The subjective life story as a resource for well-being

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tilmann Habermas
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421926219

The project studies the contribution of the subjective life story (narrative identity) to well-being. The focus is on life story coherence and autobiographical reasoning. The study situates this relationship in the context of biographical change in a longitudinal and lifespan perspective. The study will be the first to test the relation of global coherence of life narratives to well-being and differentiate it from the relation of autobiographical reasoning to well-being. This relation is modeled along a timeline relative to life events. The central aim is to empirically study the claim that life narrating establishes personal identity across biographical change (McAdams, Ricoeur). The study intends to show that after biographical change, accommodative autobiographical reasoning buffers the negative effects on the sense of self-continuity and on well-being by bridging change in the life story. Alternative ways of safeguarding a sense of self-sameness require distorting present or past self so as to render them more similar to each other, thereby reducing the effects of the disruptive event. Thus another aim is to show that after biographical change, accommodative autobiographical reasoning protects self-knowledge of the past and the present self from being distorted. Furthermore the study tests longitudinally whether life narrative coherence serves as resilience against biographical change by predisposing individuals to cope with biographical change with accommodative autobiographical reasoning. In addition the study explores moderation of the effects of accommodative autobiographical reasoning by developmental periods of early adolescence and old age as well as by habitual rumination. The study takes builds on a 12-year-longitudinal study of entire life narratives with six age groups and a total of originally 172 participants by adding a fifth wave after 16 years and including the not yet coded fourth wave in the analyses; ages range from 8 to 77 years. To control for possible effects of repeated telling of entire life narratives and to enlarge the sample for testing cross-sectional hypotheses, and following advice by a reviewer of the previous grant proposal (DFG HA 2077/14), an additional sample will be collected, roughly doubling participants in each age group. The biographical integration of negative life events such as losses or severe illness has long been claimed as essential for coping, but has never been studied quantitatively in life stories. This study expands the dominant correlational approach of narrative well-being studies to a processual view on events and life-story coping. It also adds a truth component, self-knowledge, which is important in the fields of memory and personality studies. It contributes to the small, but burgeoning study of how self-continuity is established. Finally, the study adds a biographical dimension to lifespan personality psychology and positive psychology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants