Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence.

“…of Personality Psychology time-limited developmental pressures may become more permanent fixtures of personality if they become consolidated into one’s identity, particularly during the formative narrative identity development period of late adolescence and early adulthood (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“The construct of coherence has received significant attention in the literature on psychotherapy (i.e., Neimeyer, Herrero, & Botella, 2006, Singer & Rexhaj, 2006) and on narrative identity more broadly (i.e., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2006a).”

“For example, it is mid-adolescence before most youth are able to reason about how events and experiences depicted in a story (including their own life story) are related to changes in the story’s protagonists [Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Habermas & Bluck, 2000].”

“Central to the development of the self is a process of self-reflective thinking and talking, in order to enhance understanding of the self (Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“Although Habermas and Bluck (2000) originally argued that true life stories are not possible before mid-adolescence, at around age 15,”

“A consistent self-narrative allows people to establish self-continuity and selfunderstanding (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Neimeyer, 2004; Pillemer, 1998).”

“A normative life script (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004) or cultural concept of biography (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) may organize one’s life events and, thereby, aid in retrieval.”

“This is particularly important because during adolescence, narratives take on new meaning for the individual (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1993, 2001).”

“…memory and life story have mentioned that knowledge of culturally expected events is critical for the organisation of life stories (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; MacAdams, 2001), life scripts have only recently become a subject of systematic quantitative empirical studies in psychology…”

“Accordingly, Bluck and Habermas (2001; Habermas & Bluck, 2000) argue that this confluence of individuals' emerging cognitive capacities for abstract reflection and the motivational press on adolescents to define their sense of identity leads to the first concerted use of autobiographical memory to…”

“…focus, we suggest that the more likely relation is the former: that younger adults, who are forging a sense of identity (low self-concept clarity) as they move into adulthood (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1999) will be more likely to use memory to help them achieve a sense of self-continuity.”

“To life story researchers, individuals retrospectively make sense of their life experiences by constructing coherent and meaningful autobiographical narratives—a process called autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“An important line of research shows that adolescents’ develop new abilities to think about the dynamic causal processes underlying the ordering of events in a person’s life (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“We have termed this activity of reflecting about life events from a biographical perspective autobiographical reasoning, which involves the use of autobiographical arguments (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Based on Havighurst’s, Neugarten’s (1996), or Erikson’s (1959) ideas of different life phases placing different demands on the individual, we believe that people in different life phases may differ systematically in what they consider wise behaviour in their own life.”

“The life story has become an increasingly important concept in theories of autobiographical memory and personality (Conway, 2005 ; Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ; McAdams, 1996 ).”

“While clearly different occupational outcomes, his career trajectory contains thematic coherence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000), providing continuity between his dreams and his realties.”

“For example, memory for a particularly negative event (i.e., “rock bottom”) could serve as a turning point, leading us down a more successful path (i.e., an adaptive function; Pillemer, 2001, 2003; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Said differently, past events are coupled with those of the present through a process of autobiographical reasoning that is more sophisticated in some than in others, as a function of (underexplored) individual differences (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean et al., 2007).”

“Here, too, are the larger cultural narrative frames that define the shape of a life (Habermas and Bluck, 2000), as well as the cultural master narratives, often embodied within mass media, as described by McLean and Breen (2016).”

“…autobiographical memory systems only begin to approximate those of adults sometime between 10 and 15 years of age (Conway, 2005; Van Abbema & Bauer, 2005), and that full adult memory capacity does not emerge until late adolescence and early adulthood (Ghetti & Bunge, 2012; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…that permits construction of a sequence of memories of temporally linked events, such as expressed in a life story or autobiography (e.g., Fivush, Habermas, Waters, & Zaman, 2011; Fivush & Zaman, 2014; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001; see also Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Thomsen, 2009).”

“Moreover, locating one’s life events on a personal timeline is considered a late developmental achievement (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…may be particularly important for adolescents who are newly able to engage in such processes and who are only slowly moving toward the accomplishment of having a life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & de Silveira, 2008; McLean & Breen, 2009; McLean et al., 2010; McLean & Mansfield, 2010).”

“Creating thematic coherence can be done in many ways, such as connecting events to each other, indicating that a certain event is similar to many others, or by explicitly offering a metaphor for one’s life (‘‘life is hard’’) (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Luborsky, 1990).”

“People derive meaning in life partly by crafting a story in which the present is explained both as the product of past events and as a springboard for future states toward which they are striving (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Perrig-Chiello and Perren (2005) asked 268 middle-aged Swiss participants to rate age-normed and non-age-normed transitional events on valence, and to report how old they were or expected to be when experiencing the events.”

“…beliefs [e.g., Wainryb, Shaw, Langley, Lewis, & Cottam, 2004], and the salience of Moral Agency and Narrative 69Human Development 2010;53:55–80 identity construction as a developmental task [Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Erikson & Erikson, 1997; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Harter, 1998].”

“In adolescence, the ability to reason about the past becomes more fully developed, at the same time when individuals are exploring possible future identities (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Pasupathi, Mansour, & Brubaker, 2007).”

“The notion of ‘the narrative self’ and ‘narrative identity’ (Habermas and Bluck, 2000) may be particularly relevant to the findings of the present study and how they relate to psychedelicinduced ego-dissolution.”

“By contrast, processes such as autobiographical memory, future thinking, problem-solving, and goalsetting are universally important processes to psychological functioning among both well-functioning and various distressed populations (133,156-159).”

“Third, narratives function to create a link between past, present, and future through the identification of common life themes or tasks (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Pasupathi et al., 2007).”

“In addition, McAdams et al., (2004) found that Openness was strongly related to the structural complexity of self-defining memories.”

“The process of drawing connections between past events and the current self, as illustrated in this example, has been termed “autobiographical reasoning” (Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ).”

“Changes in the social and cognitive worlds of children as they transition into adolescence dramatically expand the scope of the collective influences on memory, and allow for the development of family and cultural identity (Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ; Fivush, Bohanek, & Duke, in press ; Fivush et al, 2004 ; Hirst & Manie…”

“These age-related differences make sense in light of a dramatic increase in focus on one’s identity from mid adolescence (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“There is accumulating evidence that a high density of personally important and vivid AMs are laid down in adolescence that endure into adulthood and are important for emotional health (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“As suggested by Erikson [1968] and spelled out by McAdams [1985], with adolescence the life story becomes the most encompassing form of identity precisely for its capacity to integrate diverse aspects of the self across time [c.f. Habermas and Bluck, 2000].”

“…is the primary function of autobiographical authorship (McAdams, 2013), and self-continuity is evident in a narrator’s use of autobiographical reasoning, the capacity to connect one’s experiences to one’s sense of self (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean & Fournier, 2008; Singer & Bluck, 2001).”

“This is appropriate for investigating disability issues because it offers “counter‐narratives” to dominant narratives and is a way of focusing on the viewpoints of marginalised groups, such as young people with physical disabilities (Frank, 1996 ; Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ; Preece; Thomas, 1999 ).”

“by considering the role these experiences have played in shaping us into our present selves), which provides us with a sense of meaning and purpose in our life (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; Lilgendahl and McAdams, 2011).”

“Although the ability to remember personal events emerges across the preschool years (Fivush & Nelson, 2004), children only start to develop a coherent life story in adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…classification is intended to represent the heuristic classification of directive functions proposed by Cohen, Pillemer, Bluck, and others, in that both classifications revolve around the use of memory for solving problems in everyday life (Cohen, 1998; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Pillemer, 1998).”

“Story telling narratives offer a coherent sense of temporal, autobiographical self, within which discrete experiences can be embedded and understood (Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“…complex temporal causal sequences and to better understand the human intentions and motivations underlying events lead to more causally linked, more cohesive, and more psychologically complex and emotionally evaluative narratives across middle childhood (see Habermas & Bluck, 2000, for a review).”

“Several researchers have suggested that life stories are based on autobiographical memory (Conway, 2005; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001).”

“Adolescence signals dramatic shifts in narrative meaning-making, both quantitative and qualitative (see Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Reese, 2015 for reviews).”

“…age, children are developing more sophisticated narrative skills that allow them to integrate their experiences into an overarching life narrative (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1992), and they are simultaneously developing more sophisticated emotional understanding (Harter, 1999) and…”

“From the standpoint of life narrative theory, contamination sequences are reflections both of a life actually lived and of the cognitive interpretations of that life as selected, edited, and reconstructed (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Hermans, 1996; McAdams, 1993, 2001; Singer & Salovey, 1993).”

“Research suggests that these life stories are not shaped until the post-adolescent years [89], and may not be stable until middle age [90].”

“…suggests that the ability to produce organized, reflective, and coherent autobiographical narratives (a central task demand of AAI-like measures) is undergoing rapid development over the childhood period and may complicate measurement (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & de Silveira, 2008).”

“It is commonly assumed that a narrative identity is first constructed in late adolescence and young adulthood (Erikson, 1968; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Children younger than 14 may not yet have the necessary narrative and emotion regulation skills (Compas, Campbell, Robinson, & Rodriguez, 2009; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), and thus at earlier ages, the use of internal state language may raise anxiety that children are not able to resolve without…”