Fractal Self-Structure and Psychological Resilience

Since the mid 1980's, mainstream social psychology investigations of self-complexity and psychopathology have produced contradictory results. These results are likely the result of a lack of theoretical and methodological grounding in complexity theory. The current study proposes that the self has an interconnected fractal structure, and that this structure may be reflected within inverse power law (IPL) disfributions of response times to self-related questions. MMPI-2 item response sets (N = 300) were selected from a larger pool of 1,881 forensic administrations. Self-complexity was operationalized as the inverse of the shape parameter (beta) of the frequency distribution of reaction times to MMPI-2 items (n = 567) for each participant. It was predicted that: (a) these disfributions would generally have strong fits with IPL distributions; and (b) that beta would tend to be correlated with pathology among the MMPI-2 scale scores. The results confirmed that the response-time disfributions tended to fit IPLs (mean R-2 = .94; range: .64 to .99). Furthermore, 18 of 45 correlations between beta and MMPI-2 scale scores associated with pathology were statistically significant, suggesting that rigidity in fractal self-structure is associated with broadband psychopathology. A follow up principal components analysis of the 45 individual scale scores across the participants confirmed this conclusion, producing three latent components, each of which was significantly correlated with beta, and each of which had a broad variety of scales with factor loadings > vertical bar.5 vertical bar. These results may provide a first step toward a practical complexity-science approach to measuring the structural resilience of the self and viewing the self as a complex self-organizing system.