In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

The final chapter of the book offers a reflection on the overarching dimensions that guided the selection of the eight Historical Trauma contexts. Here, the emphasis is placed on the concept of multi-directional memory, a notion derived from memory studies that can be employed to circumvent victimhood competition. Selected concepts related to the HT definition criteria are compared across the different contexts. To this end, a series of flowcharts were developed to illustrate the historical trajectories of the concepts discussed in the book, including conspiracy of silence, victim identity, and value compilations. The comparison of social pathologies and reconciliation is given a broad scope. The concept of healing is addressed, and it is noted that the social and cultural science literature has been reticent to engage in discussions about the reasoned use of the concept that is consistent with evidence-based health interventions and comprehensive psychological and holistic approaches. The outlook addresses the prolificacy of the concept of historical trauma, and the potential dangers associated with its overuse.

The contributors to the present volume take the psychological study of the life story into new directions. Coming from diverse backgrounds like developmental, memory, personality, social, and clinical psychology, they share an interest in life as a frame of reference for biographical narrating and remembering. We have crossed intellectual and life paths at different times in the past 30 years, becoming cherished colleagues and friends. I cannot adequately express how grateful for and delighted I am by the contributions.

Cultural life scripts refer to typical life events and their expected timing within a given culture. Although life scripts tend to be substantially similar across cultures, a few studies examining subcultures (e.g., ethnicity, religious affiliation) reported some differences in event content (Bohn & Bundgaard-Nielsen, 2021) and normativity (Hatiboğlu & Habermas, 2016; Tungjitcharoen & Berntsen, 2022). Here, we report data from a study exploring life story events and life scripts of a subsection of society: LGBQ individuals in Turkey. We collected life scripts and life story events from LGBQ and cis-heterosexual adults living in Turkey. Participants also filled out questionnaires regarding well-being and life satisfaction, along with questions on sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Life story–life script overlap was stronger for cis-heterosexuals than for the LGBQ group largely due to differences in life script typicality. Well-being was associated with life script positivity for cis-heterosexual participants but with life story positivity for LGBQ participants. Results are discussed in terms of life script framework and identity development.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.

Chapter 3 draws on the rich psychological-psychiatric and related literature on the sequelae of the Holocaust. This was the basis for many of the propositions of the historical trauma concept among Indigenous Americans. In this field, many Jewish or Israeli researchers have contributed important theories and concepts, such as the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder with its precursor terms, the memorial concept ‘Zachor’, survivor guilt, and the just-world hypothesis, among others. In this area, inter- or transgenerational transmission has been extensively studied. The collective narrative of Anne Frank’s memories helped these topics to achieve a level of international acknowledgment that they did not have before. To this day, descendants still experience discrimination. As remedies, significant contributions were made to the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, although these remained largely an individual and not community-based approach. Research into the effectiveness of memorial visits was initiated here in isolated studies.

The extent to which people succeed in integrating several perspectives in their narratives of an emotionally charged event suggests how well the narrator has coped with it. Through temporal and social perspective taking, narratives promote emotion regulation and help making sense of experience. The present work will discuss the close entanglement of emotion regulation, perspective taking, and narrative. First, we will discuss how adverse childhood experiences and interpersonal potentially traumatic experiences during childhood harm the development of emotion regulation and perspective taking skills. Second, we will highlight how this reflects in emotion and trauma narratives of children and adults who have gone through child maltreatment. Finally, we will argue that narratives not only reflect the extent to which a person copes with the event narrated but also promote coping itself, by restructuring the autobiographical memory due to perspective taking and emotion regulation in an interpersonal elicitation context.

This chapter recounts the history of the functional approach to autobiographical memory and lays out ways to move the field forward. In the 1970s, prominent cognitive psychologists called for research to expand beyond controlled experimental laboratory procedures to examine memory in everyday life. Early research theorized three broad functions from which a self-report measure was developed. The functional approach is intuitively appealing, but its growth has been somewhat haphazard. One barrier may be the lack of a solid, agreed-upon, definition. To aid the field in moving forward, we present a clear, detailed definition of function. Using criteria related to this definition allows other candidate functions to be rigorously considered. Two candidate functions are explored. Existing work suggesting that emotion enhancement may be a function of autobiographical memory is reviewed and compared with our definition. We then elaborate on a new proposal that social status may be a function of autobiographical remembering. Finally, a brief discussion of how narrative approaches to recalling the personal past might be used to study functions of autobiographical memory is presented.