Causal coherence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) is a cognitive process that is integral to the life story and is shaped by social and cultural forces. However, the majority of life story research focuses on individual recall of life events, obtained either via interviews with a researcher or from participants writing down their memories. This chapter analyzes four narratives of recent, negative events shared among friend dyads in which listeners made many contributions. Narratives were coded for causal coherence and categorized as independently produced, prompted by listeners, or suggested by listeners. Qualitative analysis shows examples of how the most responsive listeners prompted statements of casual coherence. Comparisons to other narrating scenarios – four from distracted listeners and six from long narratives told to attentive listeners who made fewer contributions – show that the narratives told to the most responsive listeners had the most statements of causal coherence. Based on these results, this chapter explores the disconnect between the theoretical role of social and cultural processes in the life story and the dearth of studies examining these processes directly.

A truism across cognitive, clinical, and personality psychology is that coherence of personal narratives is good for us; overall, narrative coherence is conceptually related to fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety and a higher sense of well-being, meaning, and purpose in life. Yet the empirical findings are inconsistent. In this chapter, I explore theoretical and methodological challenges to the concept of narrative coherence, drawing heavily on Habermas’s (2008) model of global, temporal, and causal dimensions. I take a sociocultural developmental approach, in which I explore how relations between different aspects of coherence vary developmentally and by event type in ways that differentially relate to evolving autobiographical memory and well-being. A more nuanced approach to narrative coherence clarifies the ways in which different aspects of personal memories and narrative coherence do and do not relate to different aspects of well-being both over developmental time and as time since the event occurred.

Children’s autobiographical memories and life stories are shaped in early interactions with parents. I integrate findings from two longitudinal cohorts of New Zealand children from toddlerhood (age 1.5 years) to young adulthood (age 21 years): Origins of Memory, a longitudinal correlational study (N = 58), and Growing Memories, a longitudinal intervention study (N = 115). Findings show that mothers’ elaborative reminiscing with young children, especially open-ended elaborative questions and confirmations, is critical for children’s later autobiographical memory and narrative skills. In adolescence and young adulthood, children with highly elaborative mothers reported earlier memories. Building on their richer memory bank, they also told turning-point narratives with stronger causal links between past and present selves. Moreover, they reported better well-being. Based on these findings and those from Habermas’ MainLife study, I propose an integrative theory of life story development that details how and why mothers’ elaborative reminiscing leads to causally coherent life stories and better well-being for their young adult children through enriching their autobiographical memories.

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.

The present chapter describes the twofold interest of the life story investigation in people experiencing mental disorders. First, life narratives provide substantial insights into mental conditions from a first-person perspective. They represent valuable testimonies of patients’ disrupted life trajectories and allow us to understand the subjective experience of mental illness. Second, analyzing the coherence and characteristics of patients’ life stories also enhances our understanding of psychopathology. We present and discuss the alterations of narrative identity possibly caused by mental disorders, either hindering the development of or disrupting the acquired abilities necessary to craft a coherent and meaningful life story. Reversely, low aptitudes in narrating one’s entire life, selecting relevant life experiences, and assembling them into a coherent story might also play a role in both the initiation and maintenance of mental disorders. Building upon these twofold interests, this chapter will open therapeutic perspectives. The importance of working with narrative material when investigating patients’ memories in psychotherapy and how to do so will be discussed.

Describe different types of memory and how they develop; explain how early experiences are remembered and why they are forgotten; understand why a limited memory can be beneficial for learning.

Describe key elements of adolescent identity development; evaluate the genetic, social, and cultural influences on identity; understand creativity and cultural change as parts of adolescent development.

Consolidate what you learned in Chapters 7–10; revisit the ideas you came across in Chapters 7–10 in a cross-cultural context.

Forgetting is a phenomenon that is familiar to everyone and among the most extensively investigated in psychological science. It is, therefore, quite surprising that forgetting is widely misunderstood by the layperson and even by researchers. Evidence for the permanence of long-term memories is presented, and the distinction between the accessibility and availability of memories is discussed. Search of associative memory (SAM) and retrieving effectively from memory (REM) models of forgetting are described and extended as a proposal for everyday forgetting.

In Chapter 5, we discuss the processing components that underlie the perspective-taking analogy that we articulated in Chapter 2. This analysis makes it clear that the retrieval of personal knowledge and experience is critical, and we review some of what is known about episodic retrieval and how it can be used in this context. In forming an analogy, one must be able to identify how elements of the story world are related to corresponding elements in one’s own experience. To understand this process, we discuss how readers must construct similarity relations. Finally, we discuss the mechanics of analogy formation per se and describe the notion of a structural mapping between the reader and the character that underlies the perspective-taking analogy. We close out Chapter 5 with a discussion of perspective-taking dynamics. This includes an illustration of how perspective taking can be driven by the events of the story world or evaluations of the character. As we make clear, perspective taking is an ongoing process that can unfold in a variety of ways over the course of reading a narrative.

In Chapter 7, we outline new empirical evidence that perspective taking depends on the reader’s analogy to their personal knowledge and experience. In the first experiment, participants read narratives that involved either familiar or unfamiliar cultural and social schemas. As predicted, we found that it was more difficult to take a character’s perspective when the events of the story world did not make sufficient contact with the reader’s own experience. A second experiment examined the use of prior knowledge and experience as it unfolds in the course of reading. When readers were asked to focus on places in the text where they were reminded of prior experience, the number of such remindings predicted perspective taking. In the third experiment, we manipulated the availability of relevant personal knowledge more directly: Before reading a story, participants were asked to think about a prior experience that either was or was not related to the experience of the character. As predicted, priming relevant prior experience promoted perspective taking.