Social psychological research has shown that we form significantly more intricate views and judgments of our own emotions and behaviors than we do of the behaviors and emotions of others. Features of the self-schema participate in the mediation between what we experience and what our behavioral or emotional response is. This sort of cognitive mediation has been found in the case of personality dimensions of the self, attention to the self, and self-esteem. The complexity here is self-complexity. The definition has been much debated, but there are two aspects of the definition that are shared among all.
All accounts also share, that at the root of self-complexity is the spreading of activation.
He admits to the great deal of overlap between these categories, but suggests that there are enough differences to make a distinction. These four faces may correspond to cognitive theory, cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and philosophy of the mind. Goertzel insists that it is by working on these four levels at once, that complex systems science may be able to transform psychology. Psychology lacks an overarching perspective which brings the brain, mind and behavior together. They are attractors of neural dynamical systems, but in psychology can also be understood as attractors of a more abstract dynamical system.