My research explores social-cognitive processes in personality functioning. A primary line of ongoing research examines social-cognitive mechanisms that contribute to cross-situational coherence in personality, that is, to people's tendency to exhibit relatively consistent patterns of experience and action across diverse life circumstances. We address this question by studying how self-knowledge and situational beliefs contribute to cross-situational coherence in a central social-cognitive variable, perceived self-efficacy.

Our results generally indicate that people do, indeed, display consistently high and low self-efficacy perceptions across clusters of social situations. For example, efficacy perceptions are highest across circumstances that people see as relevant to highly salient (and positively valenced) self-knowledge, or self-schemas. Two important points are that (1) the patterns of personality coherence identified at the level of the individual often violate the structure of dispositional categories that summarize individual differences in the population (i.e., traditional trait categories), and that (2) patterns of both high and low self-efficacy perception are identified for each individual; thus, individuals cannot be well described by assigning to them a single global self-efficacy score (see Cervone, 1997, 1999; Cervone & Shoda, 1999). Research being done in collaboration with Dr. William Shadel, of the Brown University School of Medicine, employs similar idiographic methods to examine the role of social-cognitive personality factors in smoking cessation. Work done in collaboration with a current student and collaborator, Julie Weitlauf, examines the possibility that some psychosocial interventions may produce relative broad, generalized changes in self-efficacy perception.

Other research explores self-regulatory processes in motivation and performance, as well as the influence of affective states on self-referent thinking. For example, work being done in collaboration with Dr. Walter Scott, of the University of Wyoming, and Dr. Julie Tillema, of Indiana University - South Bend, investigates the processes that contribute to our finding that lower moods induce relatively higher personal standards for performance; depressed individual and people in induced negative moods tend to adopt standards for performance that exceed the levels of performance that they judge they actually can achieve (i.e., standards exceed self-efficacy perceptions). Work conducted with another student/collaborator, Nilly Rafaeli-Mor, explores the affective implications of different types of goals ("approach" versus "avoidance" goals), and also examines the impact of goal-setting, self-evaluative reactions, and self-efficacy perceptions on performance on cognitive complex activities.

I have addressed the role of social-cognitive processes in personality functioning and individual differences in a number of recent theoretical and empirical papers, and also in two books. "The coherence of personality" (1999, Guilford Press; the hypertext link takes you to the Guilford web page for this volume), co-edited by myself and my colleague Yuichi Shoda, of the University of Washington, presents papers showing how social-cognitive processes contribute to multiple aspects of personality coherence. The other book is the forthcoming volume, "Personality: Determinants, Dynamics, and Potentials" (2000, Cambridge University Press), co-authored with my colleague Gian Vittorio Caprara, of the University of Rome, "La Sapienza." This book is a comprehensive survey of contemporary personality psychology that is designed for the professional reader and as a textbook for upper-level classes. Both volumes devote significant attention to the question of strategies of explanation in personality psychology, that is, the question of how one is to build a scientific explanation of personality coherence, development, and individual differences. My work promotes a "bottom-up" strategy of explanation (Cervone, 1997, 1999), that is, one in which the individual's characteristic personality style is explained in terms of an underlying system of social-cognitive and affective processes, rather than by locating the person within a system of high-level trait dimensions