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

“The construction of these integrative stories begins in earnest in emerging adults, that is, traditionally aged college students, who are developing the complete set of cognitive tools [22, 23], they need to carry out this work.”

“During adolescence, more sophisticated cognitive abilities allowing for deeper self-reflection and critical thinking, along with exposure to new contexts and growing peer and community networks, contribute to a more complex understanding of the self in relation to society (Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“In doing so, she increases the coherence of her life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Autobiographical memories are memories of “the events of one's life” (Conway & Rubin, 1993, p. 103) and are closely related to processes of identity formation (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“The identity function of AM suggests that people use AMs to create and maintain a cohesive sense of self across time (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Lampinen, Beike, & Behrend, 2004; Wilson & Ross, 2003).”

“This code is a form of autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000), and the coding rules drew upon a coding manual developed by Thorne et al. (2004).”

“…that an individual’s life history is constructed through the selection and organization of memories that are meaningful and that this constructed life history is a core building block of identity (Bohanek, Marin, Fivush, & Duke, 2006; Conway, 2005; Conway & Holmes, 2004; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…that self-narratives are conveyed frequently (e.g., Rimé, Mesquita, Philippot, & Boca, 1991), begin to be constructed in adolescence and young adulthood (e.g., Blagov & Singer, 2004; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean, 2005; Thorne, 2000) and continue to develop and change across the life span.”

“Other proponents of a life-story model have also suggested that an individual's life history is constructed through the selection and organization of personal autobiographical memories ( Conway, 2005 ; Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ).”

“Making meaning out of life events has also been linked to a better understanding of the self (e.g., Blagov and Singer 2004; McLean 2005; McLean and Pratt 2006), and is an ability that appears to come with age (Pasupathi and Mansour 2006), as autobiographical reasoning ( Habermas and Bluck 2000 ) improves.”

“Autobiographical memory, or memory about one’s past, plays an important role in how people form their identity, connect with others, and make decisions about their future [22, 24, 44, 80].”

“Autobiographical memory integration, in particular, plays a central role in therapeutic processes, fostering personal growth and resilience (Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“Research shows how the cognitive, narrative tools and socio-motivational demands necessary for constructing a life story (autobiographical reasoning and life narrating) develop during adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Identity formation is theorised to be a particular task for adolescents (Erikson, 1968) as they develop autobio-graphical reasoning and abstract thought (Habermas & Bluck, 2000), which challenges current perceptions of self.”

“By connecting past events with one's development and the present self (i.e., autobiographical reasoning; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), individuals can draw meaning from their past and establish a sense of coherence across life (Habermas, 2011).”

“With respect to both events, moreover, Biden engages in autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) to find further redemptive meaning in the trauma.”

“…personality coherence as the degree to which individuals create a coherent narrative of their memories and identity as a person (McAdams & Pals, 2006; Murray, 1938), involving temporal, causal, thematic, and autobiographic relationships of self-aspects in a social context (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Research on life story sharing (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; McAdams and McLean, 2013) also suggests that the listener plays a crucial role in shaping how individuals recall and evaluate their personal past (Pasupathi and Rich, 2005), as occurs centrally during DT.”

“At this stage, identity coherence becomes especially relevant, as individuals strive to construct an identity that brings together the past, present, and future into a sense of a unified and coherent self (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…a personal narrative includes temporal coherence, a unification of past, present and future selves into a single narrative identity (Adler, 2012; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), which may assist in influencing behaviour (Adler, 2012; Adler et al., 2016; Vanderveren et al., 2017; Waters & Fivush, 2015).”

“It might then be difficult and not age-appropriate for young individuals to answer questions about the early relationship with their parents, since these memories are not yet well organized and settled in their autobiographical memory (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Steele & Steele, 2005a).”

“That is, how they remember challenges and integrate them into their life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“It requires the deployment of autobiographical reasoning, through which people connect experiences to their sense of themselves (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Narrative theory asserts that individuals make sense of the world and their place in it by constructing stories with themselves as the main character (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“By adolescence, people are able to relate past stories to present circumstances in a causal and thematic way, and in this way establish a sense of self-continuity and self-understanding (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“During this period, adolescents are exploring and forming their identity (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“More frequently using AMs for self-functions is associated with an earlier mean age located in adolescence, the time, in which individuals form and consolidate their identity (e.g. Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“…information about past events from a particular time and place (Tulving, 1972, 2002), and is necessary in a variety of domains including reminiscing about the past, anticipating future events, and building a sense of self (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Levine et al., 1998; Nelson & Fivush, 2004).”

“Dimensions of coherence include: temporal, cultural, causal, and thematic ( Habermas and Bluck 2000 ).”

“…in the development of identity as it coincides with particular cognitive developments—in Piagetian terms, formal operational thought—entailing forms of “causal” reasoning or inferential interpretation that make the connectivity of narrative lines possible (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001).”

“In adolescence, the developmental task is to make sense of one’s experiences and relationships through the development of life narratives, and reflection on these, in order to produce an integrated life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“It is during adolescence when people are likely to have developed these requisite social-cognitive abilities, thus enabling them to construct reasonably coherent life stories ( Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ).”

“A number of theorists of narrative have suggested that the development of a sense of identity in adolescence depends on the construction of a personal life story (e.g., Erikson, 1968; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007).”

“During this time, autobiographical memories become more complex, coherent, and personally integrated (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“This chronological structure helps the listeners to understand at which time in the narrator’s life a life story event has occurred (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008), hence providing a fundamental form of coherence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Through autobiographical reasoning, people inductively derive semantic meanings regarding the self from the memories of episodic events (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…to the temporary dominance of one perspective, which gains the right to impose a certain sense of self, rather than harmonious merging of diverse perspectives and elements into a wholeness, as the advocates of some theoretical positions attempt to show (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001, 2006).”

“Scholars (e.g. McAdams, 1995; Habermas and Bluck, 2000; Singer, 2004; McAdams and McLean, 2013) view identity in adulthood as emerging in the telling of one’s life story, as ‘an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpo…”

“It is believed that play is important in the development of social and emotional capacities, resilience, creativity and problem-solving skills of children (Erikson, 1977; Ginsburg, 2007; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Nijhof et al., 2018; Piaget, 1962).”

“…although some cognitive abilities (perspective taking, summarizing disparate information into coherent abstractions…) emerge in late childhood and adolescence, the ability to create a coherent text about personal events may appear earlier (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean, Breen, & Fournier, 2010).”

“Previous research provided evidence that self-continuous feelings increase individuals’ psychological well-being (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Sedikides et al., 2016).”

“Bringing a biographical perspective to the experience of recollecting (engaging in autobiographical reasoning, Habermas & Bluck, 2000) can include articulating connections between seemingly disparate episodes from one’s life.”

“The ability to construct a life story develops from pre- to late adolescence as more sophisticated self-reflection becomes possible (Habermas, 2011; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Reese, 2015).”

“Life span developmental theory and research propose that the ability to create coherent life narratives does not develop until early adolescence (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Chen, McAnally, & Reese, 2013; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & de Silveira, 2008; Habermas & Paha, 2001).”

“Emerging adulthood brings increased cognitive abilities to understand the cumulative role of events and circumstances in shaping human actions (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Although the life story in its full form is a developmental achievement of late adolescence and early adulthood [Habermas & Bluck, 2000], research on children’s autobiographical narration has shown that children as young as 5 can construct meaningful accounts of their experiences [Fivush & Nelson,…”

“Habermas & Bluck (2000) provide four types of coherence that define a “good” life story: temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic.”

“Thus, memories may serve to form meaning for the individual (Conway, 2003), and meaning making may be a way in which AM represents and integrates experiences in some causally coherent fashion (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“It has been shown to be appropriate for investigating disability issues because it gives voice to marginalised groups and disabled young people are one such marginalised group (Frank 1996, Preece 1996, Thomas 1999, Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“The use of introspective language in formulating a cohesive life narrative emerges during adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000); a new measure might be designed more appropriately for adolescents 13 years of age or older.”

“Habermas and Bluck (2000) argued that this is because of the development of a life-story schema at this age (Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“Autobiographical memories are essential for constructing life stories and maintaining a continuous sense of self (Bluck and Liao 2013; Habermas and Bluck 2000; Habermas and Köber 2015; Prebble et al .”

“Crucially, these losses and the emotional pain they imply are often conditioned on societal expectations and result from internalized cultural life scripts (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; Berntsen and Rubin, 2004).”

“…as studied here, occur relatively infrequently in everyday life, the life story functions as the necessary frame for any kind of autobiographical reasoning about the significance of past experiences for the self, and therefore for any kind of biographical self-presentation (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Blue cluster: Autobiographical memory The main works in this cluster belong to authors such as Bluck and Habermas (2000), Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000), Habermas and Bluck (2000), Berntsen and Rubin (2004), or Conway et al. (2004).”

“It can be used to make sense of personal developments, and explain away in consistencies and irregularities, by creating connections between the self and experience (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi et al., 2007).”

“As mentioned in Introduction, narrative has been claimed to reveal aspects of the processes involved in the integration of events of the personal experiences in a coherent representation (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & de Silveira, 2008; Herman, 2013; Köber & Habermas, 2017; Köber et al., 2019).”

“The way autobiographical narratives of important events, life periods, and recurrent themes (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) are imbued with meaning has important implications for individuals’ outlooks on the world (McLean & Pratt, 2006), psychological growth (Merrill, Waters, & Fivush, 2015), and…”

“Turning point narratives, in contrast, mark a moment of strategic change in a life, thereby contributing to causalmotivational coherence in the life story that bridges change (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”