Investigating personality from within‐person and between‐people approaches: A study on patterns linking beliefs on self‐discrepancies and self‐appraisals of dejection

The study investigates personality structure and processes from a social-cognitive perspective, using a sample of 96 participants. For each participant, personality structure was idiographically assessed as individual beliefs. Those beliefs relate to how generally self-discrepant as well as actual self-defining characteristics facilitate target actions in interpersonal situations. The main results revealed a within-person co-variability between self-appraisals and personal beliefs on the situational relevance of actual/ideal self-discrepant characteristics. For dejection, such an association was stronger in individuals with higher levels of wish for change their own actual/ideal self-discrepant attribute. Actual self-defining characteristics interacted with actual/ideal selfdiscrepancies as well and mitigated the effect of self-discrepancies on contextualized selfappraisals of dejection. These results did not emerge when data were aggregated across situations and inspected from a between-people approach