Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries.

Self-concept clarity (SCC) references a structural spect oftbe self-concept: the extent to which self-beliefs are clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and stable. This article reports the SCC Scale and examines (a) its correlations with self-esteem (SE), the Big Five dimensions, and self-focused attention (Study l); (b) its criterion validity (Study 2); and (c) its cultural boundaries (Study 3). Low SCC was independently associated with high Neuroticism, low SE, low Conscien-tiousness, low Agreeableness, chronic self-analysis, low internal state awareness, and a ruminative form of self-focused attention. The SCC Scale predicted unique variance in 2 external criteria: the stability and consistency of self-descriptions. Consistent with theory on Eastern and Western self-construals, Japanese participants exhibited lower levels of SCC and lower correlations between SCC and SE than did Canadian participants. Within the last couple of decades, psychologists ' view of the self-concept has undergone a dramatic transformation (Markus & Wurf, 1987). Early researchers treated the self-concept as a unitary, monolithic entity--a stable, generalized view of the self--and typically focused their research efforts on a single as-pect of the self-concept, self-esteem. Contemporary research-ers, in contrast, rely on a multifaceted, ynamic construal in which the self-concept is defined as a cognitive schema--an or-ganized knowledge structure that contains traits, values, epi-sodic and semantic memories about the self and controls the processing of self-relevant information (e.g., Greenwald & Prat-