Narrative Identity and the Redemptive Self: An Intellectual Autobiography, with Occasional Critique

In this intellectual autobiography, I trace the development of the idea of narrative identity as manifest in personality and developmental psychology.  As far as my own work in this area is concerned, the story begins in the early 1980s when my students and I struggled to understand the meaning of Erik Erikson’s concept of identity.  Early work on a life-story model of identity aimed to situate the concept within the rapidly transforming field of personality psychology, first articulated as an alternative to the ascending conception of the Big Five traits.  Eventually, I turned my attention to the redemptive life stories told by highly generative American adults, as my understanding of narrative identity came to be more fully contextualized in culture and history.  While hundreds of nomothetic, hypothesis-testing studies of narrative identity have been conducted in the past two decades, the concept has also proven useful in the realm of psychobiography, as illustrated in my case studies of the redemptive life story constructed by the American President George W. Bush, and in my research into the strange case of President Donald J. Trump, whose most striking psychological attribute may be the near total absence of a narrative identity

Second Chances in The Wire: Perspectives from Psychology and the Judiciary

Playing off a scene in The Wire wherein prison inmates discuss whether American lives have “second acts,” this essay considers psychological and legal issues at play in people’s efforts to turn their lives around, from bad to good. In the first half of the essay, a professor of psychology discusses empirical research into redemptive life stories in which people find positive meaning in suffering and/or transform their lives from failure to relative success. While examples of redemptive life stories may be found in The Wire, making good on second chances seems to be a relatively rare occurrence. In the second half, a federal judge considers the issue of second chances in the American legal system, focusing on the issue of sentencing. Like many of the drug offenders in The Wire, young men sentenced for crimes today have often suffered from a litany of setbacks and deprivations in life. The effort to rehabilitate these offenders must be balanced against competing sentencing goals that involve, for example, deterrence and payback. As in the television series, the possibilities of making good on second chances may be vanishingly rare in the real lives of offenders today

Themes of Self‐Regulation and Self‐Exploration in the Life Stories of Religious American Conservatives and Liberals

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97151/1/pops933.pd

Parental Co‐Construction of 5‐ to 13‐Year‐Olds\u27 Global Self‐Esteem Through Reminiscing About Past Events

The current study explored parental processes associated with children\u27s global self‐esteem development. Eighty 5‐ to 13‐year‐olds and one of their parents provided qualitative and quantitative data through questionnaires, open‐ended questions, and a laboratory‐based reminiscing task. Parents who included more explanations of emotions when writing about the lowest points in their lives were more likely to discuss explanations of emotions experienced in negative past events with their child, which was associated with child attachment security. Attachment was associated with concurrent self‐esteem, which predicted relative increases in self‐esteem 16 months later, on average. Finally, parent support also predicted residual increases in self‐esteem. Findings extend prior research by including younger ages and uncovering a process by which two theoretically relevant parenting behaviors impact self‐esteem development

Transitions to Older Adulthood: Exploring Midlife Women’s Narratives Regarding Purpose in Life

Purpose in life has been shown to affect important outcomes related to healthy aging.  However, quantitative studies have consistently found lower purpose in life among older adults. A qualitative inquiry into purpose in life may offer insights into why there appears to be a decline in later life, and for whom. This study investigated two waves of life narratives from late midlife women to explore how they expressed meaning and purpose regarding their life paths. White and Black women (N = 16) with higher and lower purpose in life were sampled based on a prior quantitative study (Ko, Hooker, Geldhof, & McAdams, 2016). Using a grounded theory approach and a life course perspective lens, we analyzed two waves of life stories over five years to understand how participants experienced their purposes in life over time. Three common themes emerged including the centrality of family relationships, the negotiation of work, and the pursuit of agency. Those with higher and lower purpose in life scores varied in how they defined and enacted purpose in life based on prior and current life experiences. Being proactive in directing one’s life course was shown to differentiate those with higher versus lower purpose in life. In transitions into older adulthood, having a proactive approach to the world may be salient for a purposeful aging process

Model-Based Deconvolution of Cell Cycle Time-Series Data Reveals Gene Expression Details at High Resolution

In both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, gene expression is regulated across the cell cycle to ensure “just-in-time” assembly of select cellular structures and molecular machines. However, present in all time-series gene expression measurements is variability that arises from both systematic error in the cell synchrony process and variance in the timing of cell division at the level of the single cell. Thus, gene or protein expression data collected from a population of synchronized cells is an inaccurate measure of what occurs in the average single-cell across a cell cycle. Here, we present a general computational method to extract “single-cell”-like information from population-level time-series expression data. This method removes the effects of 1) variance in growth rate and 2) variance in the physiological and developmental state of the cell. Moreover, this method represents an advance in the deconvolution of molecular expression data in its flexibility, minimal assumptions, and the use of a cross-validation analysis to determine the appropriate level of regularization. Applying our deconvolution algorithm to cell cycle gene expression data from the dimorphic bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, we recovered critical features of cell cycle regulation in essential genes, including ctrA and ftsZ, that were obscured in population-based measurements. In doing so, we highlight the problem with using population data alone to decipher cellular regulatory mechanisms and demonstrate how our deconvolution algorithm can be applied to produce a more realistic picture of temporal regulation in a cell

What Might Have Been Lost

This article examines the role of “independent” folk music (indie-folk) in personal identity formation. It builds upon Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, which argues (i) that it is through the mechanism of narrative that people build a more or less coherent life-story, and (ii) emphasizes the role of art (most notably literary fiction and poetry) as a mediator in the comprehension and regulation of transitory life experiences. This article aims to apply these insights to studying the role of indie-folk, a narrative art form adhering to the traditional understanding of folk music as a genre rooted in oral tradition, in the construction of personal identity. Studying the daily use of indie-folk songs by audience members through in-depth interviewing, it shows that (i) the reception of indie-folk music results in ritualistic listening behavior aimed at coping with the experience of accelerating social time; (ii) that respondents use indie-folk narratives as resources for reading the self, and (iii) that indie-folk songs provide healing images that are effective in coping with the experience of narrated time as discordant. In arguing for the central role of narrative in identity formation, this article aims to contribute to existing research on music as a “technology of the self” (DeNora). It specifically emphasizes how narrative particles are tools and building blocks in identity construction, a process characterized by the oscillation between narrative coherence and disruption