The Janus Face of Fixed Mindset: Revisiting the Neglected Self-Concept × Mindset Interaction in Achievement Emotions

Many influential psychological theories are formulated in explicitly conditional terms: the impact of one construct depends on another. Yet when interactions appear weak or inconsistent empirically, often as a function of analytic constraints, the absence of evidence may be mistaken for evidence of absence. This encourages a drift from interactional theory to additive conceptions. Mindset theory provides a revealing case. Dweck’s original formulation did not portray fixed-ability beliefs as uniformly maladaptive; rather, it implied that their consequences depend on individuals’ self-evaluative appraisals, particularly self-concept. Yet this theoretically central interaction has rarely been directly tested. Our substantive–methodological synergy re-examines this neglected prediction, leveraging a three-wave longitudinal dataset and latent interaction modeling to test the theory’s conditional architecture. Across specifications and multiple achievement emotions, fixed mindset was neither uniformly detrimental nor benign. Only combined with low self-concept, it predicted greater anxiety, anger, and shame. Combined with high self-concept, it was associated with elevated pride—a dual pattern captured in the metaphor of the “Janus face.”By recovering this conditional structure, the findings clarify a foundational aspect of mindset theory and illustrate a broader principle: When theories are interactional in form, empirical models must mirror that structure to yield theoretically faithful conclusions. Keywords: conditional theory, latent interaction analysis, latent profile analysis, mindset, self-concept, achievement emotions