Personality, Coherence and Incoherence: A Perspective on Anxiety and Depression

This book presents the Complex-System Approach to Personality, which seeks to promote the development of integrative theorizing and subsumes particular insights from earlier models while permitting both within-person and between-person comparisons. The C-SAP is based on an assumption that a systems approach potentially might advance the core concerns of personality psychology, with a priority on personality coherence and incoherence. Within this approach the author postulates the System of Regulation and Integration Stimulation-a hierarchically organized control system-as a fundamental structure of personality architecture, and provides a complete account of the integrative role of the SRIS within the personality system. In addition, the author introduces to this theory the affective traits (anxiety and depression) as elements of intraindividual coherence/incoherence, with the intention of offering a more complete explanation for the functional links between negative affectivity and attentional processing.