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

“Similarly, Habermas and Bluck (2000) describe stories as a fundamental way of organising a person’s experiences to create a global coherent understanding of their selfhood and their world.”

“…their life to have unfolded and embraces the subjective way in which participants remember, perceive, and interpret events throughout their life; this approach is distinct from other life-history approaches that seek to uncover an objective accounting of sequenced events (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“According to Habermas and Bluck (2000), beginning in adolescence, one becomes capable of constructing a life story—and not coincidentally, adolescence is the time when Erikson (1968) believed that individuals acquired the perspective-taking abilities necessary to support exploration and…”

“In particular, among younger adults who are developing the ability to tell their life stories (Grysman & Hudson, 2010; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), life scripts structure expectations for the future.”

“…of autobiographical reasoning that integrate episodic memories (autobiographical memories about specific life experiences) based on their personal meaning and their relevance to longterm goals or enduring conflicts (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean et al., 2007; Singer, Blagov, Berry, & Oost, 2013).”

“…the narrative story of the participant; without over-theorizing up front about the various forms of identity theories, such as academic identity, identity formation, identity construction, and identity development (Archer, 2008; Erikson, 1950; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Marcia 1991; Zirkel, 2002).”

“Thus, the self is central to the construction of AMs, and in turn, AMs are essential to form a coherent self-concept, linking one’s past, present and future (Conway, 2005; Conway& Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001; Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013).”

“These attainments in narrative language scaffold the development of what is variously termed the ‘narrative self’ (Gallagher, 2000) or the ‘life story’ (Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“A meaningful sense of personal continuity develops (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001).”

“Both Bruner (2004) and Habermas and Bluck (2000) have noted the dearth of research that has specifically examined the process of narrative across development.”

“An interesting piece of corroborative evidence to the claims—echoed by C. Taylor, Tappan and Bruner—that moral identity is itself a product of development is the finding by Habermas & Bluck (2000) that only in early adolescence do people develop a “lifestory” by which they evaluate their actions.”

“, turning points) and arrange multiple episodes or events in ways that provide causal inferences about their development and who they are (Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“And it is a crucial point in forming a cohesive self (Habermas and Bluck, 2000) and a clear identity (Ogle et al., 2013).”

“The global coherence aspect of the ANIQ assesses three of the four coherence domains proposed by Habermas and Bluck (2000): temporal, thematic, and causal coherence.”

“…negative self-conception may result from greater exposure to adverse life events, as the AUD patients reported higher scores than the control group on the LEC-5, especially from a negative integration of past life events into their sense of identity (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Pasupathi et al., 2007).”

“…of existing theoretical and empirical studies, we coded family stories in terms of three important dimensions of narrative identity: structure, autobiographical reasoning, and motivational/affective themes (Adler et al., 2016; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams & McLean, 2013; McLean et al., 2019).”

“According to Habermas and Bluck (2000), flaws in thematic coherence (which is the inability to tie together meanings from repeated sequences across memories) hinder the integrity of the self.”

“Single memories are used as building blocks for the overarching life story – the story we construct and narrate about ourselves, and which provide our lives with unity and meaning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Autobiographical reasoning is the process through which individuals actively reflect on their past, present, and future, and link these aspects together into their narrative (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1993).”

“During adolescence, young people acquire the cognitive skills needed to reflect on who they are and where they belong, and to construct a narrative linking their past, present, and imagined future (Erikson 1968; Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“…begin to narrate their experiences very early (Fivush et al., 2004; Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997), but their ability to create coherent, complete, and complex narratives continues to develop until early or even mid-adulthood (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Köber et al., 2015; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010).”

“…& Pals, 2007); and c) the ability to create a personal timeline and observe an organized manner in creating a personal chronology (Habermas, 2007; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).4 Childhood amnesia, the first three to five years of life for which most people have little or no recollection, is the…”

“Autobiographical continuity, coherence, and reflection are key aspects of the narrative self (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“The story of our lives, rich in interpretation and relationships, provides a sense of self in different ways and contexts through narratives we construct (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001).”

“This is an active and lifelong process, guided by the cultural concept of biography (Habermas & Bluck, 2000), but requires autobiographical reasoning (McLean & Fournier, 2008).”

“As reviewed by Habermas and Bluck (2000), the ability to construct an autobiography, or life story, emerges in adolescence: “The life story allows individuals to organize recollective memories (Brewer, 1996) and more abstract knowledge of their past into a coherent biographical view” (p. 748).”

“The present study does not clarify whether temporal coherence, causal coherence, and thematic coherence, as introduced by Habermas and Bluck (2000), are most validly assessed by independent rater ’ s coding of life story narratives or with self-report measures such as the ANIQ.”

“Emma’s eventual self-identification as an ‘out-sider’ in early adulthood provides an apparent endpoint to the journey, supporting developmental perspectives on teleological causality and retrospective coherence (Brockmeier, 2000; Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“…attention, despite the life story being regarded as the most integrated and complex level of autobiographical memory (Conway & PleydellPearce, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000) essential for developing and maintaining a coherent sense of self and identity (Bruner, 1987; Conway, 2005; McAdams, 1996).”

“This is because when life’s experiences are structured by narrative, those elements manifest coherence, such as causal, thematic, and temporal (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2006; Reese et al., 2011).”

“The second concept is narrative identity, understood as a lifelong changing process through which people make sense of themselves, their lives, and others (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…narration) should be positively associated with other dimensions of narrative identity that reflect personal identity development, such as motivations for agentic actions as well as autobiographical reasoning (i.e., drawing links between experiences and the self; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…a coherent autobiographical story with selected, temporally and thematically organized, causally linked events and experiences that are essential for one’s sense of self (Bruner, 2003; Bruner & Kalmar, 1998; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1993; 2003; Reese, Yan, Jack, & Hayne, 2010).”

“The process of constructing a narrative identity begins in young adulthood, when individuals are tasked with making sense of personal experiences in relation to their broader life course (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Life stories create self-continuity when they causally link life’s scenes and settings into a whole (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1985).”

“…and life defining functions like maintaining identity and developing a coherent sense of self and one’s emotions and making future plans (e.g., Bluck & Alea, 2008; Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean & Pasupathi, 2006; Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2013).”

“Habermas and Bluck identify four kinds of coherence in their work: causal coherence, temporal coherence, thematic coherence, and the cultural concept of biography (which reflects the ways in which people in different cultures tell life stories) [11].”

“…memory, providing thematic coherence (the ability to identify overarching values and motifs that recur throughout the story), temporal (the ability to place events into the correct time order) and causal (the ability to describe how one event led to another) structures (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“Starting from adolescence, individuals begin to construct an integrative life story with the aim to provide life with continuity and coherence (McAdams 1996; Habermas and Bluck 2000).”

“Some studies pointed out that the difficulties of psychological adaptation, typical of the adolescence, after a negative and traumatic event could lead to a critical development of a coherent self (Habermas and Bluck 2000) and a definite identity (Erikson 1963; Ogle et al.”

“I also present a developmental perspective since memory and the life story have been found to be powerfully influenced by developmental stage (Charles & Carstensen, 2010; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“An innovative method of assessing narrative data is to code how people think about their own narratives, termed autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…for evaluating the merits of a given narrative, coherence has been of primary concern and much debate (e.g., Dimaggio, 2006; Freeman, 2010; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Hyvärinen, Hydén, Saarenheimo, & Tamboukou, 2010; McAdams, 2006a; Singer & Rexhaj, 2006); and like any such construct, it…”

“This gradually increases the temporal, autobiographical, causal, and thematic coherence of their stories ( Habermas and Bluck 2000 ).”

“Building on this theoretical framework, Habermas and colleagues developed a rigorous method to assess the degree to which the three types of coherence—temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic—support and sustain life story narration 18,25,26 .”

“Stories constructed in young adulthood often exhibit causal coherence (i.e., how an earlier event caused a later event) and thematic coherence (i.e., unifying themes across moments in time) (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…to the construction and elaboration of one’s identity (McAdams, 2006), where the narrator with high levels of coherence demonstrates greater reflective integrity and complex emotional processing concerning their mental state (Pennebaker, 1999; Pennebaker and Seagal, 1999; Habermas and Bluck, 2000).”

“…body of research in personality and life-span developmental psychology shows that, beginning in adolescence, people organize separate life experiences into a temporally coherent and meaningful story of the self, or narrative identity (Adler et al., 2016; Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2021).”

“Autobiographical reasoning is defined as the ability to connect past events in one’s life into a personal biography with a view both to the present and the future (Habermas and Bluck 2000; Habermas 2010; Habermas and Köber 2014, 2015).”

“Speci fi cally, in late adolescence, identity commitment solidi fi es (Erikson, 1968), and a life story is constructed out of autobiographical memories (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“More recently, researchers have stressed the importance of studying narrative identity and BPD in adolescence [15,19], since this is the developmental period in which narrative identity emerges [20] either in adaptive or maladaptive ways.”

“Second, the life story is an organising construct within autobiographical memory (Bluck & Habermas, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), and so it is expected that individuals think back to their life story in search of specific memories.”

“Creating a personal or communal narrative surrounding a collective trauma can work to influence health behaviors with stories that become realized through action and guide collective and individual agency (Habermas and Bluck 2000; Trout et al. 2018).”

“A life-narrative approach links and integrates single-event narratives, relating them to the self and giving unity and purpose to the individual (Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”

“…identified in autobiographical memory research: (a) the criteria of a CLS (e.g., Berntsen and Rubin, 2004), (b) the coherences that define the way people tell their life stories (e.g., Habermas and Bluck, 2000), and (c) the defining characteristics of transitional life events (Brown et al., 2012).”

“It is seeing the experience through the actors’ point of view and the meanings they attach to their behaviors that will help unpack the culturally expected response of b’nai mitzvah being a rite of passage into adulthood (Geertz, 1973; Grimes, 2013; Habermas & Bluck, 2000).”