The State of the Story in Personality Psychology

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.