This project investigates the consistencies that characterize the individual's social behavior across situations and over time. It has found a theoretically significant but previously unidentified type of consistency: behavioral signatures, consisting of characteristic, distinctive patterns of variability in the person's behavior in relation to particular types of situations. Clues about the person's underlying qualities (e.g., goals, motives) may be seen in when and where a type of behavior, such as helpfulness, occurs, not just in its overall frequency. These patterns, in the form of the person's stable profiles of if ..then... relationships (e.g., she does X if A but Y if B) are linked to dispositional judgments and to perceptions of consistency. The behavioral signatures distinctive for a person vary in their structural characteristics (e.g., in discriminativeness and responsiveness to differences in situational features). The structure and determinants of these signatures will be investigated with populations ranging from toddlers, to inner city school children, to 35 year-olds first assessed when they were in preschool and who will now again be followed-up. Methods range from large scale but highly controlled field studies (cross-sectional and longitudinal), to experimental studies. A typology of persons, situations, and behaviors will be developed, based on behavioral signatures in selected domains of social behavior. The structural characteristics of the signatures of selected sub-types, and their consequences for flexible adaptive behavior and coping, will then be investigated. The single unifying theme is to assess and clarify the determinants and health-relevant consequences of the different types of signatures found. Related studies of the development of these signatures are revealing long-term consistencies in the individual's patterns of goal-directed attentional-control strategies (e.g., to enable delay of gratification) over the course of development. These strategies, visible in diagnostic pre-school situations, are predicting significant outcomes decades later. Further, the attentional strategies used to enable such self-control (e.g., via strategic self-distraction to """"""""cool"""""""" the aversiveness and frustrativeness of the delay) seem to be central for the development of flexible, adaptive behavioral signatures that facilitate social-cognitive functioning and coping.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 39 publications
