Personality as a dynamical system: Emergence of stability and distinctiveness from intra- and interpersonal interactions

The implications of conceptualizing personality as a cognitive-affective processing system thatfunctions as a parallel constraint satisfaction network are explored. Com-puter simulations show thatfrom dynamic interactions among the units in such a net-work, a set ofstable attractor states andfunctionally equivalent groups ofsituations emerge, such that IF exposed to situation group X, THEN the system settles in attractor Y This conceptualization explicitly models the effect ofsituations on a given individual, and therefore can also be used to model thefunction ofinterpersonal systems. We dem-onstrate this possibility by modeling dyadic systems in which one partner's behavior becomes the situational input into the other partner's personality system, and vice versa. The results indicate that each memberofthe dyad will, in general, exhibitnew at-tractor states. This suggests that the thoughts, affects, and behaviors thatan individual typically experiences are afunction not ofthat individual's personality system alone, but ratherafunction ofthe interpersonal system ofwhich the individual is apart. Just as individuals have distinctive and stable IF-THEN signatures, so do interpersonal rela-tionships. Understanding the structure ofthe cognitive-affective processing system o