"I want to lift my people up": Exploring the psychological correlates of racial themes within the life stories of midlife Black Americans.

OBJECTIVE: This study explores how middle-aged Black Americans talk about race, without prompting, while telling their life stories. METHOD: Drawing upon a dataset of lengthy Life Story Interviews (N = 70), we first employed a keyword search to identify race-relevant interview scenes for each participant. Next, we conducted a thematic analysis of these scenes to identify salient racial narrative themes. Finally, we coded race-relevant scenes to examine the psychological correlates of racial narrative themes. RESULTS: We identified 460 total racially themed Life Story Interview scenes, with the number of racially themed scenes ranging from 1 to 17 across participants' interviews. Racial narrative themes included Community of Care, Black Cultural Identity, Multiculturalism, Activism, Encounter with Racism, Systemic Racism, and Racial Reckoning. Quantitative analyses highlight a relationship between racial narrative themes and psychological measures of wisdom and generativity. CONCLUSION: This study offers insight into the ways that race manifests in the life stories of Black Americans and highlights the importance of considering race in the study of narrative identity, and personality, more broadly.

The comforter-in-chief: How two traumatic experiences shaped president joe Biden's first 100 days.

OBJECTIVE: In the first 100 days of his U.S. presidency, Joe Biden sought to comfort Americans who had lost loved ones to the pandemic and to initiate a surprisingly progressive policy agenda. I interpret these two cardinal features of his early presidency in terms of two traumatic losses in Biden's personal life, contextualizing the argument within a 3-tiered model of personality. METHOD: This psychobiography of a single case mainly follows an inductive, grounded-theory approach that aims to find patterns in the data that both explain a life and link to evidence-based constructs in psychological science. RESULTS: As Biden understands his own life story, the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972 and first-born adult son in 2015 forged an empathic sensibility that enables him to connect deeply with other Americans through shared grief and pain. These two traumatic events also inform the uniquely conciliatory approach he followed to instigate social change. CONCLUSIONS: The first 100 days of the Biden presidency provide a striking example of how a particular person's life history comes to meet the broader historical moment. The findings have implications for how personality researchers think about redemptive life stories and the nature of late-life narrative identity.

Hiding in plain view: An historical perspective on the study of morality in personality psychology.

OBJECTIVE: We aim to identify the major ideas and trends in the study of morality within personality psychology over the past 100 years. METHOD: Our historical review is organized into three sections, examining moral dimensions in personality from the standpoints of the person as (1) a social actor (moral traits), (2) a motivated agent (the mental infrastructure of morality), and (3) an autobiographical author (moral life stories). RESULTS: Within the field of personality psychology, a great deal of research into morality has been hiding for decades in plain view. Accordingly, we trace the history of research on socialization and instrumental competence, altruism, moral traits and virtues, the dimensions of morality inherent in the authoritarian personality, personal values, moral reasoning, moral intuitions, and the life stories constructed by people who have distinguished themselves for moral excellence, as evidenced in extraordinary bravery, compassion, or generativity. CONCLUSIONS: In a multitude of ways, human beings express and experience individual differences in their moral engagement of the world, all of which fall within the purview of personality psychology.

Self-transcendence and life stories of humanistic growth among late-midlife adults.

OBJECTIVE: Self-transcendence is the experience of feeling connected to something greater than oneself. Previous studies have shown high scores on self-transcendence are associated with well-being and other psychological benefits, but have rarely examined the lived experiences of highly self-transcendent people. METHOD: Black and White men and women in late-midlife completed Life Story Interviews and self-report measures of self-transcendence. In Study 1 (N = 144, Mage  = 56.4), we used grounded theory methodology to differentiate the stories told by participants scoring either extremely high or extremely low on self-transcendence. In Study 2 (N = 125; Mage  = 60.4), we created a quantitative coding scheme and scored 1,375 new life story scenes. RESULTS: In Study 1, six narrative themes were identified (closure, interconnectedness, lifelong learning, secure attachment, self-actualization, and spiritual pluralism) as part of a "humanistic growth story." In Study 2, four of the narrative themes were found to predict self-transcendence scores with significant effect sizes of ß = .26 to .47. CONCLUSIONS: In our sample, highly self-transcendent individuals tended to narrate their lived experiences as spiritual journeys of humanistic growth. This study adds to our understanding of one path of personality growth in late-midlife, that toward self-transcendence.

Psychopathology and the self: Human actors, agents, and authors.

The articles included within this special issue of the Journal of Personality all conceptualize psychopathology as the result of problems in human selfhood. As such, they implicate a wide assortment of self-related constructs, from self-objectification to self-esteem, in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, and they point to interventions designed to alter these self-processes in order to alleviate suffering. In this commentary, I reinterpret and reorganize many of the ideas presented in the articles from the standpoint of a tripartite perspective on the reflexive human self. The self is first and foremost an inherent duality of I and Me. Psychologically speaking, the I/Me dynamic plays out in three different guises-the self as (1) social actor, (2) motivated agent, and (3) autobiographical author. Problems in human selfhood as they pertain to psychopathology may be profitably reconceived in terms of the corresponding performative styles expressed by social actors, the motivational agendas of values and goals that energize human striving and determine self-esteem, and the internalized life stories that human beings, as authors of the self, fashion and narrate to make sense of the reconstructed past and imagined future.

Core beliefs in healthy youth and youth at ultra high-risk for psychosis: Dimensionality and links to depression, anxiety, and attenuated psychotic symptoms.

Cognitive theory posits that core beliefs play an active role in developing and maintaining symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis. This study sought to comprehensively examine core beliefs, their dimensionality, and their relationships to depression, anxiety, and attenuated psychotic symptoms in two groups of community youth: a group at ultrahigh risk for psychosis (UHR; n = 73, M age = 18.7) and a matched healthy comparison group (HC; n = 73, M age = 18.1). UHR youth reported significantly more negative beliefs about self and others, and significantly less positive beliefs about self and others. HC youth rarely endorsed negative self-beliefs. Exploratory factor analyses found that HC negative self-beliefs did not cohere as a single factor. We hypothesized specific links between core beliefs and symptoms based on cognitive models of each disorder, and tested these links through regression analyses. The results in the HC group were consistent with the proposed models of depression and anxiety. The results in the UHR group were consistent with proposed models of depression and negative psychotic symptoms, somewhat consistent with a proposed model of positive psychotic symptoms, and not at all consistent with a proposed model of anxiety. These findings add to a growing developmental literature on core beliefs and psychopathology, with important clinical implications.

Identity development in cultural context: The role of deviating from master narratives.

OBJECTIVE: The great majority of research on identity and personality development has focused on individual processes of development, to the relative neglect of the cultural context of development. We employ a recently articulated framework for the examination of identity development in context, centered on the construct of master narratives, or culturally shared stories. METHOD: Across four studies, we asked emerging and midlife adults (N = 512) to narrate personal experiences of deviations from these master narratives. RESULTS: Across three quantitative studies, we show that (a) those who elaborated their deviation experiences were more likely to be in structurally marginalized positions in society (e.g., ethnic or sexual minorities); (b) those who elaborated an empowering alternative to the master narrative were more likely to be engaged in identity processes; and (c) master narratives maintain their rigidity by the frequency of their use. In study 4, using qualitative analyses, we illustrate the rigidity of master narratives, as well as the degree to which they take shape in social and group experiences. CONCLUSIONS: These studies emphasize the importance of cultural context in considering personality and identity development.

Parental Co-Construction of 5- to 13-Year-Olds' Global Self-Esteem Through Reminiscing About Past Events.

The current study explored parental processes associated with children's global self-esteem development. Eighty 5- to 13-year-olds and one of their parents provided qualitative and quantitative data through questionnaires, open-ended questions, and a laboratory-based reminiscing task. Parents who included more explanations of emotions when writing about the lowest points in their lives were more likely to discuss explanations of emotions experienced in negative past events with their child, which was associated with child attachment security. Attachment was associated with concurrent self-esteem, which predicted relative increases in self-esteem 16 months later, on average. Finally, parent support also predicted residual increases in self-esteem. Findings extend prior research by including younger ages and uncovering a process by which two theoretically relevant parenting behaviors impact self-esteem development.

Studying the Motivated Agent Through Time: Personal Goal Development During the Adult Life Span.

This research examined the rank-order and mean-level consistency of personal goals at two periods in the adult life span. Personal goal continuity was considered among a group of young adults (N = 145) who reported their goals three times over a 3-year period and among a group of midlife adults (N = 163) who specified their goals annually over a 4-year period. Goals were coded for a series of motive-based (viz., achievement, affiliation, intimacy, power) and domain-based (viz., finance, generativity, health, travel) categories. In both samples, we noted a moderate degree of rank-order consistency across assessment periods. In addition, the majority of goal categories exhibited a high degree of mean-level consistency. The results of this research suggest that (a) the content of goals exhibits a modest degree of rank-order consistency and a substantial degree of mean-level consistency over time, and (b) considering personality continuity and development as manifest via goals represents a viable strategy for personality psychologists.

Narrating the generative life.

Generativity is an adult's concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations. Analyzing lengthy life-narrative interviews of late-midlife adults, we examined the extent to which a particular kind of life story is empirically linked to self-report measures of generativity and other indices of psychosocial adaptation in midlife. The results showed that highly generative adults are significantly more likely than their less-generative counterparts to construe their lives as variations on a prototypical redemption narrative, wherein the story's protagonist (a) enjoys an early advantage in life, (b) exhibits sensitivity to the suffering of other people, (c) develops a clear moral framework, (d) repeatedly transforms negative scenes into positive outcomes, and (e) pursues prosocial goals for the future. The psychological and cultural features of redemptive life stories are considered, as are the problems and potentialities of life-narrative research in psychological science.

Physiological Reactivity During Parent-Adolescent Discussions: Associations with Scaffolding Behaviors and Relationship Quality.

BACKGROUND: Parents and adolescents commonly discuss stressful experiences. However, little is known about the features of these conversations that may have implications for health. METHODS: One hundred five adolescents and their parents engaged in conversations about two challenging events, with parental contributions to the discussions coded for four scaffolding behaviors (reiterations, negations, move alongs, and new interpretations). Systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate were measured in both participants at baseline and throughout the conversation. Parent-reported relationship quality was also assessed. RESULTS: For both parents and adolescents, negative scaffolding behaviors were associated with increased physiological reactivity, whereas positive scaffolding behaviors were associated with decreased reactivity. Furthermore, children in higher quality parent-child relationships showed greater reactivity to reiterations and lower reactivity to new interpretations, but those in lower quality relationships demonstrated the opposite patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Specific aspects of parent-child interactions appear to contribute to physiological responses to challenging events, which in turn may have implications for health.

The life narrative at midlife.

In a remarkably prescient chapter, Bertram Cohler (1982) reimagined the problems and the potentialities of psychological development across the life course as a distinctively human challenge in life narration. This chapter situates Cohler's original vision within the intellectual and scientific matrix of the late 1970s, wherein psychologists expressed grave doubts about the extent to which human lives may demonstrate consistency and coherence. By focusing attention on human beings as autobiographical authors rather than as mere social actors or motivated agents, Cohler moved the conversation away from dispositional personality traits and developmental stages and toward the emerging concept of narrative identity. Over the past 30 years, research on narrative identity has shown how people use stories to integrate the reconstructed past and imagined future, providing their lives with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning. At midlife, many adults struggle to solve the problem of generativity, aiming to leave a positive legacy for the next generation. Inspired by Cohler's original chapter, contemporary research reveals that the most generative adults in American society tend to construe their lives as narratives of personal redemption. As such, life stories may serve as valuable psychological resources for midlife adults, even as they reflect and refract prevailing cultural themes.

Specificity in autobiographical memory narratives correlates with performance on the autobiographical memory test and prospectively predicts depressive symptoms.

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) is an important cognitive marker in depression that is typically measured with the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986). The AMT is widely used, but the over-reliance on a single methodology for assessing AMS is a limitation in the field. The current study investigated memory narratives as an alternative measure of AMS in an undergraduate student sample selected for being high or low on a measure of depressive symptoms (N=55). We employed a multi-method design to compare narrative- and AMT-based measures of AMS. Participants generated personally significant self-defining memory narratives, and also completed two versions of the AMT (with and without instructions to retrieve specific memories). Greater AMS in self-defining memory narratives correlated with greater AMS in performance on both versions of the AMT in the full sample, and the patterns of relationships between the different AMS measures were generally similar in low and high dysphoric participants. Furthermore, AMS in self-defining memory narratives was prospectively associated with depressive symptom levels. Specifically, greater AMS in self-defining memory narratives predicted fewer depressive symptoms at a 10-week follow-up over and above baseline symptom levels. Implications for future research and clinical applications are discussed.

Self-concept and Narrative Identity in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Disturbances of the narrative self and personal identity accompany the onset of psychotic disorders in late adolescence and early adulthood (a formative developmental stage for self-concept and personal narratives). However, these issues have primarily been studied retrospectively after illness onset, limiting any inferences about their developmental course. STUDY DESIGN: Youth at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR) (n = 49) and matched healthy comparison youth (n = 52) completed a life story interview (including self-defining memory, turning point, life challenge, and psychotic-like experience) and questionnaires assessing self-esteem, self-beliefs, self-concept clarity, and ruminative/reflective self-focus. Trained raters coded interviews for narrative identity themes of emotional tone, agency, temporal coherence, context coherence, self-event connections, and meaning-making (intraclass correlations >0.75). Statistical analyses tested group differences and relationships between self-concept, narrative identity, symptoms, and functioning. STUDY RESULTS: CHR participants reported more negative self-esteem and self-beliefs, poorer self-concept clarity, and more ruminative self-focus, all of which related to negative symptoms. CHR participants narrated their life stories with themes of negative emotion and passivity (ie, lack of personal agency), which related to positive and negative symptoms. Reflective self-focus and autobiographical reasoning were unaffected and correlated. Autobiographical reasoning was uniquely associated with preserved role functioning. CONCLUSIONS: This group of youth at CHR exhibited some, but not all, changes to self-concept and narrative identity seen in psychotic disorders. A core theme of negativity, uncertainty, and passivity ran through their semantic and narrative self-representations. Preserved self-reflection and autobiographical reasoning suggest sources of resilience and potential footholds for cognitive-behavioral and metacognitive interventions.

Seeing your life story as a Hero's Journey increases meaning in life.

Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., Beowulf) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., Harry Potter). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and can causally increase people's experience of meaning in life. We first distill the Hero's Journey into seven key elements-protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy-and then develop a new measure that assesses the perceived presence of the Hero's Journey narrative in people's life stories: the Hero's Journey Scale. Using this scale, we find a positive relationship between the Hero's Journey and meaning in life with both online participants (Studies 1-2) and older adults in a community sample (Study 3). We then develop a restorying intervention that leads people to see the events of their life as a Hero's Journey (Study 4). This intervention causally increases meaning in life (Study 5) by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connecting them into a coherent and compelling narrative (Study 6). This Hero's Journey restorying intervention also increases the extent to which people perceive meaning in an ambiguous grammar task (Study 7) and increases their resilience to life's challenges (Study 8). These results provide initial evidence that enduring cultural narratives like the Hero's Journey both reflect meaningful lives and can help to create them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Environmentalism as a context for expressing identity and generativity: patterns among activists and uninvolved youth and midlife adults.

Previous qualitative studies have identified themes of generativity and identity development in the interviews of environmental activists (Chan, 2009; Horwitz, 1996), suggesting their importance as motives for environmental behavior. The purpose of our study was to extend this work by identifying positive relationships between identity maturity, generativity, and environmentalism using quantitative methodologies. To explore these relationships, we designed quasi-experimental and correlational studies. We recruited 54 environmental activists and 56 comparison individuals, half of whom were youth (mean age = 22 years) and the other half midlife adults (mean age = 43 years). Sixty-three percent of our sample was female. Participants completed several environmental, generativity, and identity questionnaires. We found that activists and comparison individuals differed on the identity maturity, generativity, and environmental measures overall. Further, greater identity maturity and generativity were associated with higher environmental engagement. And generativity was found to mediate the relation between identity maturity and environmentalism. Our findings suggest that engaging in generative behaviors may be an important part of the process in forming an environmental identity and engaging in environmental actions.

Personality development: continuity and change over the life course.

The development of personality across the human life course may be observed from three different standpoints: the person as actor (behaving), agent (striving), and author (narrating). Evident even in infancy, broad differences in social action patterns foreshadow the long-term developmental elaboration of early temperament into adult dispositional traits. Research on personal strivings and other motivational constructs provides a second perspective on personality, one that becomes psychologically salient in childhood with the consolidation of an agentic self and the articulation of more-or-less stable goals. Layered over traits and goals, internalized life stories begin to emerge in adolescence and young adulthood, as the person authors a narrative identity to make meaning out of life. The review traces the development of traits, goals, and life stories from infancy through late adulthood and ends by considering their interplay at five developmental milestones: age 2, the transition to adolescence, emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age.

Constructing stories of self-growth: how individual differences in patterns of autobiographical reasoning relate to well-being in midlife.

Although growth has been a central focus in narrative research, few studies have examined growth comprehensively, as a story that emerges across the interpretation of many events. In this study, we examined how individual differences in autobiographical reasoning (AR) about self-growth relate to traits and well-being in a national sample of midlife adults (N= 88) who ranged in age from 34 to 68. Two patterns of growth-related AR were identified: (1) positive processing, defined as the average tendency to interpret events positively (vs. negatively), and (2) differentiated processing, defined as the extent to which past events are interpreted as causing a variety of forms of self-growth. Results showed that positive processing was negatively related to neuroticism and predicted well-being even after controlling for the average valence of past events. Additionally, differentiated processing of negative events but not positive events was positively related to openness and predictive of well-being. Finally, growth-related AR patterns independently predicted well-being beyond the effects of traits and demographic factors.

The Episodic Man: How a Psychological Biography of Donald J. Trump Casts New Light on Empirical Research Into Narrative Identity.

People make meaning through life narrative. The central thesis of my book-length psychological biography of Donald Trump is that the 45th president of the United States defied this general meaning-making tendency and epitomized instead the episodic man. Like no other president in modern history, Trump seems to be nearly devoid of a narrative identity, which is an internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the personal past and imagines the future in order to provide life with temporal continuity and meaning. Instead, Trump has always lived in the emotionally vivid moment (episode), fighting to win each moment, moment by discrete moment. Seeing him through the lens of the episodic man helps to explain many puzzling features of Donald Trump's personality, from his charismatic effect on millions of Americans to his penchant for lying and malice. Importantly, the analysis of Trump's episodic nature informs the scientific study of narrative identity and meaning making more generally, suggesting that people vary not only with respect to the kinds of stories they create for their lives but also with respect to the extent to which they construe life in narrative terms. Therefore, the analysis of Trump illustrates the potentially reciprocal relationship between the idiographic case and the nomothetic effort to develop and evaluate more general scientific hypotheses.

More Vulnerable? The Life Story Approach Highlights Older People's Potential for Strength During the Pandemic.

OBJECTIVES: Older adults have repeatedly been referred to as more physically vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic, however, is not only about becoming physically ill. It has many psychosocial aspects: people are exposed to myriad life challenges. The life story approach does not ignore physical status but also emphasizes psychosocial strengths. It highlights that older people are likely to have developed resilience through experiencing life challenges and living across history. METHOD: We used the narrative method to review research on three strengths: tendency toward life reflection, adaptive use of personal memory, and temporal focus encouraging generativity. RESULTS: For each, we (a) present evidence that this strength manifests in the second half of life, and (b) identify how it may specifically be applied in dealing with the challenges of the pandemic. In considering their life stories, the picture that emerges is one of older adults as having the potential to show considerable psychosocial strength despite the adversities of the pandemic. DISCUSSION: We conclude that during this period of sweeping change in the lives of individuals of all ages, our older citizens may act as valuable societal anchors.