's underlying resources, interests, values, and/or developmental condition. These studies suggest that selecting self-concordant goals is an important but difficult skill, which requires complex self-perceptual abilities. My own work based in Self-determination theory, has used internal perceived locus of causality (I-PLOC) ratings to index the concordance of goals with implicit personality and may be susceptible to self-deceptive biases, the proposed research will experiment with a variety of indirect means of measuring self-concordance. These will include analysis of response latencies, use of cardiovascular methodologies, use of the Implicit Associates Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), and use of self-infiltration memory paradigms. The research will have three basic goals: First, to provide new validation for our conceptual assumptions regarding self-concordance ratings, by showing that they indeed predict micro-level optimal-functioning outcomes such as faster response latencies, reduced autonomic defensiveness, and healthier cardiovascular response. Second, it will explore conditions (such as authority recommendations) and goal-types (such as avoidance framing and extrinsic content) for which self-concordance ratings may sometimes be inaccurate or self-deceived. Third, it will explore the generalizability of effects to different types of outcomes and to persons of different age, income, and ethnicity. The long-term aim of the research is to develop a multi-modal profiling system, drawing upon people's own implicit self-knowledge, by which the deeper appropriateness of a person's self-generated initiatives can be objectively assessed. Such a tool will be invaluable for therapists and clients alike as they attempt to determine what goals the client should pursue. In the process we hope to develop new understanding of personality differentiation and adult identity formation.
