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Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/1 (2008): 434–443, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00070.x
The State of the Story in Personality Psychology
Barbara A. Woike*
Barnard College
Abstract
Personality psychologists have been studying narratives for decades. Their work
offers significant insights into the meaning of the stories people tell. This article
highlights some historical antecedents as well as the latest research findings from
the growing area of personality psychology that focuses on narrative approaches.
First, narrative research in personality shows that imaginative stories reveal
enduring implicit motivations linked to affect, thought, and behavior. Second,
autobiographical stories play a significant role in self-development and personal
identity formation. The narration of one’s story is a process influenced over the
life span by age-related capacities and various psychological needs that occur in
social and cultural contexts.
Currently, there is intense interest in narratives, memoirs, and autobiographies. Everyone seems be to writing a memoir. This is not to even mention
the media explosion of telling all to everyone via everything from talk
shows and reality TV to YouTube. For instance, the blog site LiveJournal
records over 200,000 entries per day. How can we understand these highly
personal and emotionally evocative stories? And what is the larger message
carried by them? Personality psychologists have been studying narratives
for over half a century. Their work offers significant insights into the
meaning of our stories. This article highlights some of the major research
findings from the growing area of personality psychology that focuses on
narrative approaches.
Throughout the history of personality psychology, there has been a core
group of researchers who have found that questionnaire methods could
not estimate the complexity of human thought, feelings, and behavior.
Thus, they turned to content and narrative analysis as an alternative that
provided less structure and greater insight into the richness of the subjective
experience of the individual (Smith, 2000). As a methodology, the analysis
of narrative descriptions of people’s experiences offers several advantages
to studying aspects of personality that can not be captured by questionnaires
(Woike, 2007). Narrative analysis may be a particularly good choice for
researchers interested in complex, subjective experiences, as well as intentions,
patterns of reasoning, and attempts to find meaning in personal experiences.
© 2008 The Author
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State of the Story 435
Some personality psychologists have argued that individual differences
are most easily detected in situations that are loosely structured so that the
person cannot rely on external social cues on how to act, think, and feel
(Woike, 2007). Participants may find that the narrative format gives them
more freedom to explore their thoughts, feelings, and reactions in ways that
they had not done previously. Their stories may reveal innermost thoughts,
frames of reference, emotional reactions, and cultural assumptions that may or
may not be accessible by other methods. For these reasons, many personality
researchers find the narrative approach invaluable.
This article reviews research demonstrating that imaginative stories reveal
enduring implicit motivations linked to affect, thoughts, and behavior. Autobiographical stories play a significant role in self-development and personal
identity formation. They are influenced over the life span by age-related
capacities, various psychological needs, as well as social and cultural contexts.
The Role of Narratives in Revealing Motivations
Henry Murray is generally credited for the emergence of interest in the
story as a portal into the study of personality. In 1935, Morgan and Murray
developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which consists of a
series of black and white drawings of one or more person(s) engaged in
ambiguous activities. The idea was that people would project their concerns
desires and wishes onto the ambiguous stimuli – thus, when asked to tell
a story about each of the pictures, people’s concerns and preoccupations
would be revealed in their stories. Attributing them to the fictional characters
in a story allows people to express desires that they might be uncomfortable
attributing to themselves, or might not even be aware of.
Based on this original work, the research programs have used ambiguous
pictures like the TAT to reliably identify three motivations: achievement,
power, and intimacy. The achievement motive is described as a desire
to meet a personal standard of excellence (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, &
Lowell, 1953). The power motive is a need to control and influence another
person, groups, or the world at large (Winter, 1973). The need for intimacy
is a communal motive that refers to a desire to experience warm, close, and
communicative exchanges with others (McAdams, 1985).
In general, it seems that people do not have conscious access to their
motives as assessed with the TAT. Because implicit motives seem to operate
outside of a person’s conscious awareness, they are fundamentally distinct
from personality motives measured with self-report tests (McClelland,
Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989; Schultheiss, forthcoming 2008). In fact, the
correlation between implicit and self-reported measures of motivation is
close to zero (Schultheiss & Pang, 2007). Implicit motivation tests, like the
TAT, measure preferences for particular types of emotional experiences,
whereas self-report questionnaires measure cognitively elaborated aspects of
the self and learned values. Many studies support this distinction by
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436 State of the Story
demonstrating that implicit and self-attributed motives differ in their
association to behavioral incentives and outcomes and seem to be
associated with different cognitive processes as well. (see Schultheiss,
forthcoming 2008; Woike, forthcoming 2008 for reviews).
Below are a few interesting findings that emphasize the power of these
implicit measures of motivation. For one thing, perceptual images are
more likely to be encoded if the images evoke the motive-related affect –
for instance, a smiling face for someone with a high need for intimacy, or
a successful shot into the wastebasket for a person with high implicit need
for achievement. Researchers have found that implicit motives do indeed
determine their selective attention to social stimuli. And, implicit motives
may be particularly attuned to nonverbal information. For instance,
Schultheiss and Hale (2007) found that people with strong implicit power
or intimacy motivation paid more attention to facial expressions indicating
dominance and friendliness respectively. Woike, Bender, and Besner (forthcoming 2008) found that in conditions that engaged their motive, those
with a strong need for achievement showed superior performance on
achievement-related memory tasks than those low in the motive or those
in the neutral (non-achievement related) conditions.
Thus, the imaginative stories that people tell to ambiguous pictures can and
do predict very specific patterns of thought and behavior. One may ask do
people tell the same kinds of stories about their own lives as they do to these
ambiguous pictures? It seems so. When people are asked to write narratives
about important and emotional experiences, the influence of implicit motives
is clear. Implicit motives are consistently reflected in the content of important and emotional autobiographical stories. When people are asked to
describe significant and/or emotionally-involving life experiences, those with
strong achievement or power motives are consistently more likely to recall
experiences about achievement, dominance, and self-mastery, whereas people
with strong intimacy motives are more likely to recall experiences pertaining to love, friendship, and social belonging (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Woike,
Gershkovich, Piorkowski, & Polo, 1999; Woike, Mcleod, & Goggin, 2003).
Data from longitudinal diary studies show the same pattern as autobiographical
narratives collected at one point in time (Woike, 1995; Woike & Polo, 2001).
The pattern has been replicated in controlled memory retrieval experiments,
further suggesting that implicit motives influence the memory for motiverelevant experiences (Woike, Lavezzary, & Barsky, 2001). Thus, the stories
people tell reveal significant and enduring patterns of motivational preferences which in turn influence affect, thought, and behavior.
The Role of Stories in Self-development and
Identity Formation
The stories people tell about their lives have significant implications for
their identities and self-understanding. In 1985, Dan McAdams put forth
© 2008 The Author Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/1 (2008): 434–443, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00070.x
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State of the Story 437
a model of identity as being rooted in one’s personal life story. According
to this view, an individual’s life story is an internalized and evolving
narrative of the self that serves to integrate disparate roles and to bring
together the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future.
In this way, the life story may be viewed as an extended but selective autobiography of personal experiences and interpretations of those experiences
and interpretations of those experiences that provide unity and purpose
to the person (McAdams, 1993). This pioneering work has served as
a foundation for many great advances in understanding the role of narration
in personality and self-concept development.
Life stories unfold sequentially as the person grows from infancy to
adulthood. Parent–child reminiscence is one of the first contexts for children
to develop self-understanding through stories. Research shows that parents
socialize different patterns of emotional elaboration and evaluation with
their children (e.g., Harley & Reese, 1999). Parents who use a high
elaborative style provide more narrative structure for children by making
evaluative comments and questions, offering and eliciting more information,
and being supportive of the child’s view in the conversation. In contrast,
parents with a low elaborative style tend to repeat questions, switch topics
quickly, and do not elaborate on the details of the event. Over time,
children of highly elaborative parents have been found to be more evaluative
of their own narratives, even when controlling for related developmental
skills (e.g., Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997). And, children of mothers who
were trained to be more elaborative had more complex narratives than
controls 2 years after the intervention (Peterson, Jesso, & McCabe, 1999).
Thus, based on these early parent–child reminiscences, the child may
emphasize evaluative and emotional information that may in turn have
consequences for one’s later life story.
Regardless of the elaboration style of parents, the capacity to narrate is
constrained by the development of cognitive capacities. Very young children
lack the psychological understanding such as theory-of-mind and related
abilities to connect experiences with the self-concept in a coherent way.
In adolescence, the need to form a personal identity emerges from an
interaction of cultural and societal demands and both maturational and
psychological age-specific requirements (Erikson, 1982). Identity formation
involves developing as a reflective, cohesive self-conception on a variety
of important dimensions related to different roles, expectations, beliefs and
values – as well as preferences and abilities.
Habermas and Bluck (2000) introduced the concept of autobiographical
reasoning as the process by which the life story is formed in adolescence.
From research on social–cognitive development, they have identified four
specific cognitive skills used to create a coherent in the life story. First,
temporal sequencing of distant experiences begins to develop during the
grade school years, followed by the acquisition of the second quality,
the cultural concept of biography by about age 10. Many studies point to
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438 State of the Story
the emergence in early adolescence of a stable self-conception that can be
used to integrate diverse events and thereby create a sense of causal coherence.
Evidence also suggests the biographical conceptions of how people change
due to life experience while nevertheless remaining the same person
emerge in mid to late adolescence. The ability to thematically interpret
past experiences begins to develop in mid to late adolescence and may
continue into adulthood. These are cognitive tools necessary for autobiographical reasoning and for forming a stable sense of identity in adolescence and beyond.
Autobiographical memories differ in their degree of specificity in ways
that have implications for the self-conception and personal identity. Conway
and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) described a framework of autobiographical
memory in which there are three levels of memory specificity: lifetime
periods, general events, and event-specific knowledge. Lifetime periods
represent knowledge about common features of a particular period with
identifiable beginnings and endings. Such knowledge might include
significant others, common locations, and activities. Examples of lifetime
periods might include ‘the college years’, ‘the time after my parent’s divorce’,
or ‘my first teaching job’. Lifetime periods represent more than a temporal
boundary in memory; they also represent thematic knowledge about
common features of the period. The reminiscence bump, a welldocumented phenomenon, is consistent with the claim that autobiographical
memories are generally organized by lifetime period (e.g., Conway &
Holmes, 1994). Adults tend to recall more memories from the approximate
ages of 15 to 25 than other periods (e.g., Fitzgerald, 1988). The reason
for this increased ability to recall memories from this period may be due
to its role in identity formation and the number of first experiences (e.g.,
dating, learning to drive). Two overarching themes that might organize
memories from the reminiscence bump period appear to be relationship
and work themes (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). There is also some
indication that memories from this period are especially rich in emotional
and motivational content (Thorne, 2000).
General events are more heterogeneous than lifetime periods and may
encompass both repeated events (e.g., vacations at the beach) and single
events (e.g., the trip to India) that comprise a common theme. Thus,
general events may group specific and unique events from a specific time
period (e.g., how I spent my summer vacation), or they may link a set of
similar actions that have been repeated on numerous occasions (e.g., my
morning routine). The organization of these repeated actions in autobiographical memory may be guided by specific goals.
Event specific knowledge is part of general events which are in turn
part of lifetime periods. This information is about a single event that
occurred at a discrete point in time in an individual’s life. Pillemer (1998)
has studied people’s recollections of momentous events in their lives,
defined as single moments that are recalled with rich imagery and in great
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State of the Story 439
detail. There are four kinds of the vividly recalled events. Originating
events mark the beginning of the story. Turning points involve making a
significant change in the story. Anchoring events provide stability, and
analogous events emphasize a similar pattern across events in the person’s
life story. Together, these most salient episodes are woven into a life story.
In a similar vein, Singer and Salovey (1993) used the term self-defining
memories to describe vivid, affectively charged memories that are often
related to important unresolved themes or enduring concerns in a person’s
life. The affective quality of self-defining memories seems to be a function
of the relevance of the memories to the attainment of the individual’s
most desired goals. The finding holds not only for memories relevant to
attainment of approach goals, but also for memories about active efforts
to avoid undesired outcomes (Moffitt & Singer, 1994). Well-adjusted students
with moderate levels of self-restraint expressed self-defining memories that
were richer in meaning and personal significance, whereas more repressed
and defensive students described memories that were overly general and
lacking in emotional detail (Singer & Blagov, 2004). Self-defining memories
exhibiting growth and insight are associated with psychological well-being
and higher levels of psychosocial maturity (Bauer & McAdams, 2004;
Singer, King, Green, & Barr, 2002). Self-defining memories may also be
employed to regulate mood. Non-depressed people recall more positive
self-defining memories after a negative mood induction than depressed
individuals, and the positive self-defining memories of depressed people
are less specific than those of their non-depressed counterparts (Conway,
Singer, & Tagini, 2004). Thus, self-defining memories are linked to central
goals or conflicts within the individual and may provide integrative lessons
or insights as well as play an important role in mood regulation.
Researchers have suggested that self-reported autobiographical memories
serve three distinct yet overlapping functions (Bluck, Alea, Habermas, &
Rubin, 2004). First, autobiographical memory serves a directive function
for present and future thought and behavior (Pillemer, 2003). Research
has found that people report remembering past events and the lessons they
learned from them as useful in guiding their present and future behavior.
Second, autobiographical memories serve to maintain self-continuity as
the personal past may preserve a sense of being coherent person over time.
And finally, as a social function autobiographical memory serves to develop,
maintain and nurture social bonds (e.g., Nelson, 1993; Pillemer, 1998).
The process of creating a life story to integrate one’s experiences is
intrinsically social. One can not create a life story in a vacuum. The notion
of the situated story emphasizes the fact that virtually all narrative accounts
of personal memory are created within specific situations, by particular
individuals, for particular audiences, and to fulfil particular goals (McLean,
Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007). Situated stories can be created internally and/or
externally. A story does not have to be told to others for it to play an
important role in the self development. But research shows that a surprisingly
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440 State of the Story
large number of people tell stories of highly personal experiences soon
after they occur (Thorne, 2000). The practice of sharing stories of most
salient and self-defining episodes may help people articulate and clarify
the meanings and the nature of their self-defining memories with each
new telling. In this way, situated stories may be used to develop and to
maintain the self-concept. Self-development through situated stories may
be viewed as a lifespan process, beginning in early childhood and extending
to old age, and that process is situated in a larger milieu of cultural
expectations (McLean et al., 2007).
Pasupathi (2001) has studied the role of the listener in story telling. In
both experimental and non-experimental settings, it has been found that
listener behavior changes how elaborative the story is in the moment of
telling, with effects that are evident on subsequent remembering of the
event. People who tell stories to distracted listeners employ less interpretive,
psychological language that connects a series of events with their own
subjectivity and come to perceive the event they talked about as less
consistent with their sense of self (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005).
In midlife and beyond, people become increasingly concerned with
making commitments that promote the well-being of youth and the next
generation, or what Erik Erikson (1982) referred to as generativity. Life
stories pertaining to mid-life often reflect these concerns. McAdams
(2005) finds that Americans at mid-life who are particularly generative
overall tend to tell a certain kind of story about their lives. In these stories,
the protagonist (i) enjoys an early family blessing or advantage, (ii) is
sensitized to the suffering of others at an early age, (iii) is guided by a
clear and compelling personal ideology that remains relatively stable over
time, (iv) transforms or redeems bad events into good outcomes, and
(v) sets goals for the future to benefit society and its institutions (McAdams,
Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997). McAdams (2006) argues
that these redemptive stories reflect certain quintessentially American
themes.
For both midlife adults and students, the tendency to construct life
stories in which bad events are ultimately redeemed into good outcomes
is associated with greater psychological well-being (e.g., McAdams & de
St. Aubin, 1992). In contrast, studies of people’s stories of what might
have been show that, although people may be quite motivated to tell
stories that help them come to terms with their difficult and regrettable
choices, but there is no correlation between the complexity of the story
and happiness (King & Hicks, in press). Taking a longitudinal approach
to the question of narrative processing and self-development, Pals (2006)
found that exploratory processing (i.e., grappling with complexity of the
experience, exploring its meaning, and actively interpreting its
transformation impact) of difficult life experiences in mid-life was
mediated by coping openness at age 21 and predicted emotional maturity
at age 61.
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State of the Story 441
Narrating one’s personal life experiences can have a transformative influence on identity and serve to integrate disparate aspects of the self (Singer
& Blagov, 2004). The telling of personal stories allows people to make sense
of difficult or discordant events and to integrate these experiences with their
life story. More specifically, personal narratives play an extremely important
role in making meaning of traumatic and difficult personal experiences
(Pennebaker, 1997). Research shows that translating personally difficult experiences into words has long-term health benefits. People are asked to write
about their ‘very deepest thoughts and feelings about an extremely important
emotional issue that has affected you and your life’ (Pennebaker, 1997;
p. 162) over a period of days. Four linguistic factors from their writings
reliably predict improved physical health. First, the more positive words
people used, the better their subsequent health. Second, moderate use of negative
emotion words was associated with better health, whereas very high or very
low numbers of negative emotion words used correlated with poorer health.
An increase in both causal and insight words over the course of the writing
was strongly associated with improved health (Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis,
1997). Finally, flexibility in pronoun use reflects an ability to change perspectives and relates to positive health outcomes (Campbell & Pennebaker, 2003).
Thus, people who benefited the most from writing began with poorly
organized positive and negative descriptions and progressed to a reasoned,
flexible, coherent story by the end of the writing assignment.
In sum, the narrative approach has allowed personality psychologists
to make significant advances in understanding implicit motivations and
the processes involved in self-development and identity formation. The
approach also provides avenues for studying the integration of difficult
experiences into the life story and the role of personal stories in mood
regulation, subjective well-being, and physical health. Personality psychologists
have only begun to consider the effect of social (e.g., McLean et al., 2007)
and cultural (e.g., McAdams, 2005) contexts on personal stories.
Short Biography
Barbara A. Woike received her doctoral degree in Psychology from Michigan
State University in 1992 and has taught courses in personality, developmental, and social psychology as well as research methods and statistics
courses for 15 years. She is currently an Associate Professor at Barnard
College, which an undergraduate women’s college affiliated with Columbia
University. Her current research pertains to the influence of personality
motivation on memory processes and motivational conflicts between love
and work. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of
Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. Her articles have
been published in professional journals such as the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. She
is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Research in Personality.
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442 State of the Story
Endnotes
* Correspondence address: Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University,
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: [email protected]
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© 2008 The Author Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/1 (2008): 434–443, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00070.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd