Unity and Modularity in the Mind and Self: Studies on the Relationships between Self-awareness, Personality, and Intellectual Development from Childhood to Adolescence

This book explores the relationships between intellectual development, self, and personality and proposes a comprehensive theory. It addresses how humans become aware of themselves, how the various products of self-awareness interrelate to produce an integrated self-system, and which includes the domains of cognition and personality. The book answers these questions on the basis of four empirical studies. The first highlights the development and organisation of self-awareness in regard to cognitive abilities, personality, and thinking styles from 10 to 15 years of age. The second highlights how children's actual cognitive abilities and self-representations interact with their parents' respective representations. The third explores the relationships between general reasoning and processing abilities and the various domain-specific abilities and characteristics examined in the other studies. The final study examines the place of the Big Five factors of personality - extraversion, agreeableness,conscientousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience - in the self-system. Finally, a general model is proposed which specifies the modular and the transmodular aspects of the mind.