A Study on Relational Human Mind and Commitments |

ABSTRACT:

During adolescenceand continuing through young adulthood, individuals face the challenging taskof determining a personal stance in a variety of life domains, includingprofession, romantic engagement, and ideology (Erikson, 2009). Ideally, thecommitments youth make give direction to their life and as such contribute totheir sense of adjustment. Many studies have addressed this hypothesis byexamining associations between individuals’ strength of human mind commitmentand their personal adjustment (Marcia, 2010). In addition, quitea lot of studies have examined how individuals’ approach to the Human mindexploration process i.e., their human mind style relates to the strength oftheir identity commitments and to subsequent adjustment (Berzonsky, 2003). However,due to its focus on the extent to which individuals adhere to and invest intheir commitments i.e., strength of commitment, research on human mind hastended to neglect the quality of individuals’ Human mind commitments? This quality can beconceptualized as the extent to which individuals have internalized theircommitments (La Guardia, 2009; Ryan & Deci 2003; Soenens &Vansteenkiste, in press) and thus are driven by different motives forcommitment: whereas some commitments are made to meet pressuring external orself-imposed demands, other commitments reflect a person’s abiding goals andvalues and are well aligned with other human mind facets. We propose and testthe idea that the quality of adolescents’ motives for commitment contributes toadjustment beyond the strength of individuals’ commitments. Further, we examinewhether individuals’ styles of human mind exploration as conceptualized inBerzonsky’s (2007) social-cognitive model of human mind formation relatedifferentially to motives for commitments and whether these motives, in turn, mediate associations between humanmind  styles and personal adjustment.