Source cited from The New Humanities Reader

While I explored the topics discussed in The New Humanities Reader, I was constantly drawn to the topics of discovering our identities and the influence society can play on this process. I will most likely research ways that forming connections with others helps to create our own personalities. An essay I found interesting in The New Humanities Reader is titled "An Army of One: Me," written by Jean Twenge. This essay explains that the modern focus on our "selves" is not only bad for society, but also bad for individual persons.

One of the 86 citations Twenge used for her essay was from a research article titled "Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion" by Vicki S. Helgeson and Heidi L. Fritz. This article is part of a larger collection of works open to the public known as the Journal of Research in Personality. This particular research study focuses on the way that complete focus on ourselves ("unmitigated agency"), or complete focus on others ("unmitigated communion"), can negatively impact our relationships and heath. The series of experiments recorded in the study prove that there is a difference between agency, communion, and unmitigated agency, and unmitigated communion. It also verifies that the extremes of both cases can negatively impact our lives.  It is relevant to the topic of forming our own identities because it shows that our identities must be a balance of focusing on others as well as focusing on ourselves.

This article was written as a formal research proposal. It was divided into sections by introduction, predictions, procedure, results, etc.. The tone of this paper was professional and informative. The intended audience for this paper was most likely other personality researchers who could benefit from knowing the results of the experiments conducted.

Works Cited

Helgeson, Vicki S., and Heidi L. Fritz. 1999. Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion. Journal of Research in Personality, 33:131-58. Carnegie Mellon University. Science Direct. Web. 19 Oct. 2016.

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