Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. “This meaning-making capability - to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am - develops across adolescence.” “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers.
People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent. Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.” “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity - stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.Įvery American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life - and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation - the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew.
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