Private Self-Consciousness and Self-Disclosure

What types of persons are more or less likely to self-disclose? That is, what individual differences exist between those who voluntarily reveal personal information to others and those who avoid such intimate self-revelation? Recent attempts to survey the evidence concerning this question have not been especially encouraging. For example, Archer (1979), in a review of the empirical attempts to link self-disclosure with personality characteristics of the discloser, stressed the relative dearth of strong and consistent results. Among the few features that do appear to be characteristic of disclosers are a lack of introversion, a lack of neuroticism, and a tendency toward impulsivity. However, despite numerous attempts to demonstrate links with many other measures of psychological functioning, Archer’s conclusion was that at present a “hazy, confused portrait is all that can be distilled from some twenty years of research” (p. 38).