The self, studied while it's still becoming.
The Self and Identity Development Laboratory is part of the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, România. We investigate the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of self-formation across development — currently centred on how identity and personality are constructed over time.
What drives us?
We are curious about the many facets of the self across the lifespan — how a sense of identity takes shape, what feeds into it, and what it in turn shapes. That curiosity is what brought each of us into this laboratory, and it is what keeps our projects moving.
Our current work follows identity and personality construction specifically: the processes through which people come to know, narrate, and revise who they are. We treat this as a genuinely open empirical question, not a settled one, and we design our studies accordingly.
We are passionate about doing this well — about psychological research that is scientifically sound from design to interpretation.
Our values
- Curiosity – We follow genuine questions about how the self develops, rather than fitting studies to convenient answers.
- Scientific rigor – Soundness comes first: careful design, transparent methods, and conclusions that stay within what the data support.
- A developmental lens – We study the self as a process unfolding over time, not a fixed trait — and choose designs that can actually capture change.
- Methodological pluralism – Longitudinal, experimental, qualitative, and mixed-method designs — we choose the tool the question calls for.
Methods we work with:
Longitudinal studies · Experiments · Qualitative research · Mixed-method studies
Since 2005, our lab has published 82 studies, articles, and books exploring how people build a sense of identity — mostly focused on how teens and young adults develop their sense of self around school, careers, and personal goals. Alongside identity, a lot of our work looks at perfectionism, achievement, and well-being, and how family, school, and culture shape all of this over time.Over half of our work appears in journals ranked in the top 25% of their field.
FUNDING
