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"McAdams, Dan P"
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The art and science of personality development
\"Integrating state-of-the-art personality and developmental research, this book presents a new and broadly integrative theory of how people come to be who they are over the life course. Preeminent researcher Dan P. McAdams traces the development of three distinct layers of personality--the social actor who expresses emotional and behavioral traits, the motivated agent who pursues goals and values, and the autobiographical author who constructs a personal story for life. Highly readable and accessible to scholars and students at all levels, the book uses rich portraits of the lives of famous people to illustrate theoretical concepts and empirical findings\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Narrative Identity
Narrative identity is a person's internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose. In recent studies on narrative identity, researchers have paid a great deal of attention to (a) psychological adaptation and (b) development. Research into the relation between life stories and adaptation shows that narrators who find redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity, and who construct life stories that feature themes of personal agency and exploration, tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity. Researchers have tracked the development of narrative identity from its origins in conversations between parents and their young children to the articulation of sophisticated meaning-making strategies in the personal stories told in adolescence and the emerging adulthood years. Future researchers need to (a) disentangle causal relations between features of life stories and positive psychological adaptation and (b) explore further the role of broad cultural contexts in the development of narrative identity.
Journal Article
The Psychological Self as Actor, Agent, and Author
The psychological self may be construed as a reflexive arrangement of the subjective \"I\" and the constructed \"Me,\" evolving and expanding over the human life course. The psychological self begins life as a social actor, construed in terms of performance traits and social roles. By the end of childhood, the self has become a motivated agent, too, as personal goals, motives, values, and envisioned projects for the future become central features of how the I conceives of the Me. A third layer of selfhood begins to form in the adolescent and emerging adulthood years, when the self as autobiographical author aims to construct a story of the Me, to provide adult life with broad purpose and a dynamic sense of temporal continuity. An integrative theory that envisions the psychological self as a developing I–Me configuration of actor, agent, and author helps to synthesize a wide range of conceptions and findings on the self from social, personality, cognitive, cultural, and developmental psychology and from sociology and other social sciences. The actor–agent–author framework also sheds new light on studies of self-regulation, self-esteem, self-continuity, and the relationship between self and culture.
Journal Article
The redemptive self : stories Americans live by
Drawing from the author's psychological research on especially generative (that is, caring and productive) midlife American adults and on a reading of American cultural history and literature, this book identifies a prototypical story of the good life that many Americans employ to make sense of who they are, who they have been, and who they will be in the future. The central theme in this story is redemption — the deliverance from suffering to a positive status or outcome. Empirical research suggests that highly generative American adults are much more likely than their less generative counterparts to construe their lives as tales of redemption. Redemptive life stories promote psychological well-being, physical health, and the adult's commitment to making a positive contribution to society. But stories of redemption are as much cultural texts as they are individual psychological constructions. From the spiritual autobiographies composed by the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to the most recent episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, common scripts for the redemptive self may be found in religious accounts of conversion and atonement, the rags-to-riches stories of the American dream, and canonical cultural narratives about personal liberation, freedom, and recovery. The book examines the psychological and cultural dynamics of redemptive life narratives, including the role of American religion and self-help as sources for the construction of life stories and the broad similarities, as well as the striking differences in how African-American and Euro-American adults construct redemptive stories of the self. For all their psychological and cultural power, redemptive life stories sometimes reveal important limitations in American identity. For example, some versions of the redemptive self underscore the naïve expectation that suffering will always be overcome and the arrogance of seeing one's own life as the living out of a personal manifest destiny.
eBook
Narrating the Generative Life
Generativity is an adult's concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations. Analyzing lengthy life-narrative interviews of late-midlife adults, we examined the extent to which a particular kind of life story is empirically linked to self-report measures of generativity and other indices of psychosocial adaptation in midlife. The results showed that highly generative adults are significantly more likely than their less-generative counterparts to construe their lives as variations on a prototypical redemption narrative, wherein the story's protagonist (a) enjoys an early advantage in life, (b) exhibits sensitivity to the suffering of other people, (c) develops a clear moral framework, (d) repeatedly transforms negative scenes into positive outcomes, and (e) pursues prosocial goals for the future. The psychological and cultural features of redemptive life stories are considered, as are the problems and potentialities of life-narrative research in psychological science.
Journal Article
Becoming Generative: Socializing Influences Recalled in Life Stories in Late Midlife
Through content analysis of adult autobiographies, this study explored possible developmental antecedents of generativity—an adult’s commitment to caring for and contributing to the well-being of future generations. A sample of 158 African-American and Euro-American adults in their late 50s completed self-report measures of generativity and various forms of societal engagement, and then each participant was interviewed in depth to tell the story of his or her life. Replicating past studies, generativity was positively associated with current political and civic engagement and with involvement in religious institutions. For the entire sample, high levels of generativity were predicted by narrative accounts of positive socializing influences coming from the family, teachers and mentors, the education system, and other valued societal institutions. Among the African-American subsample, however, socioeconomic status trumped these positive socializing influences as a strong statistical predictor of generativity, even as African-Americans scored higher than Euro-Americans on both generativity and positive socializing influences. Gender differences also emerged. The results suggest that both social class and positive socializing influences from individuals and institutions may shape generativity for midlife American adults and that these developmental relationships may differ as a function of race/ethnicity and gender.
Journal Article
Self-concept and Narrative Identity in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis
Background and Hypothesis
Disturbances of the narrative self and personal identity accompany the onset of psychotic disorders in late adolescence and early adulthood (a formative developmental stage for self-concept and personal narratives). However, these issues have primarily been studied retrospectively after illness onset, limiting any inferences about their developmental course.
Study Design
Youth at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR) (n = 49) and matched healthy comparison youth (n = 52) completed a life story interview (including self-defining memory, turning point, life challenge, and psychotic-like experience) and questionnaires assessing self-esteem, self-beliefs, self-concept clarity, and ruminative/reflective self-focus. Trained raters coded interviews for narrative identity themes of emotional tone, agency, temporal coherence, context coherence, self-event connections, and meaning-making (intraclass correlations >0.75). Statistical analyses tested group differences and relationships between self-concept, narrative identity, symptoms, and functioning.
Study Results
CHR participants reported more negative self-esteem and self-beliefs, poorer self-concept clarity, and more ruminative self-focus, all of which related to negative symptoms. CHR participants narrated their life stories with themes of negative emotion and passivity (ie, lack of personal agency), which related to positive and negative symptoms. Reflective self-focus and autobiographical reasoning were unaffected and correlated. Autobiographical reasoning was uniquely associated with preserved role functioning.
Conclusions
This group of youth at CHR exhibited some, but not all, changes to self-concept and narrative identity seen in psychotic disorders. A core theme of negativity, uncertainty, and passivity ran through their semantic and narrative self-representations. Preserved self-reflection and autobiographical reasoning suggest sources of resilience and potential footholds for cognitive-behavioral and metacognitive interventions.
Journal Article
Core beliefs in healthy youth and youth at ultra high-risk for psychosis: Dimensionality and links to depression, anxiety, and attenuated psychotic symptoms
Cognitive theory posits that core beliefs play an active role in developing and maintaining symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis. This study sought to comprehensively examine core beliefs, their dimensionality, and their relationships to depression, anxiety, and attenuated psychotic symptoms in two groups of community youth: a group at ultrahigh risk for psychosis (UHR; n = 73, M age = 18.7) and a matched healthy comparison group (HC; n = 73, M age = 18.1). UHR youth reported significantly more negative beliefs about self and others, and significantly less positive beliefs about self and others. HC youth rarely endorsed negative self-beliefs. Exploratory factor analyses found that HC negative self-beliefs did not cohere as a single factor. We hypothesized specific links between core beliefs and symptoms based on cognitive models of each disorder, and tested these links through regression analyses. The results in the HC group were consistent with the proposed models of depression and anxiety. The results in the UHR group were consistent with proposed models of depression and negative psychotic symptoms, somewhat consistent with a proposed model of positive psychotic symptoms, and not at all consistent with a proposed model of anxiety. These findings add to a growing developmental literature on core beliefs and psychopathology, with important clinical implications.
Journal Article
“How Did That Make You Feel?” Influences of Gender and Parental Personality on Family Emotion Talk
Parent–child conversations about shared events may facilitate important aspects of psychosocial development through the family's references to emotions. Although past research has begun examining features of speakers and topics that predict emotion talk in these conversations, the potential contribution of personality traits has been overlooked. The current study investigated whether parental personality and participant gender were related to emotion talk during conversations between parents and their 5-year-old children. Results revealed discussion differences as a function of gender and discussion topic. Moreover, higher levels of trait Social Closeness in mothers corresponded to their richer emotional talk during discussions, particularly when conversing with daughters. Children's emotion talk regarding negative events was associated with their mothers' Positive Emotionality. No significant associations emerged for fathers' personality. The findings suggest that personality traits and gender may influence the very words that parents and children use, thus shaping the developmental environment in important ways.
Journal Article