The subjective life story as a resource for well-being

该项目研究主观生活故事（叙事认同）对幸福感的贡献。重点是生活故事的连贯性和自传式推理。该研究将这种关系置于纵向和寿命角度的传记变化的背景下。这项研究将首次测试生活叙事的全球一致性与幸福感的关系，并将其与自传体推理与幸福感的关系区分开来。这种关系是沿着与生活事件相关的时间轴建模的。研究的中心目标是通过经验研究生活叙事在传记变化中建立个人身份的说法（麦克亚当斯，里科尔）。本研究旨在表明，在经历了人生故事的改变之后，适应性自传推理可以缓冲自我连续性和幸福感的负面影响。另一种保护自我同一性的方法需要扭曲现在或过去的自我，使它们彼此更加相似，从而减少破坏性事件的影响。因此，另一个目的是表明，在传记变化之后，适应性自传推理保护了过去和现在的自我认识不被扭曲。此外，本研究还从纵向上考察了生活叙事连贯性是否通过使个体倾向于通过适应性自传推理来应对传记变化，从而发挥了对传记变化的弹性作用。此外，研究还探讨了适应性自传式推理在青春期早期和老年时期以及习惯性反刍中的调节作用。这项研究基于一项为期12年的纵向研究，研究对象是6个年龄组，最初共有172名参与者，在16年后加入了第五波，并在分析中包括了尚未编码的第四波；年龄从8岁到77岁不等。为了控制重复讲述整个生活故事的可能影响，并扩大样本以测试横截面假设，并根据先前拨款提案（DFG HA 2077/14）的审稿人的建议，将收集额外的样本，每个年龄组的参与者大约增加一倍。长期以来，诸如损失或严重疾病等负面生活事件的传记整合一直被认为是应对的必要条件，但从未在生活故事中进行过定量研究。本研究将叙事性幸福感研究的主要相关方法扩展到事件和生活故事应对的过程观。它还增加了一个真理成分，即自我认识，这在记忆和人格研究领域很重要。它对如何建立自我连续性的小型但新兴的研究做出了贡献。最后，本研究在寿命人格心理学和积极心理学中增加了传记维度。

The project studies the contribution of the subjective life story (narrative identity) to well-being. The focus is on life story coherence and autobiographical reasoning. The study situates this relationship in the context of biographical change in a longitudinal and lifespan perspective. The study will be the first to test the relation of global coherence of life narratives to well-being and differentiate it from the relation of autobiographical reasoning to well-being. This relation is modeled along a timeline relative to life events. The central aim is to empirically study the claim that life narrating establishes personal identity across biographical change (McAdams, Ricoeur). The study intends to show that after biographical change, accommodative autobiographical reasoning buffers the negative effects on the sense of self-continuity and on well-being by bridging change in the life story. Alternative ways of safeguarding a sense of self-sameness require distorting present or past self so as to render them more similar to each other, thereby reducing the effects of the disruptive event. Thus another aim is to show that after biographical change, accommodative autobiographical reasoning protects self-knowledge of the past and the present self from being distorted. Furthermore the study tests longitudinally whether life narrative coherence serves as resilience against biographical change by predisposing individuals to cope with biographical change with accommodative autobiographical reasoning. In addition the study explores moderation of the effects of accommodative autobiographical reasoning by developmental periods of early adolescence and old age as well as by habitual rumination. The study takes builds on a 12-year-longitudinal study of entire life narratives with six age groups and a total of originally 172 participants by adding a fifth wave after 16 years and including the not yet coded fourth wave in the analyses; ages range from 8 to 77 years. To control for possible effects of repeated telling of entire life narratives and to enlarge the sample for testing cross-sectional hypotheses, and following advice by a reviewer of the previous grant proposal (DFG HA 2077/14), an additional sample will be collected, roughly doubling participants in each age group. The biographical integration of negative life events such as losses or severe illness has long been claimed as essential for coping, but has never been studied quantitatively in life stories. This study expands the dominant correlational approach of narrative well-being studies to a processual view on events and life-story coping. It also adds a truth component, self-knowledge, which is important in the fields of memory and personality studies. It contributes to the small, but burgeoning study of how self-continuity is established. Finally, the study adds a biographical dimension to lifespan personality psychology and positive psychology.