Person X Situation interactionism in self-encoding (I am ... when ...): Implications for affect regulation and social information processing

Although Person X Situation (P X S) interactionism is central in current so cial-cognitive conceptions of personality organization, its implications fo r the encoding of the self remain unexplored. Two studies examined the caus al role of P X S interactionism in self-encoding on affect regulation and d iscriminative social perception. Following failure (Studies 1 and 2) and su ccess (Study 2) ideation, participants were prompted to encode the self eit her in P X S interactionist terms (I am... when...) or in traitlike uncondi tional terms (I am...). Interactionist (compared with unconditional) self-e ncoding led to less affective extremity, suggesting that such encoding may prevent individuals from generalizing specific success and failure experien ces to the self as a whole. Study 2 also found that interactionist self-enc oding attenuated the endorsement of global stereotypes, suggesting that suc h encoding may enhance fine-grained social perception as well.