How to Read Your Identity Results: What Your Six Scores Actually Mean

Your CommStyle Identity result gives you six separate scores, one for each dimension of authentic identity and self-understanding.

This guide explains what each dimension measures, what high and low scores indicate in everyday life, and how to use your results as a genuine tool for self-understanding rather than a verdict on who you are.

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Before You Read: Important Context

These scores describe tendencies, not fixed traits. Identity, as Erikson's foundational framework describes it, isn't a static object^[2] — the scores you receive reflect where you are now, shaped by your history and current circumstances, and they aren't permanent.

Both high and low scores carry information: a low score isn't a failure, it may point to an area that's been difficult to develop given your circumstances, or one that's ripe for growth, while a high score reflects a strength that may also point to ways this dimension could be deepened.

Your profile is more meaningful than any single score. The six dimensions interact, and noticing the pattern across your profile, where you're strong, where you're less developed, how the dimensions relate, gives a richer picture than any one number.

Acceptance of Your Past and Self-Understanding

Acceptance of your past measures the degree to which you can acknowledge, integrate, and make meaning of your personal history, including the difficult parts, as part of who you are. Identity isn't built despite your past — it's built through the work of making sense of it.

Acceptance doesn't mean approving of everything that happened; it means being able to hold your history as yours, something that has shaped you in ways that can be understood, rather than something that must be avoided or that continues to control you without your awareness.

A high score here looks like being able to talk about difficult past experiences without being overwhelmed, recognizing how specific experiences shaped who you are today without being entirely defined by them, and holding your history with a degree of compassion.

A low score often means significant parts of your past feel unresolved or cut off from your current sense of self, and past experiences may surface unexpectedly with emotional intensity that feels disproportionate to the present.

Research by Dan McAdams on narrative identity has found that the ability to construct a coherent life narrative, one that makes sense of both positive and negative experiences, is strongly associated with psychological maturity, resilience, and wellbeing.^[3]

Self-Understanding measures clarity about your own values, motivations, emotional patterns, and characteristic ways of thinking — the degree to which you know who you are from the inside.

It's perhaps the most foundational dimension, since before you can live authentically, you need some sense of what authentic looks like for you.

A high score means you can articulate your core values with reasonable consistency and distinguish between what you genuinely want and what you feel pressured to want.

A low score often means your sense of who you are shifts significantly depending on who you're with, and decisions feel difficult because you lack a stable internal compass.

Research on self-knowledge has found it's not as reliable as most people assume, since everyone has significant blind spots — but the effort to understand oneself, through active reflection on values and patterns, is associated with meaningfully better decision-making and relationship quality.

Agency and Openness to Growth

Agency measures the degree to which you experience your life as self-authored, the sense that your choices reflect your own values rather than being driven primarily by external pressure or reactive patterns.

Agency doesn't mean being unaffected by circumstances — it means that even within constraints, you experience yourself as making deliberate choices rather than simply being swept along.

A high score means the direction of your life feels like it reflects choices you've consciously made; a low score often means life feels like it's happening to you, with important decisions frequently made by default.

Agency connects directly to self-determination theory, which has documented across hundreds of studies that experiencing one's behavior as self-authored is a fundamental human psychological need, strongly associated with wellbeing.^[1] It also connects to research on locus of control, which has found that believing your outcomes are influenced by your own actions, rather than external forces or luck, is consistently associated with greater resilience.

Openness to Growth measures your capacity to hold your current sense of self with security while remaining genuinely open to new experiences and the possibility of change.

A common misconception is that a strong identity means a fixed one — research suggests the opposite: people with the most secure identities tend to be more curious and more willing to revise their self-understanding, not less.

A high score means new ideas feel engaging rather than threatening, and you can receive critical feedback without it destabilizing your sense of self.

A low score means new experiences that challenge your current worldview tend to provoke anxiety, and major life changes feel particularly destabilizing.

Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset has documented that people who believe their qualities can develop respond more adaptively to challenge and show greater wellbeing over time.

Related research on psychological flexibility, a core construct in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, has found that holding one's self-concept with flexibility rather than rigidity is associated with a wide range of positive mental health outcomes.

Authentic Expression and Respect for Diversity

Authentic Expression measures the degree to which your external behavior, how you present yourself and show up in relationships, genuinely reflects your internal values, rather than being shaped primarily by social performance.

It doesn't mean sharing everything with everyone — it means there isn't a large, chronic gap between who you are inside and how you present yourself outside.

A high score means your behavior across contexts is consistent in terms of your core values, even if your style adjusts appropriately; a low score means you frequently find yourself behaving in ways that feel inconsistent with who you actually are, and spend significant energy managing how others perceive you.

Research on the discrepancy between one's actual self and presented self consistently finds that larger discrepancies are associated with lower wellbeing and greater relationship dissatisfaction.

Research on self-monitoring found that people who habitually adjust their self-presentation based on social cues tend to have shallower relationships and report lower authenticity, even as they may be more socially skilled in surface-level interactions.

Respect for Diversity measures whether your sense of self is secure enough to genuinely accommodate the reality that other people's identities and values differ significantly from yours, without experiencing those differences as a threat.

A secure identity doesn't require the world to reflect your own values back to you — people with well-developed identities tend to find difference genuinely interesting rather than threatening.

A high score means you're genuinely curious about people whose perspectives differ from yours; a low score often means significant differences in values or lifestyle produce discomfort or judgment, and disagreement can feel like a personal attack.

Research on identity security has found that people with a stronger, more coherent sense of identity are typically more tolerant of difference and ambiguity, not less — the need to surround oneself with likeness tends to signal identity uncertainty rather than strength.

Research on intergroup contact has documented that genuine engagement with people from different groups, when conditions support it, reliably reduces prejudice and increases appreciation for difference.

How to Use Your Profile

Start with the dimensions that surprise you. A score higher or lower than expected often carries the most useful information — what does the discrepancy tell you about how you understand yourself?

Notice the pattern: self-understanding and authentic expression often move together, since it's difficult to express yourself authentically if you don't know yourself well, while acceptance of the past and agency are often related, since unresolved history can constrain your sense of freedom to choose your direction.

Rather than trying to work on all dimensions at once, identify the one where further development seems most meaningful or most possible for you right now.

→ Take the free CommStyle Assessment

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a high score mean on the Identity assessment?

A higher score indicates that the capacities measured in that dimension are more developed or more prominently expressed in your current functioning. The specific meaning varies by dimension — read the dimension-specific explanations above for what higher scores suggest in practical terms.

What does a low score mean on the Identity assessment?

A lower score indicates a development area rather than a fixed deficit. All dimensions measured are developable — lower scores identify where deliberate practice would be most impactful.

The dimension-specific explanations above describe what lower scores suggest behaviorally and what development approaches tend to be effective.

How accurate is the Identity assessment?

The Identity assessment is a self-report tool — it captures how you perceive your own functioning across the measured dimensions.

Research on self-report psychological assessments consistently finds they're meaningful predictors of relevant outcomes, while also being subject to self-perception biases.

The most accurate use of results combines self-report scores with honest feedback from people who know your behavior well, alongside your own genuine reflection on which results feel true.

This article was developed with oversight from a Certified Public Psychologist (Japan). It's intended for informational purposes and doesn't constitute clinical advice.