Content and style in personality assessment.

In personality theory a ubiquitous and fundamental distinction may be drawn between the interpretation of behavior in terms of (a) the content of "needs" and of cognitive structures generally and in terms of (b) characteristic styles of response and action. The separation of these two components of personality organization has taken a variety of forms in the hands of different theorists, as in the Allport-Vernon (2) Studies in Expressive Movements, in Murphy's (47) scholarly discussion of continuity in personality structure, in Klein's (40) distinction between needs and control processes, and in Vernon's (54) distinction between adaptive and expressive behavior. One may legitimately ask not only what a person says or does (the particular content of his statements and actions) but how he acts (his characteristic mode or style of expression). What is conceptually a relatively sharp distinction is typically blurred and confounded in a particular concrete act; the what and how are fused in a given goal-directed response. An obsequious person indicates his deference not only by the act of yielding, but by the tone of his voice in performing the yielding act. Because content and style are intermixed in a