Abstract
The current research was aimed to dynamically study the structure of personality. Study I adopted the ideographic method to investigate dynamic contents of personality. One hundred and fifty college students were asked to choose 10 words to describe each of their actual-, ideal- and ought-selves. The word frequency analysis revealed the features of different selves. Study II adopted nomothetic method to investigate the structure of personality. The high frequency word lists of actual-, ideal- and ought-self from Study I were used as testing materials. Two hundred college students were asked to rate to what extent each word was appropriate to describe the respective selves on a 7-point scale with “1” representing extremely inappropriate while “7” representing completely appropriate. Factor analysis showed that there were 5 factors in actual-self explaining 47.1% variance while 3 factors were revealed in both ideal- and ought-selves explaining 42.3% and 41.9% variance respectively. All factors in actual-self were bi-polar except for emotionality while all factors in ideal- and ought-selves were mono-polar. The ideal-self and ought-self were quite similar both in the content and in the structure. A theory of dynamic structure and functions of personality was then proposed to state that the personality structure had its pattern feature and content feature, the latter, influenced by culture, is the main actor of personality function. The different selves as the personality components interact to each other to form a dynamic relationship pattern of personality that has the function of influencing emotion, motivation and behavior.
| Keywords: | self; personality; dynamic structure; personality function; college student |
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