See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12332756

Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story

in Adolescence

Article in Psychological Bulletin January 2000

DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.748 Source: PubMed

CITATIONS READS

593 2,159

2 authors:

Tilmann Habermas Susan Bluck

Goethe-Universitt Frankfurt am Main University of Florida
124 PUBLICATIONS 2,636 CITATIONS 248 PUBLICATIONS 3,768 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Emotion and Narrative View project

Life Story Lab: Ongoing Projects View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Tilmann Habermas on 08 December 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document
and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
Psychological Bulletin Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
2000, Vol. 126, No. 5, 748-769 0033-2909/00/$5.00 DOI: 10.10371/0033-2909.126.5.74S

Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story in Adolescence

Tilmann Habermas and Susan Bluck

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

In the life story, autobiographical remembering and self-understanding are combined to create a coherent
account of one's past. A gap is demonstrated between developmental research on the story-organization
of autobiographical remembering of events in childhood and of life narratives in adulthood. This gap is
bridged by substantiating D. P. McAdams's (1985) claim that the life story develops in adolescence. Two
manifestations of the life story, life narratives and autobiographical reasoning, are delineated in terms
of 4 types of global coherence (temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic). A review of research shows
that the cognitive tools necessary for constrtlcting global coherence in a life story and the social-
motivational demands to construct a life story develop during adolescence. The authors delineate the
implications of the life story framework for other research areas such as coping, attachment, psycho-
therapeutic process, and the organization of autobiographical memory.

For the past 2 decades, many disciplines in the social sciences
and humanities have seen attempts to reformulate their basic
concepts in terms of narrative (e.g., history; see Evans, 1997;
White, 1987). These developments have also influenced psychol-
ogy, leading to a renewed interest in narrative in psychology in
general (Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Bruner, 1987; Howard,
1991; Schank & Abelson, 1995) and to a revaluing of the life story
in particular. The life story is used as a theoretical m o d e l and
research method in the fields of personality (McAdams, 1998;
Nasby & Read, 1997), cognitive (Fitzgerald, 1996; Robinson &
Taylor, 1998), and clinical psychology (Rybaczyk & Bellg, 1997;
Schafer, 1983), as well as gerontology (Bluck, in press; Coleman,
1999).
The life story allows individuals to organize recollective mem-
ories (Brewer, 1996) and more abstract knowledge of their past
into a coherent biographical view. It is an important way to
establish self-continuity and self-understanding (Pillemer, 1998).
In this article, we elaborate the concept of the life story and specify
its development. We focus not on the content of life stories but on
their formal aspects. By reviewing research in cognitive, social,
personality, and developmental psychology and, to a lesser extent,
research in sociology and linguistics, we develop an integrative
conceptual framework that is useful in identifying areas and meth-
ods for future research.
This article concerns the human life span at two levels: individ-
uals' personal reasoning about their own life span (Staudinger,
1999) and academic theorizing about the life span development
(Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998) of individuals' auto-
biographical reasoning. The focus is on adolescence as a develop-
mental bridge between childhood and adulthood in the integration
and interpretation of memories of one's personal past. By about
age 10, children have event representations that allow them to
integrate temporally proximal episodes into a story format struc-
tured by goals. Adults, however, are able to organize memories in
much more complex ways by placing events in the frame of a
whole life. This is apparent in adults' ability to produce life
narratives.
This gap between research on how children Organize past events
and research on adults' ability to narratively organize their whole
life has been repeatedly noted (Bruner, 1987; Linde, 1993;
Rosenthal, 1995; Straub, in press). On the basis of Erikson's
(1968) theory of adolescent identity formation, others have also
proposed that the life story develops during adolescence (Cohler,
1982; McAdams, 1985, 1996). To substantiate this claim, we
elaborate the concept of the life story by taking textual aspects of
life narratives as a starting point. We are not aware of any studies
that have attempted to directly test the emergence of the life story
in childhood or adolescence. We nonetheless make a case for the
emergence of the life story in adolescence by critically reviewing
evidence of the organization of autobiographical remembering in
adults and children and, more specifically, evidence of adolescent
developments that, we argue, provide critical elements of the adult
life story (see Habermas, 1997).

Tilmann Habermas and Susan Bluck, Max Planck Institute for Human
Development, Berlin, Germany.
We thank our colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Devel-
opment for their comments and feedback at various stages in the writing of
this article. Particularly, we thank Monisha Pasupathi and Ulman Linden-
berger for their comments on earlier drafts.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tilmann
Habermas, who is now at the Institute for Medical Psychology, Free
University Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany, or to
Susan Bluck, who is now at Institute on Aging, University of Florida, 1329
SW 16th Street, Gainesville, Florida 32610-0177. Electronic mail may be
sent to thaber@zedat.fu-berlin.de or sbluck@hpe.ufl.edu.
Overview
Conceptual Framework
The term life story has been used in two different ways. Socio-
logical, anthropological, and psychological research on the life
course focuses on the unfolding of lives as seen from an observer
perspective (see, e.g., B. Singer, Ryff, Carr, & Magee, 1998).
Often, the term life histories is used for this objective sequence of
events in a life. In contrast, we focus on the subjective versions of
one's life and reserve the term life story for the life as told,
remembered, or thought about by the individual.

748
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
To clarify the concept of the life story, we differentiate two
major manifestations: life narratives (full products of the life
story) and autobiographical reasoning (the process by which the
life story is formed and used). Life narratives are overt recountings
of one's life that are bound in time and social context. Life
narratives are linguistic products that follow syntactic and prag-
matic rules. Because of our interest in the individual's own rep-
resentation of her or his life, when using the term life narrative, we
refer only to those accounts that are structured by the individual
and not to narratives that are structured by an interviewer. What is
distinct about life narratives, setting them apart from mere lists of
past events that a child might produce, is the more or less coherent
integration of their elements. Embedding experience in a narrative
is a fundamental way of making sense of it (Baumeister & New-
man, 1994). The representation of the life story in memory, the life
story schema, and its relation to the temporal and thematic orga-
nization of autobiographical memory (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce,
2000) are discussed elsewhere (Bluck & Habermas, 2000; see S. C.
Thompson & Janigan, 1988).
The life story is usually used in a piecemeal fashion (Linde,
1993) through what we term autobiographical reasoning. Autobio-
graphical reasoning is a process of self-reflective thinking or
talking about the personal past that involves forming links between
elements of one's life and the self in an attempt to relate one's
personal past and present (see also Bluck & Levine, 1998). Auto-
biographical reasoning indicates the evolution of a biographical
perspective that frames one's individuality in terms of a specific
developmental history. It relies on autobiographical remembering
but goes beyond it by enhancing understanding through actively
creating coherence between events and the self.
We assume a relatively close link between remembering, rea-
soning, and narrating. This assumption is based on an understand-
ing of autobiographical activity as learned in social interactions.
We share Fivush's (1998b) view that "autobiography i s . . . the
way we make sense of what happened, and this is fundamentally
a social-cultural process" (p. 486).
Developmental Issues
In referring to the emergence of the life story, we mean that the
ability to construct a life story emerges in adolescence. We argue
that this ability depends on more general social-cognitive abilities.
We conceptualize the ability to create a life story not as a basic
cognitive competence comparable to general cognitive structures
sensu Piaget (1970) or to structures of moral reasoning (Colby &
Kohlberg, 1987). Rather, the life story has highly specific struc-
tures that are constituted by relations of global coherence. In life
narratives, these are relations in a text, whereas in autobiographical
reasoning, these are relations in a life between present self, past
selves, past events, and past circumstances. The specificity of the
life story gives reason to expect greater interindividualdifferences
than exist in more basic cognitive abilities.
Because there is little direct evidence available on the ability to
construct a life story, we review the emergence of social-cognitive
abilities in adolescence that, though they may be used for a variety
of ends, are demonstrated to be instrumental for constructing a life
story. We conceptualize these abilities as cognitive tools that
converge in the ability to form a coherent life story.
749
Notwithstanding these differences, our conceptual framework is
partially rooted in the Piagetian tradition and therefore shares some
features with cognitive--developmentaltheories. The central the-
sis of the development of the life story in adolescence is the
emergence of a new quality, This quality, the global coherence of
the life story, however, may be attained to varying degrees, com-
parable with the gradual emergence of the story format during
childhood. We also make a claim regarding the development of an
ability or competence. We argue that this competence to construct
a life story has more basic cognitive abilities as its necessary
developmental prerequisites.
Scope of the Argument
The scope of our examination of the life story should be made
clear from the outset. First, we limit our discussion to the repre-
sentation of one' s own life. We do, however, assume that the types
of global coherence that define the life story also define analogous
representations of the lives of significant others. We thereby fol-
low the traditions of G. H. Mead (1934) and Vygotsky (Vygotsky
& Luria, 1930/1993) that locate the origin of social categories in
social interaction (cf. Baltes & Staudinger, 1996). Consequently,
structural homology is assumed for concepts when applied to
others and self. This structural homology of biographical and
autobiographical understanding does not preclude functional
differences.
The second limitation results from our focus on the development
of the social-cognitive means to achieve global coherence in a life
story. This is necessary for defining its specificity as a form that is
distinct from the more elementary event representations that
emerge during childhood. Consequently, other aspects of autobio-
graphical understanding, such as the social--interactional origins
of the life story and its role in modulating emotions (Levine &
Bluck, 1997; Levine, Stein & Liwag, 1999), in understanding
oneself and empathizing with others (Kernberg, 1975; Main,
Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985), and in prosocial behavior (N. Eisen-
berg, Losoya, & Guthrie, 1997), are neglected. Similarly, we
examine neither cultural variations nor gender differences (deVries
& Watt, 1996; Fivush, 1998a; Gee & Crawford, 1998) in the life
story.
The third limitation is imposed by the relative paucity of re-
search that speaks directly to our contention. To demonstrate the
emergence of the life story during adolescence, life narratives and
other forms of autobiographical reasoning need to be measured,
without the confound of additional task-demands, across late child-
hood and into early adulthood. At present, this kind of direct
evidence is not available. Instead, we review studies on motiva-
tional changes and emerging social-cognitive abilities in adoles-
cence and identify common qualitative elements in these and the
life story (Chandler, 1991; Smith, 1991). That is, we present
evidence that the cognitive abilities necessary to create global
coherence in a life story and the motivation to do so develop in
adolescence. We interpret age ranges as indirect indicators of
cognitive and motivational development and use them to relate a
variety of different developments to draw conclusions concerning
the probable sequence of developmental steps in the emergence of
the life story.
This article is divided into three major sections. First, we present
the four main types of global coherence in adult life narratives to
750 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
determine the criteria for global coherence in the life story. We
then sketch the development of the organization of autobiograph-
icai remembering in children, showing that the life story has not
been researched in childhood and making the case that this is
partly due to children's inability to construct a life story. The third
section, on adolescence, is the focus of the article. We present a
sequence of social-motivational and social-cognitive adolescent
developments that make it functional and possible for adolescents
to develop a life story. In the concluding section, ways to substan-
tiate our theoretical framework in future research are delineated,
and implications for other areas of research are identified.
Coherence of the Life Story in Adulthood
Adults are able to understand and present themselves in bio-
graphical terms by coherently organizing recollective memories
and other self-relevant information into a life story (McAdams,
1985). We describe the ways in which adults organize their views
of their lives by defining four types of global coherence in life
stories. Because life narratives provide the most extensive and
explicit representation of a life story, we derive the four types of
global coherence of the life story from life narratives.
Depending on their theoretical interests, researchers have pro-
posed various types of global coherence (see, e.g., Coleman, 1999;
Fiese et ai., 1999; Randall, 1999). The four types of global coher-
ence we adopt are central in defining the life story and provide a
heuristic for reviewing relevant research. In contrast to other
approaches to the formal analysis of life narratives (Mishler,
1995), we focus on coherence because it is best suited to differ-
entiating life stories from other, more limited stories.
Whereas local coherence concerns neighboring clauses in a text,
global coherence relates to an entire text. Global coherence is
understood to be "a complex, composite meta-phenomenon, in-
volving multiple strands" (Givon, 1995, p. 59). Multiple types of
global coherence contribute to varying degrees of overall global
coherence in a given text. Major types of global coherence dis-
cussed and studied with regard to text comprehension are referen-
tial, spatial, temporal, causal, and thematic coherence (Fiese et ai.,
1999; Gernsbacher, 1997; Graesser, Mills, & Zwaan, 1997). The
texts that have been used in research are usually specific in content
and restricted in temporal extension. Because life narratives span
an extended time-range and cover heterogeneous locations, situa-
tions, and actors (other than the narrator), we suggest that it is
mainly the three latter types of global coherence (temporal, causal,
and thematic) that are relevant to the life story. Thus, three of the
four types of coherence we use here are derived from psycholin-
guistic research on text comprehension (for reviews, see Graesser
et al., 1997; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). We introduce a fourth type
of global coherence that is specific to life narratives. The cultural
concept of biography is based on research on how life is subjec-
tively structured by a sequence of age-graded normative events
and developments (Heckhausen, 1989). Throughout the text, the
use of the term coherence refers to global coherence if not other-
wise specified.
Temporal coherence and the cultural concept of biography are
used to form a basic, skeletal life narrative consisting of an ordered
sequence of culturally defined, major life events. Causal and
thematic coherence express the unique interpretative stance of the
individual. We suggest that only life narratives that are causaUy
and thematically coherent will be recognized as good or real life
narratives (for the concept of a good story, see McCabe & Peter-
son, 1984). Comparing children's narratives of single personal
experiences with those of older adolescents, Sun (1998) termed
this acquisition of an interpretative stance "the loss of narrative
innocence." Due to their importance for creating overall global
coherence in the life story, causal and thematic coherence are
discussed more extensively than temporal coherence and the cul-
tural concept of biography.
Temporal Coherence
In a coherent narrative, remembered events are temporally re-
lated to other events. This requires either remembering dates,
which is possible only for a few highly significant events, or
reconstructing temporal order on the basis of contextual informa-
tion (Friedman, 1993; Huttenlocher & Prohaska, 1997; C. Thomp-
son, Skowronski, Larsen, & Betz, 1996). In modern Western
cultures, life narratives usually follow a linear chronological order
(Fromholt & Larsen, 1991; Fromholt, Larsen, & Larsen, 1995;
Luborsky, 1990; Robinson & Taylor, 1998). Some cultures (Lu-
borsky, 1990; TenHouten, 1999) and some individuals use a cy-
clical temporal organization or multiple time lines (Luborsky,
1990; Weisser, 1996). Luborsky (1990) and Rosenthai (1995) both
observed that when inconsistencies in temporal order occur in life
narratives, the temporal orientation is maintained through explicit
temporal realignments (as in flashbacks). Temporal ordering pro-
vides a fundamental form of coherence in life narratives. Future
research on how temporal coherence is created in life narratives
needs to address not only the use of temporal connectives (mostly
conjunctions or adverbs) but also the use of explicit dating of
events by reference to the calendar and cross-referencing of events
and life periods to other parts of the life story or to known
historical events.
Cultural Concept of Biography
We introduce the term cultural concept of biography to describe
the normative cultural notion of the facts and events that should be
included in life narratives (e.g., birth, affiliations with and transi-
tions from family, institutions, and geographical locations). Bio-
graphical cultural norms define conventional life phases (Conway
& Bekerian, 1987; Nanpon, 1991). Age norms for the timing of
transitions between life phases (Hagestad, 1990; Heckhausen,
1989, 1993; Kalicki, 1996; Settersten & Mayer, 1997) provide a
further aid to establishing the sequence of life's events. The
cultural concept of biography may vary among cultures, social
classes, and genders, both in terms of typical or normative life
sequences and in what is considered to be a significant life event.
As Schtitze (1984) suggested, awareness of these norms may act as
an effective organizer of life narratives by constraining the narrator
to discuss progress through life phases and to explain any major
deviations.
Research by Clarke (1995) suggested that these shared norma-
tive expectations concerning appropriate and probable life se-
quences enable individuals to order undated segments of others'
lives. Future research on uses of the cultural concept of biography
in life narratives could identify the typical events included, events
that are normatively used as temporal landmarks, and events that
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY 751

prompt explanations for deviations from the cultural concept of implicit. For example, Ruth, Birren and Polkinghorne (1996)
biography. Cross-cultural variation in all these features is another content-coded life narratives provided by older adults and found
clear direction for research. them to fall into thematic categories such as "life is loving" or "life
is struggling." Implicit thematic similarity can also be assessed by
Causal Coherence rating life narratives for basic motives such as the needs for
intimacy and power (Mansfield & McAdams, 1996; McAdams,
Both philosophers (Bieri, 1986) and linguists (Linde, 1987b)
Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997; Singer & Salovey,
have suggested that causal (Robinson, 1996) or explanatory co-
1993).
herence (Trabasso, Suh, & Payton, 1995) is central to life narra-
Life narratives may also contain statements that make thematic
fives because without it, the narrator cannot present herself or
coherence explicit. Narrative analyses show that these typically
himself as having lived a reasonable life. Causal coherence is used
appear in introductory or concluding evaluative statements or
not only to link the episodes within a life phase and to relate life
when commenting on turning points (Bruner, 1994; W. Fischer,
phases but also to explain changes in the narrator's values or
1978; Rosenthal, 1993; Schtitze, 1981). In making such state-
personalityas a result of events over time. Causal coherence may
ments, the individual acknowledges the necessity to interpret the
be established by providing external causes for life's events or
entire life to give it meaning. One way to explicitly thematically
internal causes that are dependent on the individual's own person-
integrate a life narrative is by reference to a central metaphor of
ality, needs, and aspirations over time (see Bruner, 1994; Linde,
oneself (for person metaphors, see Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Lubor-
1987a; Schiitze, 1982). When causal links are lacking (discoher-
sky, 1990).
ence; Linde, 1993), life appears to have been determined by
Another way to explicitly establish thematic coherence is by
chance and therefore to be meaningless (see Krantz, 1998).
making comparisons between several episodes or by declaring a
Narrators and listeners use shared background knowledge for
specific episode to be typical of many others. Repisodic memories
understanding and judging the plausibility of a narrative (cf. Linde,
(Neisser, 1986) may, for example, be of childhood events that
1987a; Moscovici, 1984). This includes assumptions about how
substantiate family myths, reveal the narrator's present character,
individuals are motivated and influenced to lead their lives. Some
or are assumed to have determined the narrator's later life course
researchers have observed that when these shared beliefs about
(see DeConinck & Godard, 1989).
plausible sequences are violated, the narrative becomes unconvinc-
A final way to provide explicit thematic coherence is to describe
ing and the narrator must add explanatory arguments to restore
life in terms of evaluative trajectories, such as "My life has been
plausibility (Linde, 1993; Schtitze, 1984).
a series of ups and downs" or "My life has been all uphill." Gergen
Causal explanations are of prime importance for making con-
and Gergen (1988) suggested a stability, a progressive, and a
nections between the self and events or circumstances. These links
regressive template as basic types that need to be further differ-
are of two major types: explanations of actions and explanations of
entiated when applied to actual life narratives (Sherman, 1994;
personal discontinuity. If the self-characteristics that the narrator
Young, Friesen, & Borycki, 1994). A linear theme may involve
uses to explain specific actions are overarching and stable, they
likening life to a journey (as in life course) or to a year that
may serve to explain a variety of past actions or events and thereby
progresses through various seasons or by viewing life as an un-
integrate them with one another. Discontinuity in self-
folding (the literal meaning of development) of human potential
characteristics calls for another type of explanation. In a sample of
(for life metaphors, see Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Luborsky, 1987).
narratives of individuals' professional careers, Linde (1993) de-
Future research should systematically identify the various mech-
scribed how personal discontinuity or change can, for example, be
anisms by which thematic coherence is achieved. These may
explained as only apparent or as only temporal. Changes in, or the
include drawing explicit comparisons between episodes or be-
development of, the narrator may be explained by the influence of
tween oneself at different times in life or by providing specific
enduring circumstances or specific events that prove to have been
episodes as examples for a more general point (cf. Schiitze, 1984).
biographically consequential (see Mackavey, Malley, & Stewart,
1991; Taylor, 1983). For example, young adults' narratives typi-
cally explain changes in attitudes and values by reference to Four Types, and Only Four Types, of Coherence ?
lessons learned during adolescence (McCabe, Capron, & Peterson,
Two objections may be raised concerning this selection of four
1991). Gaining insight through critical experiences is, however,
major types of global coherence. One objection is that not all life
mentioned more frequently by older adults (Pratt, Norris, Arnold,
narratives are necessarily globally coherent in all of the four ways.
& Filyer, 1999).
We have defined the types of coherence present in a prototypical
Future research might address whether there is a typical struc-
life narrative. We acknowledge that they are not necessarily found
ture in life narratives that is comparable to the intentional structure
in all life narratives. We assume that the degree to which the four
of single stories. Also, methods are needed to more clearly identify
types of coherence are present in a given life narrative determines
the causal structure of life narratives: through specific causal
its overall global coherence. If the recounting of a life were merely
words (causal connectives; Halliday & Hasan, 1976) or by iden-
an unrelated sequence of episodes, it would lack the distinctive
tifying semantic and pragmatic causal relations between state-
characteristics of a life narrative.
ments (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992).
Another possible objection concerns the choice of exactly these
four types of coherence. Even if valid arguments for alternative
Thematic Coherence
types of coherence could be presented, however, our four catego-
Thematic coherence is created by establishing thematic similar- ries (a) are sufficiently distinct as well as reasonably comprehen-
ity between various elements of a life. Thematic coherence may be sive, (b) reflect categories used in psycholinguistic analyses of text
752 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
coherence, and (c) provide useful categories for reviewing research
on the cognitive developments that, we argue, are necessary for the
emergence of a life story in adolescence.
Autobiographical Remembering in Childhood
Research on children's development of scripts and stories and
on how memories are shared has enormously advanced psychol-
ogists' knowledge of the social development of the organization of
memory (for a review, see Gathercole, 1998). Our argument con-
cerning adolescent development builds on these accomplishments
and extends this perspective to a later phase of life. Although
event-specific knowledge (Conway, 1992) and recollective mem-
ories are certainly accessible to children, we argue that the orga-
nizational means to connect single events with each other to attain
global coherence in the life story emerge only in adolescence.
The ability to narrate personal experiences has been interpreted
as evidence of the emergence of a "narrated self" that is able to
weave together "an array of past and present lived experi-
e n c e s . . , into a coherent narrative" (Stern, 1989, p. 168). The
emergence of the ability to narrate single personal experiences in
a story format has been interpreted as evidence that during the late
preschool years, "personal memories begin to be organized as a
life history" (Fivush, Haden, & Adam, 1995, p. 34; see also
Fivush, 1998a; Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997; Nelson, 1996).
Similarly, Welch-Ross (1995) considered the preschool years as
the time when the self becomes sufficiently organized and psy-
chological in nature to structure memories into a life history.
The above quotations provide examples of the occasional im-
plications that the life story begins to develop in the late preschool
years. However, there is no positive evidence that children can
construct a coherently organized account of their life that inte-
grates single stories with each other and with the self in the manner
that we have described as necessary characteristics of coherent
adult life narratives. Research on autobiographical remembering
during the first 10 years of life is briefly reviewed below; the focus
is on social-cognitive abilities that prepare the grounds for, but fall
short of, the adolescent capacity to coherently consider one's
whole life.
Social and Structural Aspects of Remembering
Observations in natural contexts show that an infant's verbal
remembering with a familiar adult starts at the age of 16 to 20
months and extends to more distant single events at 30 months
(A. R. Eisenberg, 1985; Fivush, Gray, & Fromhoff, 1987; Miller &
Sperry, 1988). Autobiographical remembering at these early ages
relies heavily on adults' prompting and sustaining the topical
focus. At 30 months, children begin to actively maintain focus on
a topic, to produce several related elements of a memory (Fivush
et al., 1987), and to initiate memory-talk spontaneously (Hudson,
1990; Umiker-Sebeok, 1977). By talking about memories, children
learn which memories are worth recounting to others (Snow,
1990).
The degree of elaboration of parents' scaffolding predicts the
amount and complexity of children's remembering (Haden et al.,
1997; Peterson & McCabe, 1994; Tessler & Nelson, 1994). Be-
tween the ages of 3 and 4, structuring and prompting of remem-
bering gradually passes from the adult to the child. As they learn
to remember autonomously during the preschool years, children
begin to organize their memory narratives using scripts and story
structure.
Scr/pts
Katherine Nelson (1988) has described the evolution between
the ages of 2 and 3 of generalized scripts that describe normative
sequences of actions and specify appropriate actors, locations, and
objects. The linear sequence of events in simple scripts is further
elaborated by adding a hierarchical structure in which elementary
actions are nested in, or subordinate to, larger action units (e.g.,
getting the ingredients ready is subordinate to making the cookies).
Larger action units are remembered better than subordinate ele-
ments by 4- to 5-year-olds (Nelson, 1993). The same trend appears
in tasks in which superordinate elements are used as criteria for
sorting more basic actions (Price & Goodman, 1990; Ratner,
Smith, & Padgett, 1990). Thus, between the ages of 2 and 5, the
child's script format develops from a stereotyped linear sequence
of events to a more complex, hierarchically integrated sequence of
events.
Stories
An even more advanced way to organize events is by construct-
ing a story. Stories mimic the temporal sequence of events and
normatively contain a setting, a complicating event, a sequence of
attempted solutions, and a resolution (Stein & Glenn, 1979). They
are structured by an evaluative perspective (Labov & Waletzky,
1967) and an intentional goal structure (Stein & Glenn, 1979). At
about age 5, children learn to structure events into stories, going
beyond temporal and hierarchical order by construing events in
terms of an initiating problem and its resolution. They reach almost
adult-level performance by ages 9 to 11 (Applebee, 1978; Botvin
& Sutton-Smith, 1977; Peterson & McCabe, 1983).
During the late preschool and the grade-school years, story
elements that are central to the causal structure of a story increas-
ingly become more memorable than peripheral elements (see, e.g.,
Trabasso, Secco, & van den Broek, 1984; van den Brock, Lorch,
& Thurlow, 1996; Varnhagen, Morrison, & Everall, 1994). This
enhanced memory for narratively organized events has also been
confirmed in a naturalistic study. Children who were 4 years old at
the time of a fire alarm remembered the event better 7 years later
if they had originally understood the reasons for the alarm and
evacuation, that is, if they had embedded the event in a rudimen-
tary story (Pillemer, Picariello, & Pruett, 1994; cf. Peterson &
Rideout, 1998).
Do Children Really Lack the Ability
to Create a Life Story?
By the end of childhood, the understanding of simple causally
structured, goal-directed stories is fully acquired. However, these
developments apply only to single stories, although those stories
may contain several episodes that took place over several days or
even weeks. Still, no systematic attempts have been reported to
demonstrate that children have acquired an ability to coherently
and evaluatively integrate a multitude of events or stories into a
life story.
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
The absence of research on a specific ability is no argument for
the absence of the ability itself. Researchers seldom attempt to
elicit life narratives from children. The available evidence on
failed attempts to elicit life narratives from children is rare and
informal. When 5- to 8-year-olds were asked to dictate their
autobiography, many of them made no mention at all of the past
(Engel, 1999). Rosenthal (1995) reported informal attempts to
elicit life narratives from a 7-year-old, who responded only when
the question was reframed in terms of individual important mem-
ories. The child then provided a series of interesting episodes or
important generalized events (Barsalou, 1988), interrelating them
only through rough temporal ordering and anchoring. Two 12- and
13-year-olds, in contrast, responded willingly by providing se-
quences of biographical dates regarding birth and transitions, that
is, versions of the cultural concept of biography. Similarly, Juen
(1997) asked 46 children between the ages of 7 and 10 to integrate
the most significant personal past events into a written story of
their life. Responses consisted of temporally ordered sequences of
episodes and generalized or extended events. Some of the oldest
children used beginnings of a cultural concept of biography, but
neither explicit global thematic nor causal coherence was evident.
Further indirect indicators of the absence of the life story in
children are that middle adolescence is the lower age-boundary of
authors of published autobiographies (see, e.g., Michener, 1998),
of clients with whom life histories are reconstructed (see, e.g.,
Lichtenstein & Baruch, 1996), of participants in life narrative
research (see, e.g., Mey, 1999; Piron, 1996; Sander & VoUbrecht,
1985), and of participants in studies that rely on autobiographical
reasoning (e.g., Adult Attachment Interview [AAI]; Main et al.,
1985). The AAI asks for accounts of one's upbringing and rela-
tionship with parents but also requires autobiographical reasoning
in terms of establishing causal links between one's development
and factors that have influenced one's development. The AAI is
used only from mid-adolescence onwards, and even then it has to
be adapted for this age group (Adam, Keller, & West, 1995; Allen,
Moore, Kuperminc, & Bell, 1998; Ward & Carlson, 1995).
In sum, informal evidence and the lack of research on the life
story below mid-adolescence suggest that children cannot provide
coherent responses. If they attempt to provide a life narrative, their
accounts apparently consist of several episodes or stories that are
not integrated with each other or with their life as a whole (Linde,
1993; Rosenthal, 1995). This conclusion remains tentative as long
as systematic studies are lacking.
From Stories to the Life Story in Adolescence
Following Cohler (1982) and McAdams (1985), we maintain
that a life story that integrates single memories and stories with
each other and with the self develops in adolescence. Linde (1993)
proposed that one reason for children's lack of a life story is the
brevity of their lives. Similarly, Rosenthal (1995) claimed that
children have endured fewer changes in their lives than adults and
therefore lack the motivation to construct a life story. Many
children, however, do experience more or less drastic changes in
their lives, such as geographical relocations, the divorce of parents,
or the birth of a new sibling. Children may also experience other
events that are significant to them but would not be considered
significant to adults, such as making a new friend at day care or
being scolded or punished by a respected adult. One way to
753
examine whether it is simply the brevity of the life that makes a
life story difficult to construct is to consider whether an adult such
as a parent could provide at least a rudimentary life narrative for
the albeit brief life of her or his own child.
We propose that although the brevity of children's lives may
play some role, the primary motivation to construct a life story is
related to age-typical demands of adolescence. Following the
discussion of motivation, we present extensive evidence for the
development of the necessary cognitive tools for autobiographical
reasoning and creating a life story.
Social-Motivational Aspects of the Emergence
of the Life Story
Developmental Tasks of Adolescence
The motivation for reflective autobiographical self-definition is
typical for adolescence and results from an interaction of cultural
and societal demands and both maturational and psychological
age-specific requirements. The major adolescent developmental
task (Havighurst, 1948) is to form a mature psychosocial identity
(Erikson, 1968). This includes the development of a mature gender
identity and sexual orientation and of commitments to significant
others, to educational and vocational pursuits, and to basic values.
These late-adolescent developments and choices tend to remain
stable in later life (for a review, see Alwin, 1994). According to
Erikson (1968), identity is formed by a process of reviewing old
beliefs and views of oneself and by exploring a variety of possible
identities.
The extent of the challenge for adolescents to develop an adult
identity in the diachronic form of a life story depends, among other
things, on historical and social-structural factors. Sociologists
suggest that the human life course has become more individualized
over the past decades (Beck-Gemsheim, 1983; Bertram & Dan-
nenberg, 1990; Kohli & Meyer, 1986), requiring individuals to
develop more flexible and individualized identities (Baumeister,
1987). Defining oneself biographically by reference to one's pre-
vious life events and contexts allows the integration of self-aspects
in a more complex, flexible, and individualized way. It allows for
multiple and flexible identifications and for the bridging of per-
sonal discontinuities that are nevertheless integrated into a some-
what coherent and Continuous identity (Fischer-Rosenthal, 1995;
Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal, 1997; McAdams, 1996).
The normative expectation in Western societies that individuals
are able to provide an individualized biographical account of
themselves appears when, in everyday parlance, individuals refer
to one another as having a life story (e.g., "He told me his whole
life story"). Outside of personal conversation, society provides
institutionalized occasions that require adolescents to think in
biographical terms (Hahn, 1987). These include job and university
applications, medical and military procedures requiring file-
making, and career and personal counseling, including the psycho-
therapeutic elaboration of one's life (Cook, 1996; Goffman, 1961;
Gubrium, Holstein, & Buckholdt, 1994).
Interest in Biographical Activities
The task of identity formation fuels an interest in biographical
activities involving thinking, reading, and writing. In a nationally
754 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
representative German sample of youth, these activities were
shown to emerge during adolescence (Zinnecker, 1985). Question-
naire studies show that the frequency of thinking about oneself
increases during adolescence (Fend, 1994; Hansell, Mechanic, &
Brondolo, 1986; Seiffge-Krenke, 1985). A radical evaluation of
one's life may be involved in the extreme decision to commit
suicide. The drastic increase in suicide rates during adolescence
may be interpreted as a sign that adolescents start thinking about
their whole life and its quality. Interviews with older adolescents
support this interpretation (D6bert & Nunner-Winkler, 1994).
Adolescents' biographical interest is also evident in the fre-
quency with which they keep diaries. Writing a diary usually starts
in early to mid-adolescence (Fend, 1994; Seiffge-Krenke, 1985;
C. B. Thompson, 1982), although a small number of adolescents
indicate that they started keeping a diary in late childhood (Burt,
1994). In representative samples of 21- to 24-year-olds and 45- to
54-year-olds, only 12% and 15%, respectively, of those who had
ever kept a diary indicated that they had started a diary before
age 11, with 13 to 14 years being the most frequent age for the
onset of diary writing (Zinnecker, 1985). One classic study (Bem-
feld, 1931) showed that when children do keep diaries, it is usually
at their parents' suggestion and that their diaries are rather listlike.
In a large study of 12- to 17-year-olds, the most frequently
named reason for keeping a diary (37%) was to document one's
thoughts to look back at later (Seiffge-Krenke, 1985). Keeping a
record of the past for use in the future was also the most frequent
motive for writing diaries mentioned in 74 adolescent diaries
collected from three time periods in the 20th century (Soft, 1989).
As Bemfeld (1931) noted, the most frequent motive for keeping a
diary is autobiographical and resembles the motive for collecting
objects that symbolize the personal past (Habermas, 1999). As
with diary writing, the explicit use of material possessions as
souvenirs (Janet, 1928) of one's life is absent in children and
begins in early adolescence (Dyl & Wapner, 1996; Kamptner,
1991).
Indirect support for adolescents' emerging interest in biography
comes from a representative German sample that was asked for the
kinds of books they read at least once a month. Biographies were
nominated by 14% of those aged 12 to 15, rising to over 25% in
older age groups covering the period from mid-adolescence to
early adulthood (Bonfadelli & Darkow, 1986). We have found no
study of children's interest in reading biographies. Experts in
reading research confirm that this category is not used in studies of
children's reading interests (B. Franzmann ["Stiftung Lesen," Ger-
man Foundation for Reading Research], personal communication,
June 16, 1999). Diverse evidence suggests that a biographical
interest emerges in adolescence. We suggest that this reflects the
social-structural and developmental requirements for adolescents
to develop an individual psychosocial identity.
Cognitive Tools
The advent of formal-operational abilities (Inhelder & Piaget,
1959) supposedly enables adolescents to reason hypothetically
about their lives and to relate the distant past and remote future to
the present self (McAdams, 1985, 1996; Rosenthal, 1995). Fitzger-
ald (1986) has referred to adolescents' developing ability to tell
meaningful stories about themselves through the use of "inference-
making mechanisms" (p. 130). These authors' arguments are rea-
sonable but leave unspecified the relations between general
formal-operational skills and the construction of the life story. We
extend their work by reviewing evidence on adolescent social-
cognitive development in areas that concern the cognitive tools
necessary for constructing each of the four types of global coher-
ence seen in life narratives.
When reviewing evidence on the development of cognitive
abilities, it is essential to differentiate mere performance from
competence. Insufficient performance may be due to a number of
factors besides lack of competence (Flavell & Miller, 1998). These
include suboptimal motivation that may, for example, account for
temporal instability in responses and task-specific requirements
that are extraneous to the cognitive competence in question (Smith,
1991). Therefore, it is advisable to use multiple tasks for testing
the generality of an ability (Chandler, 1991). Ideally, the tasks
being used require no other abilities than the one that is being
tested and cannot be successfully completed other than by means
of the hypothesized cognitive operation (Chapman & Linden-
berger, 1988). Assessing competence requires thoroughly analyz-
ing task requirements as well as eliciting information about how
participants mastered a task, for example, by asking for justifica-
tions of judgments. The more spontaneous and less probed the
observed reasoning is, the more it should be regarded as an
indicator of performance level and not of competence. Therefore,
one way to test cognitive competence is to optimize individuals'
performance by extensive training. Also, the criterion should not
be the mean level of performance but rather the maximum level of
performance. All of these enumerated requirements for testing
competence are rarely met in a single study.
Many of the studies reviewed below, especially in the sections
on causal and thematic coherence, are rooted in the Piagetian
tradition and therefore aim, to varying degrees, at differentiating
performance and competence. We report features of studies that
allow the reader to judge the degree to which results identify
emerging abilities. We explicitly comment on the degree to which
competence is tested by specific studies only in extreme cases in
which clearly nothing but performance is measured or when a
study excels in differentiating competence from performance. We
also evaluate research areas in terms of how well they demonstrate
that a new cognitive ability emerges in adolescence and whether
the evidence generalizes across a variety of tasks and laboratories.
Finally, on theoretical or logical grounds, we evaluate the extent to
which the specific emerging abilities may be involved in construct-
ing the four types of global coherence seen in life narratives.
Temporal Sequencing
Even very young children are able to impose some temporal
order on events (Bauer, 1997). Three-year-olds can order events by
embedding them in dally and weekly routines (Nelson, 1988). A
linear, transitive understanding of time develops in the early school
years (Piaget, 1946; for the preschool years, see McCormack &
Hoerl, 1999).
The few pertinent studies available suggest that the ability to
temporally order a series of remote events, however, develops
later. In studies with 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children, even the
youngest were able to correctly remember single events from
specific recent times such as yesterday, last weekend, and last
summer, as corroborated by teachers and parents (Friedman, 1992,
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
Experiment 1). Only 8-year-olds, however, performed above
chance level when asked to temporally order the last occurrences
of four annually recurring events such as their birthday or Christ-
mas. Even 8-year-olds performed imperfectly in naming the month
or season of such recurring events and performed poorly when
asked to make pairwise comparisons of the relative temporal
distance of two events (Friedman, 1992, Experiment 2). Children
in preschool and grade school based judgments of temporal order
on temporal distance, with accuracy decreasing the more distant
the events were (Friedman, Gardner, & Zubin, 1995).
In adults, the ability to order distant events relies on the ability
to use structured temporal systems, such as the calendar, or land-
mark events for reconstructing temporal order and dates (Fried-
man, 1993). Use of conventional calendar knowledge apparently
begins to develop only after age 8. In a large sample of 5- to
12-year-old children, those older than 8 years showed evidence of
calendar knowledge for ordering two distant past events, but even
12-year-olds still used calendar knowledge inaccurately (Friedman
et al., 1995, Experiment 1). Another group of researchers (Strube
& Weber, 1988) found a somewhat earlier development of land-
mark strategies that rely on knowledge of calendar cycles for
ordering memories. Performance in ordering personal experiences
improved when seasons of the year were offered as landmarks in
the 8-year-olds, but not in the 5-and 9-year-olds. This indicated
that 5-year-olds could not make use of seasons for dating events,
whereas 9-year-olds spontaneously used seasons as landmarks for
ordering recollective memories. Friedman (1993) suggested that
further development of temporal understanding may depend on the
replacement of a listlike, sequential representation of the calendar
by an imagelike representation of the days of the week and months
of the year in early to middle adolescence (see Friedman, 1986).
The evidence reviewed here is limited by its cross-sectional
nature and by originating largely from only one laboratory. It does,
however, indicate that although preschool children are able to
correctly remember events from specified times during the past
year, the use of conventional cyclical time structures begins only
at about age 8 and continues to be refined through mid-
adolescence. Concerning the temporal ordering of events in life
narratives, it remains unclear whether calendar knowledge is spe-
cificaily needed to order major distant life events. Alternatively, in
the absence of the ability to reconstruct calendar dates, events
could be sequenced using conditional relationships (e.g., in order
to have had an accident at school, my first day at school must have
already happened) or by reference to the cultural concept of
biography.
Cultural Concept of Biography
As with temporal sequencing, little developmental research has
examined the acquisition of the cultural concept of biography.
Available evidence suggests that a culturally normative sequence
of standard events to be included in biographies is acquired early
in adolescence. Rosenthal (1995) reported that whereas younger
children produce unconnected recountings of memorable events,
young adolescents embed events in a conventional biographical
structure that normatively orders the sequence of events such as
birth, birth of siblings, school transitions, and geographical relo-
cations. In one study (Strube, Gehringer, Ernst, & Knill, 1985), 46
participants in three age groups described the probable life course
755
of a fictitious young and a fictitious old person shown in a
photograph. Participants were presented 30 (ll-year-olds) or 50
(19-year-olds, 35- to 40-year-olds) age-graded life events. All
participants selected about two thirds of the cards as representing
normative life events and ordered them temporally. The group of
preadolescents (age 11) ordered the events according to the nor-
mative sequence with only a few deviations. Adolescents (age 19)
accomplished the task perfectly, whereas adults (35-40 years)
again showed more variation. In contrast to the preadolescents, the
adults, however, did not violate established cultural or logical
conditionalrelationships between items. In a separate task, adults
were better than preadolescents at sorting the life events into one
of five age periods. The authors concluded that whereas the pre-
adolescents' performance demonstrated their imperfect mastery of
what we term the cultural concept of biography, the adults con-
veyed a more realistic variation in the life course than did the
adolescents, whose depiction was highly stereotyped.
The generalizability of these findings is limited by the small
number of participants. This pattern of results has, however, been
confirmed in a study of knowledge about age-typical psychologi-
cai and social development. Participants aged 4 to 17 years as-
signed 48 items concerning psychological traits, maturational char-
acteristics, and social events to one of eight life phases. Correct
knowledge of characteristics of life phases increased with grade
and age up to about age 13 (Schorsch, 1992). Similarly, written
accounts of their lives by 9- to 10-year-olds evidenced the begin-
nings of the use of normative life events for structuring a life (Juen,
1997).
On the basis of converging but sparse evidence, it appears that
the cultural concept of biography emerges in late childhood and
early adolescence. We suggest that the cultural concept of biog-
raphy provides a basic and normative grid that can be used to
select and arrange life events into coherent life narratives. This
tentative conclusion needs further empirical corroboration from
studies focusing on late childhood and early adolescence and using
diverse methods such as life narratives, pairwise temporal ordering
of normative life events, detection of abnormalities in sequences,
and training studies.
If the ability for temporal sequencing of distant events and a
cultural concept of biography emerge toward the end of childhood,
older children and preadolescents should be able to create skeletal
coherence in life narratives in terms of sequential order and nor-
mative content. The following two types of coherence, however,
transform a temporally and normatively sequenced list of events
into an interpreted life story. We argue that although the types of
coherence reviewed thus far emerge in late childhood to early
adolescence, the more cognitively sophisticated forms of coher-
ence (causal, thematic) develop only during adolescence.
Causal Coherence
We begin by presenting studies of the development of causal
coherence in shorter narratives and then provide a more extensive
review of the cognitive developments that support the ability to
establish global causal coherence in the life story. These include
the development of the person-concept that allows the explanation
of a variety of actions and events through reference to a charac-
teristic of the self and the cognitive developments that contribute
to the ability to explain personal change and discontinuity.
756 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
Causal coherence in texts. An essential integrative .device in
adults' life narratives is establishing causal relationships between
various events and between past events and the present self.
Research on the development of the causal structuring of nan'a-
fives has relied on brief stories. A review of this literature (van den
Broek, 1997) concluded that this focus on brief stories makes it
difficult to generalize these developments to the causal structuring
of more complex narratives. However, even in developing local
coherence (within a story), adolescents and young adults are more
sophisticated than children. When telling the story of a boy's loss
and retrieval of a frog on the basis of a series of pictures (see
Berman & Slobin, 1994), young adults referred to the boy's
intentions and other states of mind more often than 9-year-olds and
were more concerned with the pursuit of the central goal (Bamberg
& Damrad-Frye, 1991). A different study (van den Broek, 1989)
used a more complex story that contained three distinct but related
subepisodes, each with its own goal. Of the 8-, 11-, 14-, and
18-year-old participants, all groups but the 8-year-olds rated the
importance of sentences in accordance with how many interepi-
sodic causal links they implied. When asked for reasons for spe-
cific actions, the three older age groups provided more answers
that linked episodes than did the 8-year-olds. In a similar vein,
Low and Durkin's (1998) study using narratives of a police story
with five video episodes showed no age differences between 6-, 8-,
10-, and 12-year-olds in the frequency of implicit causal interepi-
sode links when the story was presented in the canonical order.
However, when the episodes were shown in noncanonical order,
interepisode causal links were established only by the two older
age groups.
Clearly, a life story is much more extended and complex than
the situations or stories used in these studies. Description of a life
requires not only local coherence within stories but also global
coherence across the life. Given this, it seems probable that the
ability to create causal links between disparate stories--
acknowledging differences while recognizing that all stories be-
long to the same individual's life--develops later than coherence
within single stories. Preliminary evidence is provided by an
exploratory study of life narratives with a total of twelve 12-, 15-,
and 18-year-olds (Habermas & Paha, 1999). Mnemonic and com-
binatorial task-requirements were reduced by providing partici-
pants with cards on which they noted major events from their lives
and ordered them beforehand. Of all causally linked statements,
those concerning actions or states extending up t o 1 month de-
creased with age, whereas those extending over longer time inter-
vals increased with age, thus indicating an increase in global causal
coherence. Explanations of actions by personality and references
to developmental status for explaining past actions were present
only in the two older groups. Explanations of personal disconti-
nuity and use of particular biographical experiences to explain
actors' specific responses to situations were evident only in the
18-year-olds. Expressions that related lasting change in attitude,
values, or habits to a specific biographical experience were also
present only in the oldest age group. This study provides some
preliminary evidence for the adolescent emergence of causal co-
herence in life narratives.
These studies of causal coherence in text tapped performance
level, not competence, because reasoning was not probed, chal-
lenged, or optimized in any other way. We therefore turn to
examining studies of specific cognitive tools for creating causal
coherence in the life story. These often address competence more
clearly.
Explanations of actions. The more integrative one's self-
conception, the more one's characteristics can be used to explain
a variety of events and actions, thereby contributing to coherence
in life narratives (for a review of the development of self, see
Harter, 1999). Free descriptions of self and significant others made
by children, adolescents, and young adults develop from physical,
concrete, o~ action-focused terms in early childhood to more
abstract and stable psychological trait descriptors in late childhood
and early adolescence (Bernstein, 1980; Hoffner & Cantor, 1985;
Montemayor & Eisen, 1977; Secord & Peevers, 1974). The emer-
gence of the use of psychological trait descriptors in late child-
hood, however, has been questioned by researchers who report
their use even by preschoolers (Eder, Gerlach, & Perlmutter, 1987)
and by studies on the development of dispositional trait attribu-
tions and their use for predicting behavior (A. S. Feldman &
Ruble, 1988; Ferguson, Olthof, Luiten, & Ruble, 1984). A problem
with these latter studies is that they used an overgeneralized
concept of trait. The use of trait words needs to be differentiated
according to their abstractness or distance from concrete behaviors
(Barenboim, 1985; Ruble & Dweck, 1995; Yuill, 1997a). Studies
that claimed preschoolers have trait knowledge did not differenti-
ate between the prediction of behavior based on using psycholog-
ical traits as causes versus that based on matching highly similar or
identical situations and behaviors or on matching behaviors in
terms of a general evaluation (Rholes, Newman, & Ruble, 1990).
Although preschool children clearly can make highly general
evaluations, they cannot think in terms of more abstract traits such
as abilities. Older children, in contrast, can experimentally be
induced to use either general evaluations or abstract traits (E.
Thompson, Boggiano, Costanzo, Matter, & Ruble, 1995; see also
Ruble & Dweck, 1995).
A more refined description of the development of the person-
concept has resulted from the use of the Piagetian clinical inter-
view method with large samples of children, adolescents, and
young adults. Selman (1980) used hypothetical dilemmas, whereas
Damon and Hart (1988) used open-ended questions concerning the
participants themselves. The sequences of levels of development
are quite similar, and both have been confirmed longitudinally.
Studies with three measurements over 2 (Damon & Hart, 1986)
or 3 years (Guruccharri & Selman, 1982) both reported high
interrater reliability for modal level score and also confirmed the
unidirectionality of the developmental sequence. The correlation
of Damon and Hart's levels with chronological age has also been
confirmed cross-culturally (Hart, Lucca-Irizarry, & Damon, 1986).
Here, we report only the basic descriptive characteristics of the
levels of understanding of persons based on these two models
(note that Damon and Hart collapsed Levels 0 and 1 into a single
level.)
Preschool children describe themselves and others in terms of
physical appearance and general evaluations such as good or nice
(Level 0). Young schoolchildren describe people in terms of sim-
ple feelings, preferences (cf. Yuill, 1997b), and specific abilities,
such as "She's good in math" (Level I). Older schoolchildren
systematically compare their own specific skills with a reference
group. They describe personality as the sum of unrelated but
relatively stable habits and attitudes that generalize across multiple
actions and feelings (Level 2). In early to mid-adolescence a
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
psychological concept of personality develops that integrates a
variety of emotional and motivational states with ways of acting in
relationships. By organizing an array of characteristics into the
unitary concept of an underlying trait, the notion of a consistent
personality develops. The concept tends to be overgeneralized,
however, such as characterizing someone as a nerd or a jerk (Level
3). In mid- to late adolescence the view of personality includes the
possibility of conflicts between various parts of personality and the
understanding that some parts of personality are not easily acces-
sible to awareness. People may be further evaluated in the light of
moral or philosophical belief systems (Level 4).
The use of the clinical interview method (see Vinh-Bang, 1978)
for assessing social-cognitive developments in these studies offers
two advantages. It provides evidence for the emergence of quali-
tatively new forms of reasoning. It also offers researchers the
opportunity to challenge responses so that participants are moti-
vated to use the most mature form of reasoning of which they are
capable. This optimal performance may be interpreted as an indi-
cator of actual social-cognitive competence. However, there are
two task demands inherent in these interviews. They require both
verbal abilities and the ability to reflect on and explicate reasoning
processes (Chandler & Sokol, 1999). Although verbal abilities,
because of advanced language development, should no longer be a
restricting task demand in the adolescent age range, the emergence
of the explicit, reflective use of specific qualitative forms of
reasoning may be preceded by their implicit, prereflective use.
We therefore briefly review experimental studies of prereflec-
tive use of forms of reasoning to show that they do support the
results reported above. Experiments have demonstrated the devel-
opment from Level 0 to Level 1, that is, from behavioral predic-
tions based on physical appearance to predictions based on inten-
tions (Hoffner & Cantor, 1985), and from behavioral regularity to
regularity of intentions and desires (Yuill & Pearson, 1998). That
the ability to explain self-presentational, deceptive motives for
behavior (Level 2) emerges only in late childhood has also been
shown experimentally (Banerjee & Yuill, 1999). To assess the
development of the self-concept in adolescence, Harter and Mon-
sour (1992) asked participants to relate descriptions of the self in
different social contexts to each other. Fifteen-year-olds indicated
more conflicts among self-attributes than either 13-year-olds or
17-year-olds; they named slightly fewer conflicts than the middle
age group. This finding has been interpreted in terms of social-
cognitive development of the person-concept (Harter, Bresnick,
Bouchey, & Whitesell, 1997). At Level 2, no general consistency
is expected, whereas at Level 3, attributes that cannot be integrated
into a unitary self-concept are experienced as contradictory, which
may explain the peak in perceived contradictoriness of self-
attributes at age 15. The late-adolescent ability to integrate oppos-
ing traits (Level 4) lessens judgments of contradictoriness. Overall,
these experimental studies support the developmental sequence of
the person-concept shown in interview studies.
Adolescents' emerging ability to explain a variety of behaviors
in terms of enduring dispositions is reflected in their growing
tendency to combine situational with dispositional attributions
(Blanchard-Fields & Norris, 1994). Following Case's (1985) the-
ory of cognitive development, Marini and Case (1994) adminis-
tered five tasks of graded difficulty to participants aged 11 to 19
years. Participants were asked to infer a protagonist's traits from
vignettes containing several situations and to predict behavior in a
757
new situation. The majority of 13-year-olds abstracted one per-
sonal trait from a vignette and used it to predict the protagonist's
behavior in a second situation. The majority of 16-year-olds suc-
ceeded in abstracting two potentially contradictory traits and used
both for predicting behavior. The majority of 19-year-olds also
acknowledged mood as a situational force. Because participants'
explanations were not probed, results may somewhat overestimate
the timing of the emergence of the underlying competence.
In applying the general person-concept to oneself, one's own
personality can be understood in ever more general and integrated
terms with each developmental level attained. For example, across
the five levels of development, a specific episode may respectively
be understood to reveal something about one' s personality in terms
of physical appearance, preferred activities, attitudes and habits,
the type of person one is, or, finally, in terms of complex multi-
layered intrapsychic processes and basic values. Even beyond that,
adolescents learn to combine personality with situational informa-
tion in explaining events and behaviors.
We have reviewed the development of the person-concept
across laboratories and methods to argue that the growing integra-
tion of the person-concept in adolescence allows the individual to
create causal coherence in the life story by reference to a single or
a few central self-characteristics. The more general and integrated
self-characteristics are, the greater the number and variety of
actions and events that may be explained with reference to this set
of characteristics. The research presented indicates that it is only in
early adolescence that the person-concept is developed enough to
allow the individual to explain actions across situations and across
time by reference to central underlying psychological traits.
Explanations of personal discontinuity. A coherent life narra-
tive must account for change and development over time. Thus, it
is essential to interrelate past and present selves by establishing
causal links between life circumstances or events and one's per-
sonal development. Global causal coherence provides a diachronic
understanding of how individuals remain themselves in spite of
change (i.e., maintain self-continuity) and a biographical under-
standing of how previous experiences have shaped oneself. We
review evidence from three areas demonstrating that causal rea-
soning about personal development emerges during adolescence:
development of criteria for what constitutes personal continuity,
development of the understanding of mechanisms of human de-
velopment, and development of an awareness of the significance of
the past for understanding the present.
To explain continuity in the face of change, children must first
learn criteria for defining personal change and continuity. A large
questionnaire study with 13- to 19-year-olds (Dreher & Dreher,
1991) failed to find specific age differences in conceptions of
personal change. There was, however, a significant decrease with
age in the number of statements that conceived of change as a
product, not a process. Thus, during adolescence, personal change
is increasingly conceived of as a process. Studies that use more
developmentally refined content categories show more specific
changes. For example, interview studies with children aged 6 to 9
(Guardo & Bohan, 1971) and 6 to 12 (Mohr, 1978) showed that the
conception of self-continuity develops from seeing only physical
and external attributes as continuous to seeing behavioral and
role-related activities as continuing over time (in late childhood),
to understanding that internal, psychological traits or processes
may show continuity (beginning in early adolescence).
758 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
Chandler and colleagues (Chandler, Boyes, Ball, & Hala, 1987)
have proposed the only specific developmental sequence that goes
beyond childhood to describe how adolescents conceptualize how
their present self has evolved from their past self. At Level 1, the
self is conceived of as a mosaic of attributes, and continuity is
based on a sufficient number of attributes being stable. At Level 2,
apparent change is seen as not necessarily indicating change in the
introspective self. At Level 3, personality change is conceived of
as occurring only in the surface manifestations of the underlying
stable attributes. Past and present self are considered to be func-
tionally continuous. At Level 4, a developmental conception of
continuity frames the past self as a necessary precondition for, and
basis of, the present self without requiring any element to remain
identical over time. At Level 5, self-continuity is understood as
existing only in the consistency of retrospective autobiographical
interpretation'andreconstruction of one's life story. We expect that
the level of abstractness of the concept of personal continuity
determines how successfully discontinuities can be rendered con-
sistent with a sense of personal identity through time.
Reasoning about personal continuity was elicited in interviews
with 50 adolescents aged 13 to 18 who responded to fictional
accounts of personal discontinuity. Levels of understanding of
personal discontinuity (1 to 5) correlated substantially with per-
formance on standard Piagetian tasks (Chandler et al., 1987). In a
second study with 29 adolescents aged t3 to 18, conceptions of
continuity correlated only moderately with age (Chandler & Ball,
1991; cf. Ball & Chandler, 1989). This may have resulted from the
narrow age range studied. Both studies were hampered by small
sample size and restricted age range.
Beyond understanding personal continuity and change, bridging
discontinuity also requires an understanding of how and why
changes come about. To date, there has been little work on the
ontogenesis of the understanding of developmental mechanisms.
The only theory of reasoning about developmental processes has
focused on a transition between ages 8 and 12 (Montangero, 1996).
Using a variety of pictorial and verbal material representing dif-
ferent points in a transformative process, followed by an interview
using Piaget's clinical method, this series of studies described the
development of the understanding of physical, biological, and
human transformations.
Reasoning about developmental mechanisms moves from a
quantitative to a qualitative conception of change: from explaining
change using external or maturational forces to using internal
causes, to combining internal and external causes. This has been
demonstrated, for example, in a study on children's understanding
of the development of drawing skills (Tryphon & Montangero,
1992). Children aged 6 to 11 years were presented 12 pictures of
human figures created by 4- to 12-year-old children. After having
ordered the pictures according to the estimated age of their cre-
ators, participants were asked why drawing skills changed with
age. With the respondents' own age, responses changed from
"because of their age" to "because they have been taught to draw,"
to developments taking place within the person concerning, for
example, motor skills or imagination, as well as references to
practice or development.
We know of no ~Iudies concerning the understanding of the
causes and mechanisms of the development of personality. The
results reviewed from studies with other foci, however, are sug-
gestive of adolescent developments in this area. They indicate that
in mid- to late adolescence, personal stability is discussed in terms
of core temperament (Selman, Lavin, Cooney, Jacobs, & Brion-
Meisels, 1979) and change is seen as a process of conscious
trade-offs between basic values (Damon & Hart, 1988; see also
Blasi & Milton, 1991).
A third facet of the understanding of human development is the
recognition of the significance of the personal past for present
personality. This diachronic tendency (Montangero, 1996) in-
volves viewing an event in an extended temporal context. Al-
though it relies on a basic cognitive competence, the diachronic
tendency is a performance characteristic. In one study, a series of
four videotaped social interactions of a target person was presented
on one day, and an additional scene was presented one day later.
Whereas a group of 9- to 21-year-olds based their judgment of the
target person's character on information from all five episodes, 5-
to 6-year-olds did so only when the behavior in the final episode
contradicted prior behaviors. Otherwise, these younger children
based their judgment exclusively on the actor's behavior in the
final episode (Rholes & Ruble, 1986).
In two similar studies with individuals ranging from age 8 to
young adulthood, participants were asked to describe three draw-
ings depicting different dramatic events. Across adolescence, there
was an increase in the number of references to events prior to or
following the depicted event (Montangero & Pons, 1995). In
several studies (Gnepp, 1989; Gnepp & Gould, 1985), participants
were told or shown stories in which the first event might reason-
ably influence the protagonist's appraisal of the second event.
Asked to predict or explain the protagonist's reaction to the second
event, 10-year-olds, but not 5- and 7-year-olds, were able to extract
personalized information from the first event and apply it to the
second event when asked to do so. Compared with adults, children
in all age groups less frequently spontaneously appreciated the
relevance of prior experience to people's appraisals of current
events.
When extended to the temporal frame of a life, the diachronic
tendency results in understanding individuals from a biographical
perspective. Research on the person-concept shows that in early to
mid-adolescence individuals begin to notice the influence of long-
term experiences, such as the character of an individual's parents
or the way the individual was brought up, on the formation of
personality (Selman et al., 1979). Still later in adolescence, indi-
viduals begin to understand their present actions and life choices in
terms of their individual life experiences. In an extensive interview
study with 14- to 22-year-olds on conceptions of why people
commit suicide, only older adolescents spontaneously related sui-
cidal motives to the subject's life history (Drbert & Nunner-
Winkler, 1994). When summarizing a story, 19- and 22-year-olds,
but not 14- and 17-year-olds, mentioned personal long-term goals
of the protagonists (Beach & Wendler, 1987).
In other research, comprehension of an orally presented story of
an adolescent's dilemma was studied in three age groups (10 to 12
years, 15 to 19 years, 26 to 49 years; C. Feldman, Bruner, Kalmar,
& Renderer, 1993). Presentation was repeatedly interrupted to
check for comprehension and interpretation. A summary of the
story was requested at the end. Preadolescents interpreted
thoughts, motives, and intentions of protagonists exclusively in
terms of their present roles, desires, and options for action. Older
adolescents extended their view by interpreting the protagonist's
behaviors, using the history of the protagonist's life as relevant
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
information for inferring present motivations. Generalizability of
results is, however, bruited by the small sample size and lack of
standardized coding.
Summary. Research on the development of causal coherence
in texts rarely includes adolescent or adult participants. The texts
that are used as stimuli are restricted in their temporal range and
complexity. Therefore, these studies provide evidence of basic
building blocks for the understanding of global causal coherence in
life narratives. Unfortunately, the one study showing the develop-
ment of causal coherence in actual life narratives across adoles-
cence had only a small number of participants.
Research provides strong evidence of the emergence of quali-
tatively new forms of the person-concept in adolescence. This is
substantiated by multiple methods and attempts to differentiate
mere performance from competence. In contrast, research on the
development of reasoning about personal continuity and change in
adolescence is sparse. The studies by Chandler and colleagues
(Chandler & Ball, 1991; Chandler et al., 1987) and by C. Feldman
et al. (1993) are promising, given that they aim at tapping quali-
tative differences in development. In-depth studies of emerging
notions of continuity and mechanisms of change in human devel-
opment would further elucidate the cognitive means for construct-
ing a life story in adolescence.
In short, the developing abilities we have reviewed serve as
cognitive tools for creating global causal coherence in the life story
in adolescence. They allow integration of past events and personal
changes into one's current view of life through causally linking
later to earlier selves.
Thematic Coherence
Thematic integration of a life narrative relies on the develop-
ment of three simpler abilities: the ability to summarize multiepi-
sode stories, the ability to interpret stories, and an awareness that
inferential processes are employed in autobiographical remember-
ing and reasoning. The reviewed evidence suggests that these skills
develop during adolescence.
Summarizing stories. The tendency to spontaneously summa-
rize stories increases across adolescence. In one study, children
recounted the aforementioned frog story based on a series of
pictures. None of the 3- to 7-year-olds, only 13% of the 9- to
11-year-olds, and 50% of the adults spontaneously produced a
summary statement specifying the overall goal of the story (Ber-
man, 1988). In another study, 8- to 12-year-olds were presented a
series of drawings depicting stages of the life cycle of a person and
asked "What does all that represent?" Only from age 10 onwards
did a majority of participants integrate the pictures using a single
phrase (e.g., "It's the life of a man"). Younger children described
a single picture or several pictures one after the other (Montangero
& Parrat-Dayan, 1992).
When participants are explicitly requested to provide summaries
of multiepisode stories, results even more clearly indicate that this
summarizing ability develops only in adolescence. Choosing
among three titles for the three subepisodes of the "Jimmy wants
a bike----Jimmy wants money--Jimmy wants a new paper route"
story, 11-, 14-, and 18-year-olds preferred the title referring to the
superordinate goal of getting a bike, whereas 8-year-olds did not
differentiate between these three rifles (van den Broek, Naslund,
Ivers, & Verduin, 1996). Similarly, over 75% of 14-year-olds, but
759
only 25% of 10-year-olds, were able to provide adequate state-
ments of the main theme of two complex biographical stories
(Williams, 1993). Evidence of continuous development of the-
matic abihties across adolescence is provided by a study in which
16- to 19-year-olds provided more gist statements when asked to
summarize a biographical narrative than a group of 12- to 15-year-
olds (Adams, 1991).
In sum, the abihty to extract the central theme of multiepisode
stories gradually develops after age 10, depending on the com-
plexity of the story. Life narratives, however, do not have the
clear-cut hierarchical goal structure that stories do. Therefore,
thematic integration of life narratives requires active interpretation
in addition to the ability to capture the gist or superordinate goal.
Interpreting stories. The spontaneous tendency to interpret
texts develops later in adolescence than does the ability to provide
a mere summary of the plot of fictional stories. When asked for
reasons why they liked or disliked the stories, no 9-year-old, but
20% of the 13-year-olds and 80% of the 17-year-olds, provided
interpretations of the point of the story (Applebee, 1978). Other
studies suggest that metaphorical interpretations of stories are even
more frequent after adolescence (Adams, 1991; Adams, Smith,
Nyquist, & Perlmutter, 1997; James, Burke, Austin, & Hulme,
1998; Jepson & Labouvie-Vief, 1992). Because these studies re-
port on performance levels in interpreting stories, results indicate
only that the spontaneous tendency to interpret stories emerges in
mid-adolescence and continues to develop through at least the
early adult years. It cannot be ruled out, however, that the com-
petence to interpret stories may be achieved earlier. Thus, studies
on the development of the ability to interpret stories in late child-
hood and early adolescence are needed.
The ability to summarize and the ability to provide interpreta-
tion are involved in creating global coherence through finding
themes in one's own life. One salient difference between inter-
preting a text and interpreting a life, however, is that the latter is
constrained not only by claims of consistency and meaningfulness
but also by truth claims. To be able to interpret a life, the individ-
ual must have some awareness that a life story is not just a question
of knowing facts and that facts can be understood and interpreted
from a variety of perspectives (e.g., self vs~ others, present self vs.
past selves). This awareness implies realizing that one's current
version may be interpreted by relating it to possible alternative
accounts. The understanding that a life must be interpreted is based
on the development of an awareness of inferential processes.
Awareness of inferential processes. The effort an individual
invests in interpreting and reinterpreting his or her life depends on
that person' s understanding of the sources of knowledge about the
facts and meaning of the personal past. If children take the re-
membered facts and events of life as self-evident truths, then
interpretation of life will not be seen as necessary or even possible.
Awareness of the inferential aspects of mental activity begins to
emerge, in a very basic form, around age 8, when children differ-
entiate valid from invalid deductive inferences and guessing in
judging the presence of a hidden toy (Pillow, Hill, Boyce, & Stein,
2000) and start to realize that ambiguous situations may be under-
stood in a variety of ways by different people (Carpendale &
Chandler, 1996). Studies on the development of more complex
epistemological reasoning demonstrate that an understanding of
the necessity to interpret evidence (instead of simply accepting it)
begins to emerge in mid-adolescence and continues to develop
760 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
through young adulthood (Boyes & Chandler, 1992; for a review,
see Hofer & Pintrich, 1997).
On the basis of K. Fischer's (1980) theory of cognitive devel-
opment, the most elaborate developmental theory in this area
describes seven developmental levels of reflective judgment
(Kitchener & Fischer, 1990). It predicts that individuals move
from taking truth statements for granted in late childhood and early
adolescence (Levels 1 to 3) to an understanding that knowledge is
uncertain in mid-adolescence (Level 4), to a conception of truth as
depending on context and on the integration of a variety of sources
of information in late adolescence and early adulthood (Levels 5 to
7). On the basis of interviews, Kitchener and colleagues have
accumulated cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence for the se-
quentiality of these levels and their developmental timing (for a
review, see King & Kitchener, 1994).
For example, a cross-sectional study (ages 14 to 28) assessed
reflective judgment by using the theory's standard interview: pos-
ing seven unprobed questions for each of two ill-defined problems
such as the safety of chemical additives to food. In addition, a
subgroup saw statements that were prototypic for each level, and
their understanding of the statements was probed. All participants
completed the standard interview again after 2 weeks. Maximal
level of performance in the standard task using unprobed questions
at Time 1 corresponded to mean level of performance at Time 2 in
the group that had practiced reflective judgment by discussing
prototypical statements. This cross-validates the interpretation of
the maximum score gained in the standard interview and the mean
performance score after practice as both being indicators of com-
petence. Maximal level of reflective judgment correlated highly
with age (King & Kitchener, 1994) even when controlling for
verbal ability. Maximal reasoning at Level 5 first emerged at
age 15 and was demonstrated by over half of the participants in
each age group from age 18 onwards. Maximal reasoning at
Level 6 first emerged at age 17 and was used by over half of the
participants from age 21 onwards (Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, &
Wood, 1993).
Awareness in mid-adolescence of the uncertainty of knowledge
and of the necessity for using inference and interpretation has also
been studied with regard to the ability to reconstruct the historical
(see also Seixas, 1996; Wineburg, 1996) and the personal past.
Adolescents develop an understanding that event sequences can be
constructed and interpreted by taking multiple perspectives into
account (Kuhn, 1991). Advanced historical reasoning involves
resolving conflicting accounts by weighing the credibility of
sources, examining possible biases in information, and interpreting
the context in which information was gained. Developmental
trends from mid-adolescence to middle adulthood are apparent in
studies in which participants were presented multiple sources of
historical evidence (Shemilt, 1980, cited in Wineburg, 1996) and
conflicting accounts of highly emotional interpersonal conflicts
(Blanchard-Fields, 1986). In the latter study, three age groups (14
to 16, 20 to 25, and 30 to 46 years) were presented discrepant
accounts of a fictional historical scenario (taken from Kuhn, Pen-
nington, & Leadbeater, 1983; Leadbeater & Kuhn, 1989) and
discrepant accounts of fictional personal scenarios. Participants
used the discrepant accounts to construct their version of what they
thought probably had happened. Probed responses were coded
using Kitchener's developmental sequence. The expected devel-
opmental sequence was thereby confirmed cross-sectionally. The
earliest and mean ages at which levels were reached were some-
what higher than in studies using the previously mentioned ill-
defined problems (see, e.g., Kitchener et al., 1993).
Thus, epistemological reasoning in mid-adolescence ranges
from naive realism to skepticism when measured using either
ill-defined problems or conflicting accounts. Even older adoles-
cents rarely reach levels of epistemological reasoning at which
varying perspectives are systematically combined to reach a well-
argued version of probable truth. The studies reported in this
subsection used appropriate interview techniques, probing for the
highest level of reasoning on a variety of tasks with several
different samples. Unfortunately, however, we know of no studies
on epistemological reasoning with younger participants or with
more differentiated adolescent age groups that could demonstrate
more clearly the lower age boundaries of skeptical and integrated
epistemological reasoning.
The emerging awareness of the inferential and constructive
nature of knowledge in mid- to late adolescence is also confLrmed
by studies using other methods. When retelling the frog story
mentioned above, young adults spontaneously used hedges (e.g.,
probably, kind of, looks like) four times as often as 9-year-olds,
marking their recognition of the distance between the original
story and their remembered and interpreted version of it (Bamberg
& Damrad-Frye, 1991). In an exploratory study of life narratives
(12-, 15-, and 18-year-olds; Habermas & Paha, 1999), the percent-
age of expressions of uncertainty concerning one's explanations
increased with age. Expressions of uncertainty regarding other
aspects of the narrative (e.g., timing, descriptions) did not vary
with age. This indicates a specific increase in the awareness of
inferential and interpretative processes involved in telling a life
story.
The lower age boundary of knowledge about inferential mech-
anisms is seen clearly in a study of the psychological organization
of mental verbs. Nine- and 11-year-olds and adults of unspecified
age were presented several scenarios and a list of 17 mental verbs
(e.g., thinking, remembering, knowing) and asked to indicate at
least three verbs describing mental activities possible in each
scenario. Multidimensional scaling for each age group showed that
9-year-olds' responses resulted in a cluster of verbs concerning
information input, 11-year-olds showed an additional cluster of
verbs concerning memory processes, and adults' responses also
produced a third cluster of verbs concerning constructive informa-
tion processing (i.e., estimate, guess, reason, think, question).
Thus, an awareness of uncertainty in knowing and remembering
seems to emerge across adolescence (Schwanenflugel, Henderson,
& Fabricius, 1998). Because of the composition of age groups, the
study does not provide evidence on the precise timing of this
development during adolescence.
Summary. The research reviewed in this section on thematic
coherence demonstrates that the ability to surnrnarize multiepisode
stories and an awareness that inferential processes are used to
interpret and reconstruct the past begin to develop in mid-
adolescence. Studies on the emergence of the ability to interpret
complex multiepisode stories are lacking, but the spontaneous
tendency to interpret stories also appears to emerge in
mid-adolescence.
The ability to recognize and combine multiple sources of infor-
mation makes it possible to move beyond seeing past events as
fixed. We argue that the ability to take situational factors into
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
account (e.g., differences between one's past and present life
situations) and to see differences between perspectives (e.g., be-
tween one's own and other's perspectives) allows for the creation
of thematic coherence between versions of the past and the present.
Cognitive Tools: Summary
We have reviewed studies of social-cognitive developments
that should contribute to the ability to create four types of coher-
ence in the life story: temporal sequencing, cultural concept of
biography, causal coherence, and thematic coherence. This body of
research provides converging evidence that a variety of social-
cognitive abilities arises in adolescence. There are differences in
the timing of the development of these cognitive tools. Temporal
sequencing of distant experiences begins to develop during the
grade school years, followed by the acquisition of a cultural
concept of biography by about age 10. A wealth of studies points
to the emergence in early adolescence of an integrated person-
concept that can be used to integrate diverse episodes and thereby
produce causal coherence. Preliminary evidence also suggests the
emergence in mid- to late adolescence of biographical conceptions
of how individuals change due to life experiences while neverthe-
less remaining the same individual. The ability to thematically
interpret complex texts and an awareness of the necessity to
interpret past events begin to develop in mid- to late adolescence
and may continue into adulthood. These cognitive tools are nec-
essary for autobiographical reasoning and thereby for the emer-
gence of the life story.
Conclusion
We have outlined a conceptual framework for the development
of the life story in adolescence to fill the gap between research on
the development of autobiographical remembering in childhood
and research on adults' autobiographical remembering and re-
counting of their lives. Our focus was on two aspects of the life
story: life narratives and autobiographical reasoning. We defined
the life story with reference to four types of global coherence in
life narratives and discussed the specific forms of autobiographical
reasoning by which this coherence is achieved. We identified
general social-cognitive abilities that serve as cognitive tools for
autobiographical reasoning when they are applied to a specific
object, a human life. As far as is possible with the existing
research, we have lent both theoretical and empirical support to the
emergence of the life story in adolescence. To highlight the po-
tential of this approach, we now outline research strategies for
studying the development of the life story and also suggest ways in
which the life story approach may enrich other areas of research.
Research Needed to Substantiate the Development
of the Life Story
Our review of research has identified major gaps in our under-
standing of adolescent development. Further direct empirical evi-
dence is needed for the emergence of the life story in adolescence.
Three areas of research are .particularly important for substantiat-
ing the proposed framework of the life story: characteristics of the
life story in adulthood, its emergence during adolescence, and its
cognitive-developmental preconditions.
761
To test whether we have selected the four most important types
of coherence that contribute to a life story's overall global coher-
ence, it is necessary to develop standardized measures of these
types of coherence for life narratives that may then also be applied
to autobiographical reasoning in more partial narratives. This
involves constructing a taxonomy of specific linguistic and con-
ceptual means for creating the four types of coherence. It should be
based on linguistic models of coherence-relations but must also
rely on psychological concepts that are more specific to life
narratives, such as the concept of explanations of personal discon-
finuity. The resulting taxonomy should be validated in several
ways, for example, by asking observers to rate the four types of
coherence, as well as overall global coherence of each life narra-
five. These ratings could be then compared to ratings of how good
or typical a life narrative appears to be.
Direct tests of the emergence of the life story in adolescence are
needed. Methods should be used that exclude explanations of low
performance other than lack of competence to create a life story.
We would not expect to find an absolute lower threshold for the
development of the life story. Rather, it should be of interest to
delineate the gradual emergence of the life story across adoles-
cence and early adulthood. The focus would be on identifying
possible developmental sequences of the means to produce global
coherence-relations (temporal, cultural concept of biography,
causal, thematic) between age 10 and adulthood.
Studying the development of the competence to create a life
story requires the use of diverse methods to rule out explanations
of low levels of performance, such as suboptimal motivation or
extraneous social or cognitive task-demands. The condition of
directly asking children and adolescents to narrate their life could
be complemented by conditions in which motivation is enhanced
by, for example, offering a reward or having a puppet narrate its
life story. Other tasks could reduce demands on memory and
demands for combinatorial reasoning by providing written or
graphic representations of parts of the life to be arranged and
manipulated physically as a basis for narrating.
ff children or adolescents indeed fall to produce life narratives
or specific types of global coherence, it could still be that they do
have the concept of a life story or the specific type of coherence in
question but are unable to use it for actively narrating their life.
Thus, life narratives of other persons could be presented, possibly
by puppets or video figures. Participants would be asked to retell
the life narratives, rate the importance of their parts, or recognize
them. Differential quality of responses for parts that are essential
or nonessential for the four types of coherence would indicate a
passive understanding of global coherence in life narratives. Al-
ternatively, life narratives of varying degrees of coherence--for
instance, life narratives produced by children, adolescents, and
adults--could be rated with regard to their quality by children,
adolescents, adults, and adult experts.
Even if children or adolescents fail to recognize coherence
relations in life narratives under these conditions, one could still
argue that they fall only because they have not learned the specific
concept of a life story and that they would be able to construct or
recognize a life story if they only knew the concept. To counter
this argument of a deficit in knowledge instead of in cognitive
abilities requires teaching and training children and adolescents
what a life narrative is (for ethical reasons, only others' or fictional
life narratives could be used). If they were unable to learn the
762 HABERMAS AND BLUCK~
concept, this would demonstrate the lack of the necessary cogni-
tive tools. An even more stringent test would restrict the task to the
more partial ability for autobiographical reasoning. Applying Pi-
aget's method of clinical interviewing, autobiographical reason-
ing--for example, about biographical reasons for specific signif-
icant events, decisions, or personal changes (see Heatherton &
Nichols, 1994)---could be elicited. Counter-suggestions would
serve to differentiate rote answers from active reasoning.
Finally, research on cognitive-developmental preconditions of
the emergence of the life story requires relating measures of
coherence in life narratives to multiple measures of the proposed
cognitive tools. A specific skill would be interpreted as a devel-
opmental precondition only if it emerged before or concurrently
with the corresponding coherence-relation in a life narrative or in
autobiographical reasoning. This specification underlines that the
proposed developmental preconditions do not concern overall
global coherence but are each related to a specific type of global
coherence, resulting in a developmental sequence of cognitive
prerequisites and specific elements that contribute to that type of
global coherence.
Implications f o r Other Fields o f Research
Despite the popular appeal of the concept of the life story, its
usefulness hinges on demonstrating that it can contribute to the
understanding of other psychological concepts and processes and
inspire the development of new measures. Though many other
research areas exist, in concluding, we point to three in particular
that may profit from our conception of the life story: autobiograph-
ical reasoning in the context of coping with trauma and transitions,
clinical diagnosis and psychotherapeutic processes, and the orga-
nization of autobiographical memory.
Diverse research areas involving autobiographical remembering
in adulthood could be enriched by differentiating more simple
forms of remembering from active autobiographical reasoning that
contributes to constructing coherence in life. The necessity to
construct or reconstruct the life story is most likely triggered by
major challenges to identity (Conway & Haque, in press; Schrauf
& Rubin, 1998). These include transitions, traumatic experiences,
and other major life events. Two constructs related to autobio-
graphical remembering--integrative reminiscing (Watt & Wong,
1991), or identity-related reminiscing (Webster, 1993), and the
search for meaning (see, e.g., Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1 9 8 3 ) -
have been found to increase during or following major life events
(Lehman et al., 1993; Lieberman & Falk, 1971; Merriam, 1993;
Quackenbush & Barnett, 1995) and traumatic experiences (Bul-
man & Wortman, 1977; Taylor, 1983). These processes have
sometimes been shown to be adaptive (Bower, Kemeny, Taylor, &
Fahey, 1998; Davis, Nolen-Hoeksma, & Larson, 1998; Silver et
al., 1983). In a related vein, experiments have demonstrated that
when participants wrote about traumatic experiences for several
days, an increase in causal and insight words predicted an increase
in psychological and physical health (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996;
Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, 1997). Thus, we believe that
research on coping with life events may gain from differentiating
simple autobiographical remembering, simple forms of meaning
making, and mere use of causal connectives from autobiographical
reasoning that involves (re)establishing coherence in the life story.
We speculate that successful coping with major life events requires
their integration into the life story through autobiographical
reasoning.
Clinical research could also profit from the life story approach.
Measures of coherence in fife narratives and autobiographical
reasoning may allow more specific tests of the dissociative and
fragmenting effects of trauma on memory (see, e.g., Holman &
Silver, 1998, Study 3; I. Klein & Janoff-Bulman, 1995; Suedfeld,
Fell, & Krell, 1998; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; cf. Pillemer,
1998). Research on process in psychotherapy could benefit from
more specific methods for identifying processes that may involve
autobiographical reasoning, such as insight (Bucci, 1997; Mer-
genthaler, 1996; for the theoretical background, see Cohler &
Freeman, 1993; Schafer, 1983) and levels of experiencing (M. H.
Klein, Mathieu-Coghlan, & Kiesler, 1986; Sherman, 1994). Re-
search in abnormal psychology may benefit from a more text-
based and life story-related definition of the diagnostic criterion of
incoherence for borderline personality disorder (Kernberg et al.,
1981) and attachment-status (Oppenheim & Waters, 1995) and
from studying formal properties of life narratives to better under-
stand specific psychological disorders such as depression (From-
holt et al., 1995; Hambleton, Russell, & Wandrei, 1996; Luborsky,
1990).
Finally, Neisser (1988) has suggested that the life story may
provide an explanation of the reminiscence bump. This term de-
notes the relative overrepresentation of the second and third de-
cades of life in the distribution of memories of adults over age 35
(Rubin, Rahhal, &Poon, 1998; Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986).
It is during these years of adolescence and postadolescence that the
life story is formed, and the most comprehensive way to express
identity is through the life story. We suggest that the life story
contains many references to this transitional age period because it
is both the time of greatest normative personal discontinuity and
the time when the life story is first constructed and therefore most
intensively rehearsed. Put differently, adolescence is the period of
life in which many of the adult individual's self-defining charac-
teristics originate. Many characteristics are therefore anchored in
episodes from that time. An additional argument for the role of the
life story in creating the reminiscence bump is suggested by the
finding that the bump is more pronounced when memories are
retrieved intentionally (not in response to cue words) and when
significant memories are elicited (Fromholt et al., 1995; Fromholt
& Larsen, 1991; Robinson & Taylor, 1998).
References
Adam, K. S., Keller,A. E. S., & West, M. (1995). Attachmentorganization
and vulnerabilityto loss, separation,and abuse in disturbedadolescents.
In S. Goldberg, S. Muir, & J. Kerr (Eds.), Attachment theory: Social
developmental and clinical perspectives (pp. 309-341). Hillsdale,NJ:
Analytic Press.
Adams, C. (1991). Qualitativeage differences in memory for text: A life
span developmentalperspective. Psychology and Aging, 3, 323-336.
Adams, C., Smith, M. C., Nyquist, N., & Perlmutter, M. (1997). Adult
age-group differencesin recall for the literal and interpretivemeanings
of narrative text. Journals of Gerontology, Series B--Psychological
Sciences and Social Sciences, 52B, 187-195.
Allen,J. P., Moore, C., Kuperminc,G., & Bell, K. (1998). Attachmentand
adolescent psychosocial functioning. Child Development, 69, 1406-
1419.
Alwin,D. F. (1994). Aging,personality,and socialchange: The stabilityof
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
individual differences over the adult years. In D. L. Featherman, R. M.
Lerner, & M. Perlmutter (Eds.), Life span development and behavior
(Vol. 12, pp. 135-185). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Applebee, A. N. (1978). The child's concept of story. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Ball, L., & Chandler, M. (1989). Identity formation in suicidal and non-
suicidal youth. Development and Psychopathology, 1, 257-275.
Baltes, P. B., Lindenberger, U., & Staudinger, U. M. (1998). Life-span
theory in developmental psychology. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) & R. M.
Lerner (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical
models of human development (5th ed., pp. 1029-1143). New York:
Wiley.
Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. (1996). Interactive minds in a life-span
perspective. In P. B. Baltes & U. Staudinger (Eds.), Interactive minds:
Life-span perspectives on the social foundation of cognition (pp. 1-34).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bamberg, M., & Damrad-Frye, R. (1991). On the ability to provide
evaluative comments. Journal of Child Language, 18, 689-710.
Banerjee, R., & Yuill, N. (1999). Children's explanations for self-
presentational behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29,
105-111.
Barenboim, C. (1985). A response to Berndt & Heller. In S. R. Yussen
(Ed.), The growth of reflection in children (pp. 61-67). Orlando, FL:
Academic Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (1988). The content and organization of autobiographical
memories. In U. Neisser & E. Winograd (Exls.), Remembering recon-
sidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory
(pp. 193-243). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bauer, P. J. (1997). Development of memory in early childhood. In N.
Cowan (Ed.), The development of memory in childhood (pp. 83-112).
Hove, England: Psychology Press.
Baumeister, R. F. (1987). How the self became a problem: A psychological
review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy, 52, 163-176.
Baumeister, R. F., & Newman, L. S. (1994). How stories make sense of
personal experiences: Motives that shape autobiographical narratives.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 676-690.
Beach, R., & Wendler, L. (1987). Developmental differences in response to
a story. Research in Teaching of English, 21, 286-297.
Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1983). Vom "Dasein f'tir andere" zum Anspruch auf
ein "Sttick eigenes Leben" [From living for others to a life of one's
own]. Soziale Welt, 34, 307-340.
Berman, R. A. (1988). On the ability to relate events in narrative. Dis-
course Processes, 11, 469-497.
Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994), Different ways of relating events in
narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erl-
baum.
Bernfeld, S. (1931). Trieb und Tradition im Jugendalter: Kulturpsycholo-
gische Studien an Tagebiichern [Drive and tradition in adolescence:
Cultural-psychological studies of diaries]. Leipzig, Germany: Barth.
Bernstein, R. M. (1980). The development of the self-system during
adolescence. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 136, 231-245.
Bertram, H., & Dannenberg, C. (1990). The pluralization of life positions
and individualization of life courses. Soziale Welt, 36(Special issue no.
7), 207-229.
Bieri, P. (1986). Zeiterfahrung und Personalit~it [The experience of time
and personhood]. In H. Burger (Ed.), Zeit, Mensch und Natur (pp.
261-281). Berlin, Germany: Arno Spitz.
Blanchard-Fields, F. (1986). Reasoning on social dilemmas varying in
emotional saliency: An adult developmental perspective. Psychology
and Aging, 1, 325-333.
Blanchard-Fields, F., & Norris, L. (1994). Causal attributions from ado-
lescence through adulthood: Age differences, ego level, and generalized
response style. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 1, 67-86.
763
Blasi, A., & Milton, K. (1991). The development of the sense of self in
adolescence. Journal of Personality, 59, 217-241.
Bluck, S. (in press). Autobiographical memories: Building blocks of life
narratives. In G. Kenyon, B. deVries, & P. Clark (Eds.), Narrative
gerontology: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Springer.
Bluck, S., & Habermas, T. (2000). The role of the life story schema in
autobiographical memory. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Bluck, S., & Levine, L. J. (1998). Reminiscence as autobiographical
memory: A catalyst for reminiscence theory development. Ageing and
Society, 18, 185-208.
BonfadeUi, H., & Darkow, M. (1986). Jugend und Medien [Youth and the
media]. Frankfurt, Germany: Media Perspektiven.
Botvin, G. J., & Sutton-Smith, B. (i977). The development of structural
complexity in children's fantasy narratives. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 13, 377-388.
Bower, J. E., Kemeny, M. E., Taylor, S. E., & Fahey, J. L. (1998).
Cognitive processing, discovery of meaning, CD4 decline, and AIDS-
related mortality among bereaved HIV-seropositive men. Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 979-986.
Boyes, M. C., & Chandler, M. (1992). Cognitive development, epistemic
doubt, and identity formation in adolescence. Journal of Youth and
Adolescence, 21, 277-304.
Brewer, W. F. (1996). What is recollective memory? In D. C. Rubin (Ed.),
Remembering our past." Studies in autobiographical memory (pp. 19-
65). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54, 11-32.
Bruner, J. (1994). The "remembered" self. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush
(Eds.), The remembering self." Construction and accuracy in the self-
narrative (pp. 41-54). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bucci, W. (1997). Psychoanalysis and cognitive science: A multiple code
theory. New York: Guilford Press.
Bulman, R. J., & Wortman, C. B. (1977). Attributions of blame and coping
in the "real world": Severe accident victims react to their lot. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 351-363.
Burt, C. D. B. (1994). An analysis of self-initiated coping behavior:
Diary-keeping. Child Study Journal 24, 171-189.
Carpendale, J. I., & Chandler, M. J. (1996). On the distinction between
false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretative theory of
mind. Child Development, 67, 1686-1706.
Case, R. (1985). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood. London:
Academic Press.
Chandler, M. J. (1991). Alternative readings of the competence-perfor-
mance relation. In M. J. Chandler & M. Chapman (Eds.), Criteria for
competence; Controversies in the conceptualization and assessment of
children's abilities (pp. 5-18). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chandler, M. J., & Ball, L. (1991). Continuity and commitment: A devel-
opmental analysis of the identity formation process in suicidal and
non-suicidal youth. In H. Bosma & S. Jackson (Eds.), Coping and
self-concept in adolescence (pp. 149-166). Heidelberg, Germany:
Springer.
Chandler, M. J., Boyes, M., Ball, L., & Hala, S. (1987). The conservation
of selfhood: A developmental analysis of children's changing concep-
tions of self-continuity. In T. Honess & K. Yardley (Eds.), Self and
identity: Perspectives across the life-span (pp. 108-119). London: Rou-
fledge & Kegan Paul.
Chandler, M. J., & Sokol, B. W. (1999). Representation once removed:
Children's developing conceptions of representational life. In I. E. Sigel
(Ed.), Development of mental representations: Theories and applica-
tions (pp. 201-230). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chapman, M., & Lindenberger, U. (1988). Functions, operations, and
drcalage in the development of transitivity. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 24, 542-551.
Clarke, D. D. (1995). Life scripts: Implicit representations of life-course
patterns. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 10, 871-884.
764 HABERMASAND BLUCK
Cohler, B. J. (1982). Personal narrative and life course. Life-Span Devel-
opment and Behavior, 4, 205-241.
Cohler, B. J., & Freeman, M. (1993). Psychoanalysis and the developmen-
tal narrative. In H. H. Pollock & S. I. Greenspan (Eds.), The course of
life: Vol. 5. Early adulthood (pp. 99-177). New York: International
Universities Press.
Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1987). The measurement of moral judgment.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Coleman, P. G. (1999). Creating a life story: The task of reconciliation.
Gerontologist, 39, 133-139.
Conway, M. A. (1992). A structural model of autobiographical memory. In
M. A. Conway, D. C. Rubin, H. Spinnler, & W. A. Wagenaar (Eds.),
Theoretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp. 167-192).
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Conway, M. A., & Bekerian, D. A. (1987). Organization in autobiograph-
ical memory. Memory and Cognition, 15, 119-135.
Conway, M. A., & Haque, S. (in press). Overshadowing the reminiscence
bump: Memories of a struggle for independence. Journal of Adult
Development.
Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of
autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological
Review, 107, 261-288.
Cook, K. K. (1996). Medical identity: My DNA/myself. In S. Smith & J.
Watson (Eds.), Getting a life: The everyday uses of autobiography (pp.
63-85). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1986). Stability and change in children's self-
understanding. Social Cognition, 4, 102-118.
Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1988). Self-understanding in childhood and
adolescence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, C. G., Nolen-Hoeksma, S., & Larson, J. (1998). Making sense of
loss and benefiting from experience: Two construals of meaning. Jour-
nal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 561-574.
DeConinck, F., & Godard, F. (1989). L'approche biographique h l'rpreuve
de l'interprrtation: Les formes temporelles de la causalit6 [The bio-
graphical approach to interpretation: The temporal forms of causality].
Revue Francaise de Sociologie, 31, 23-53.
de Vries, B., & Watt, D. (1996). A lifetime of events: Age and gender
variations in the life story. International Journal of Aging and Human
Development, 42, 81-102.
DiSbert, R., & Nunner-Winkler, G. (1994). Commonsense understandings
about suicide as a resource for coping with suicidal impulse. In W.
Damon (Series Ed.) & G. G. Noam & S. Borst (Vol. Eds.), New
directions for child development: Vol. 63. Children, youth, and suicide:
developmental perspectives (pp. 23-38). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Dreher, E., & Dreher, M. (1991). Entwicklungsrelevante Ereignisse aus der
Sicht von Jugendlichen [Developmentally consequential events as
viewed by adolescents]. Schweizerische Zeitschrift fidr Psychologie, 50,
24-33.
Dyl, J., & Wapner, S. (1996). Age and gender differences in the nature,
meaning, and function of cherished possessions for children and ado-
lescents. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 62, 340-377.
Eder, R. A., Gerlach, S. G., & Perlmutter, M. (1987). In search of
children's selves: General components of the self-concept. Child Devel-
opment, 58, 1044-1050.
Eisenberg, A. R. (1985). Learning to describe past experience in conver-
sation. Discourse Processes, 8, 177-204.
Eisenberg, N., Losoya, S., & Guthrie, I. (1997). Social cognition and
prosocial development. In S. Hala (Ed.), The development of social
cognition (pp. 329-363). Hove, England: Psychology Press.
Engel, S. (1999). Context is everything: The nature of memory. New York:
Freeman.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: Norton.
Evans, J. R. (1997). In defense of history. London: Granta.
Feldman, A. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1988). The effect of personal relevance on
dispositional inference: A developmental analysis, Child Develop-
ment, 59, 1339-1352.
Feldman, C., Bruner, J., Kalmar, D., & Renderer, B. (1993). Plot, plight,
and dramatism: Interpretation at three ages. Human Development, 36,
327-342.
Fend, H. (1994). Die Entdeckung des Selbst und die Verarbeitung der
Pubertat [The discovery of the self and coping with puberty]. Bern,
Switzerland: Huber.
Ferguson, T. J., Olthof, T., Luiten, A., & Rule, B. G. (1984). Children's use
of observed behavioral frequency versus behavioral covariation in as-
cribing dispositions to others. Child Development, 55, 2094-2105.
Fiese, B. H., Sameroff, A. J., Grotevant, H. D., Wamboldt, F. S., Dickstein,
S., & Fravel, D. L. (1999). The stories that families tell: Narrative
coherence, narrative interaction, and relationship beliefs. Monographs of
the Society for Research in Child Development, 64(2, Serial No. 257).
Fischer, K. (1980). A theory of cognitive development: The control and
construction of hierarchies of skill. Psychological Review, 87, 477-531.
Fischer, W. (1978). Struktur und Funktion erzahlter Lebensgeschichten
[Structure and functions of life narratives]. In M. Kohli (Ed.), Soziologie
des Lebenslaufs (pp. 311-337). Neuwied, Germany: Luchterhand.
Fischer-Rosenthal, W. (1995). The problem with identity: Biography as
solution to some (post-)modernist dilemmas. Comenius, 15, 250-265.
Fischer-Rosenthal, W., & Rosenthal, G. (1997). Warum Biographieanalyse
und wie man sie macht [Why biographical analysis and how to do it].
Zeitschrift fiir Sozialisationsforschung und empirische Soziologie, 17,
405-427.
Fitzgerald, J. M. (1986). Autobiographical memory: A developmental
perspective. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical memory (pp. 122-
134). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, J. M. (1996). The distribution of self-narrative memories in
younger and older adults: Elaborating the self-narrative hypothesis.
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 3, 229-236.
Fivush, R. (1998a). Gendered narratives: Elaboration, structure, and emo-
tion in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. In C. P.
Thompson, D. J. Herrmann, D. Bruce, J. D. Read, D. G. Payne, & M. P.
Toglia (Eds.), Autobiographical memory: Theoretical and applied per-
spectives (pp. 79-103). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R. (1998b). The stories we tell: How language shapes autobiogra-
phy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, 483-488.
Fivush, R., Gray, J. T., & Fromhoff, F. A. (1987). Two-year-olds talk about
the past. Cognitive Development, 2, 393-409.
Fivush, R., Haden, C., & Adam, S. (1995). Structure and coherence of
preschoolers' personal narratives over time: Implications for childhood
amnesia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 32-56.
Flavell, J. H., & Miller, P. H. (1998). Social cognition. In W. Damon
(Series Ed.) & D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child
psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (5th ed., pp.
851-898). New York: Wiley.
Friedman, W. J. (1986). The development of children's knowledge of
temporal structure. Child Development, 57, 1386-1400.
Friedman, W. J. (1992). Children's time memory: The development of a
differentiated past. Cognitive Development, 7, 171-187.
Friedman, W. J. (1993). Memory for the time of past events. Psychological
Bulletin, 113, 44-66.
Friedman, W. J., Gardner, A. G., & Zubin, N. R. E. (1995). Children's
comparison of the recency of two events from the past year. Child
Development, 66, 970-983.
Fromholt, P., Larsen, P., & Larsen, S. F. (1995). Effects of late-onset
depression and recovery on autobiographic memory. Journal of Geron-
tology: Psychological Sciences, 50, 74-81.
Fromholt, P., & Larsen, S. F. (1991). Autobiographical memory in normal
aging and primary degenerative dementia. Journal of Gerontology:
Psychological Sciences, 46, 85-91.
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
Gathercole, S. E. (1998). The development of memory. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 39, 3-27.
Gee, J. P., & Crawford, V. M. (1998). Two kinds of teenagers: Language,
identity, and social class. In D. E. Alvermann, K. A. Hinchman, D. W.
Moore, S. F. Phelps, & D. R. Waft (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the
literacies in adolescents' lives (pp. 225-245). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gergen, K., & Gergen, M. (1988). Narrative and the self as relationship. In
L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 21, pp. 17-55). New York: Academic Press.
Gernsbacher, M. A. (1997). Coherence cues mapping during comprehen-
sion. In J. Costermans & M. Fayol (Eds.), Processing interclausal
relationships: Studies in the production and comprehension of text (pp.
3-21). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Giv6n, T. (1995). Coherence in text vs. coherence in mind. In A. Gems-
bacher & T. Giv6n (Eds.). Coherence in spontaneous text (pp. 59-115).
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gnepp, J. (1989). Personalized inferences of emotions and appraisals:
Component processes and correlates. Developmental Psychology, 25,
277-288.
Gnepp, J., & Gould, M. E. (1985). The development of personalized
inferences: Understanding other people's emotional reactions in light of
their prior experiences. Child Development, 56, 1455-1464.
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York: Doubleday.
Graesser, A. C., Mills, K. K., & Zwaan, R. A. (1997). Discourse compre-
hension. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 163-187.
Guardo, C. J., & Bohan, J. B. (1971). Development of a sense of self-
identity in children. Child Development, 42, 1909-1921.
Gubrium, J., Holstein, J. A., & Buckholdt, D. R. (1994). Constructing the
life course. Dix Hills, NY: General Hail.
Gurucharfi, C., & Selman, R. (1982). The development of interpersonal
understanding during childhood, preadolescence, and adolescence. ChiM
Development, 53, 924-927.
Habermas, T. (1997). Autobiographisches Erinnem und Identit~it [Auto-
biographical remembering and identity]. In H. Mandl (Ed.), Bericht iiber
den 40. Kongrefl der DGfPs in Miinchen 1996 (pp. 248-253). G6ttingen,
Germany: Hogrefe.
Habermas, T. (1999). Geliebte Objekte: Symbole und Instrumente der
ldentitiitsbildung [Beloved objects: Symbols and instruments of identity-
formation]. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Hahermas, T., & Paha, C. (1999, July). The development of the ability to
create causally coherent life stories in adolescence. Paper presented at
the 3rd Biannual Meeting of the Society for Applied Research in
Memory and Cognition, Boulder, CO.
Haden, C. A., Haine, R. A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative
structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Devel-
opmental Psychology, 33, 295-307.
Hagestad, G. O. (1990). Social perspectives on the life course. In R. H.
Binstock & L. K. George (Eds.), Handbook of aging and the social
sciences (pp. 151-163). New York: Academic Press.
Hahn, A. (1987). Identit~it und Selbstthematisierung [Identity and self-
thematization]. In A. Hahn & V. Kapp (Eds.), Selbstthematisierung und
Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Gesttindnis (pp. 9-25). Frankfurt, Ger-
many: Suhrkamp.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.
Hambleton, G., Russell, R. L., & Wandrei, M. L. (1996). Nan'ative per-
formance predicts psychopathology: A preliminary demonstration. Jour-
nal of Narrative and Life History, 6, 87-105.
HanseU, S., Mechanic, D., & Brondolo, E. (1986). Introspectiveness and
adolescent development. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 15, 115-
132.
Hart, D., Lucca-Irizarry, N., & Damon, W. (1986). The development of
self-understanding in Puerto Rico and the United States. Journal of
Early Adolescence, 6, 293-304.
765
Harter, S. (1999). The construction of self." A developmental perspective.
New York: Guilford Press.
Harter, S., Bresnick, S., Bouchey, H. A., & Whitesell, N. R. (1997). The
development of multiple role-related selves during adolescence. Devel-
opment and Psychopathology, 9, 835-853.
Harter, S., & Monsour, A. (1992). Developmental analysis of conflict
caused by opposing attributes in the adolescent self-portrait. Develop-
mental Psychology, 28, 251-304.
Havighurst, R. J. (1948). Developmental tasks and education. New York:
Longman.
Heatherton, T. F., & Nichols, P. A. (1994). Personal accounts of successful
versus failed attempts at life change. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 20, 664-675.
Heckhausen, J. (1989). Normatives Entwicklungswissen als Bezugsrahmen
zur (Re)Konstruktion der eigenen Biographie [Normative developmental
knowledge as frame of reference for constructing one's biography]. In P.
Alheit & E. M. Hoeming (Eds.), Biographisches Wissen (pp. 202-220).
Frankfurt, Germany: Campus.
Heckhausen, J. (1993). Developmental expectations for the self and most
other people: Age grading in three functions of social comparison.
Developmental Psychology, 29, 539-548.
Hofer, B. K., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). The development of epistemological
theories: Beliefs about knowledge and knowing and their relation to
learning. Review of Educational Research, 67, 88-140.
Hoffner, C., & Cantor, J. (1985). Developmental differences in response to
a television character's appearance and behavior. Developmental Psy-
chology, 21, 1065-1974.
Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (1998). Getting "stuck" in the past:
Temporal orientation and coping with trauma. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 74, 1146-1163.
Howard, G. S. (1991). Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking,
cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psycholo-
gist, 46, 187-197.
Hudson, J. A. (1990). The emergence Of autobiographical memory in
mother-child conversation. In R. Fivush & J. A. Hudson (Eds.), Know-
ing and remembering in young children (pp. 166-196). Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Huttenlocher, J., & Prohaska, V. (1997). Reconstructing the times of past
events. In N. L. Stein, P. A. Ornstein, B. Tversky, & C. Brainerd (Eds.),
Memory for everyday and emotional events (pp. 165-179). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1959). The growth of logical thinking from
childhood to adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
James, L. E., Burke, D. M., Austin, A., & Hulme, E. (1998). Production
and perception of "verbosity" in younger and older adults. Psychology
and Aging, 13, 355-367.
Janet, P. (1928), L'~volution de la m~moire et de la notion du temps [The
evolution of memory and the time concept]. Pads: Chahine.
Jepson, K. L., & Labouvie-Vief, G. (1992). Symbolic processing of youth
and elders. In R. L. West & J. D. Sennot (Eds.), Everyday memory and
ageing (pp. 124-138). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Juen, B. (1997). Wie Kinder ihre Lebensgeschichte erzCihlen [How children
tell their life story]. Unpublished manuscript, University of Innsbruck,
Austria.
Kalicki, B. (1996). Lebensverltiufe und Selbstbilder: Die Normalbiogra-
phie als psychisches Regulativ [Life courses and self-images: The stan-
dard biography as a developmental regulator]. Opladen, Germany: Leske
& Budrich.
Kamptner, N. L. (1991). Personal possessions and their meanings: A
life-span perspective. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6,
209 -228.
Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcis-
sism. New York: Aronson.
Kernberg, O. F., Goldstein, E., Cart, A., Hunt, H., Baur, S., & Blumenthal,
766 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
R. (1981). Diagnosing borderline personality disorder. Journal of Ner-
vous and Mental Disease, 168, 225-231.
King, P. M., & Kltchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kitcbener, K. S., & Fischer, K. (1990). A skill approach to the development
of reflective thinking. In. D. Kuhn (Ed.), Contributions to human devel-
opment: Vol. 21. Developmental perspectives on teaching and learning
thinking skills (pp. 48-62). New York: Karger.
Kitchener, K. S., Lynch, C. L., Fischer, K. W., & Wood, P. K. (1993).
Developmental range of reflective judgment: The effect of contextual
support and practice on developmental stage. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 29, 893-906.
Klein, I., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1995). Trauma history and personal nar-
ratives: Some clues to coping among survivors of child abuse. Child
Abuse and Neglect, 20, 45-54.
Klein, M. H., Mathieu-Coghlan, P., & Kiesler, P. J. (1986). The experi-
encing scales. In L. S. Greenberg & W. M. Pinsof (Eds.), The thera-
peutic process: A research handbook (pp. 21-71). New York: Guilford
Press.
Kohli, M., & Meyer, J. W. (1986). Social structure and social construction
of life stages. Human Development, 29, 145-149.
Krantz, D. L. (1998). Taming chance: Social science and everyday narra-
five. Psychological Inquiry, 9, 87-94.
Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Kuhn, D., Pennington, N., & Leadbeater, B. (1983). Adult thinking in
developmental perspective. In P. B. Baltes & O. Brim (Eds.), Life span
development and behavior (pp. 157-195). New York: Academic Press.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience. In I. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual
arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American
Ethnological Society (pp. 12-44). Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: Afield guide to
poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leadbeater, B., & Kuhn, D. (1989). Interpreting discrepant narratives:
Hermeneutics and adult cognition. In J. Sinnott (Ed.), Everyday prob-
lem-solving: Theory and application (pp. 175-190). New York: Praeger.
Lehman, D. R., Delongis, A., Davis, C. G., Wortman, C. B., Bluck, S.,
Mandel, D., & Ellard, J. H. (1993). Negative and positive changes
following bereavement and their relations with adjustment. Journal of
Social and Clinical Psychology, 12, 9 0 - I 12.
Levine, L. J., & Bluck, S. (1997). Experienced and recalled emotional
intensity in older and younger adults. Psychology and Aging, 12, 514-
523.
Levine, L. J., Stein, N. L., & Liwag, M. (1999). Remembering children's
emotions: Sources of concordant and discordant accounts between par-
ents and children. Developmental Psychology, 35, 210-230.
Lichtenstein, T., & Baruch, R. (1996). "I was born from earth": Recon-
structing the adoption-narrative in the treatment of a preadolescent girl.
Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Service, 77,
90-97.
Lieberman, M. A., & Falk, J. (1971). The remembered past as a source of
data for research on the life cycle. Human Development, 14, 132-141.
Linde, C. (1987a). Explanatory systems in oral life stories. In D. Holland
& N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought (pp.
343-366). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Linde, C. (1987b). The life story: A temporally discontinuous discourse
type. In H. W. Dechert & M. Ranpach (Eds.), Psycholinguistic models of
production (pp. 189-206). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Linde, C. (1993). Life stories. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Low, J., & Durkin, K. (1998). Structure and causal connections in chil-
dren's on-line television narratives: What develops? Cognitive Develop-
ment, 13, 201-225.
Luborsky, M. (1987). Analysis of multiple life histories. Ethos, 15, 366-
381.
Luborsky, M. (1990). Alchemists' visions: Cultural norms in eliciting and
analyzing life history narratives. Journal of Aging Studies, 4, 17-29.
Mackavey, W. R., Malley, J., & Stewart, A. J. (1991). Remembering
autobiographically consequential experiences: Content analysis of psy-
chologists' accounts of their lives. Psychology and Aging, 6, 50-59.
Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood,
and attachment: A move to the level of representation. In I. Bretherton
& E. Waters (Eds.), Growing points of attachment research. Mono-
graphs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2),
66-104.
Mansfield, E. D., & McAdams, D. P. (1996). Generativity and themes of
agency and community in adult autobiography. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 22, 721-731.
Marini, Z., & Case, R. (1994). The development of abstract reasoning
about the physical and social world. Child Development, 65, 147-159.
McAdams, D. P. (1985). Power and intimacy. New York: Guilford Press.
McAdams, D. P. (1996). Personality, modernity, and the storied self: A
contemporary framework for studying persons. Psychological Inquiry, 7,
295-321.
McAdams, D. P. (1998). The role of defense in the life story. Journal of
Personality, 66, 1125-1146.
McAdams, D. P., Diamond, A., de St. Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997).
Stories of commitment: The psychosocial construction of generative
lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 678-694.
McCabe, A., Capron, E., & Peterson, C. (1991). The voice of experience:
The recall of early childhood and adolescent memories by young adults.
In A. McCabe & C. Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp.
137-173). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
McCabe, A., & Peterson, C. (1984). What makes a good story? Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 13, 457-480.
McCormack, T., & Hoed, C. (1999). Memory and temporal perspective:
The role of temporal frameworks in memory development. Developmen-
tal Review, 19, 154-182.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Mergenthaler, E. (1996). Emotion-abstraction patterns in verbatim proto-
cols: A new way of describing psychotherapeutic process. Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 1306-1315.
Merriam, S. B. (1993). Race, sex, and age-group differences in the occur-
rences and uses of reminiscence. Activities, Adaptation, and Aging, 18,
1-18.
Mey, G. (1999). Adoleszenz--ldentiti~t--Erztihlung [Adolescence, identity,
and narrative]. Berlin, Germany: Ktister.
Michener, A. J. (1998). Becoming Anna: The autobiography of a sixteen-
year-old. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, P. J., & Sperry, L. L. (1988). Early talk about the past: The origins
of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Lan-
guage, 15, 293-315.
Mishler, E.-G. (1995). Models of narrative analysis: A typology. Journal of
Narrative and Life History, 5, 87-123.
Mohr, D. M. (1978). Development of attributes of personal identity.
Developmental Psychology, 14, 427-428.
Montangero, J. (1996). Understanding changes in time: The development
of diachronic thinking in 7- to 12-year-old children. London: Taylor &
Francis.
Montangero, J., & Parrat-Dayan, S. (1992). Descriptions d'images et point
de vue diachronique chez l'enfant: Une perspective diachronique
6volure se confond-elle avec la capacit6 de synth~se? [Descriptions of
pictures and diachronic perspective in children: Does a mature diachro-
nic perspective confound with the ability to synthesize?]. Archives de
Psychologie, 60, 317-330.
Montangero, J., &Pons, F. (1995). L'introduction du pass6 et du futur dans
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
la description d'une situation pr~sente: l~tude du d6veloppement de la
tendance diachroulque [The introduction of past and future in the de-
scription of a present situation: Study of the development of the dia-
chronic tendency]. L'Annd Psychologique, 95, 621-644.
Montemayor, R., & Eisen, M. (1977). The development of self-conceptions
from childhood to adolescence: Developmental Psychology, 13, 314-
319.
Moscovici, S. (1984). The phenomenon of social representation. In R. M.
Farrar & S. Moscovici (Eds.), Social representations (pp. 3-70). Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Nanpon, H. (1991). Les ages de la vie: La repr6sentation des ages de
l'existence par un groupe des jeunes 6tudiants [The times of life:
Representations of life phases by college students]. Enfance, 45, 205-
129.
Nasby, W., & Read, N. W. (1997). The life voyage of a solo circumnav-
igator: Integrating theoretical and methodological perspectives. Journal
of Personality, 65, 785-1042.
Neisser, U. (1986). Nested structure in autobiographical memory. In D. C.
Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical memory (pp. 71-81). Cambridge, En-
gland: Cambridge University Press.
Neisser, U. (1988). Commentary on Fitzgerald. Human Development, 31,
271-273.
Nelson, K. (1988). The ontogeny of memory for real events. In U. Neisser
& E. Winograd (Eds.), Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and
traditional approaches to the study of memory (pp. 244-276). New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, K. (1993). The psychological and social origins of autobiograph-
ical memory. Psychological Science, 4, 7-14.
Nelson, K. (1996). Language in cognitive development: Emergence of the
mediated mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Oppenheim, D., & Waters, H. S. (1995). Narrative processes and attach-
ment representations: Issues of development and assessment. Mono-
graphs of the Society of Research in Child Development, 60i2-3),
197-215.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Francis, M. E. (1996). Cognitive, emotional, and
language processes in disclosure. Cognition and Emotion, 10, 601-621.
Pennebaker, J. W., Mayne, T. J., & Francis, M. E. (1997). Linguistic
predictors of adaptive bereavement. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 72, 863-871.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1983). Developmental psycholinguistics:
Three ways of looking at a child's narrative. New York: Plenum.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1994). A social interactionist account of
developing decontextuallzed narrative skill. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 30, 937-948.
Peterson, C., & Rideout, R. (1998). Memory for medical emergencies
experienced by 1- and 2-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 34,
1059-1072.
Piaget, J. (1946). The child's conception of time. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1970). L'~pistdmologie gdndtique [Genetic psychology]. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Pillemer, D. B. (1998). Momentous events, vivid memories. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Pillemer, D. B., Picariello, M. L., & Pruett, J. C. (1994). Very long-term
memories of a salient preschool event. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 8,
95-106.
Pillow, B. H., Hill, V., Boyce, A., & Stein, C. (2000). Understanding
inference as a source of knowledge: Children's ability to evaluate the
certainty of deduction, perception, and guessing. Developmental Psy-
chology, 36, 169-179.
Piron, F. (1996). R6pondre de soi: R6flexivit6 et indivuation dans le r6cit
de soi d'une jeune Qu6b~coise [Talking about oneself: Reflexivity and
individuation in the self-narrative of a female adolescent from Quebec].
Sociologie et Socidtds, 28, 119-134.
767
Pratt, M. W., Norris, J. E., Arnold, M. L., & Filyer, R. (1999). Generativity
and moral development as predictors of value socialization narratives
from young persons across the adult life span: From lessons learnod to
stories shared. Psychology and Aging, 14, 414-426.
Price, D. W. W., & Goodman, G. S. (1990). Visiting the wizard: Children's
memory for a recurring event. Child Development, 61, 664-680.
Quackenbush, S. W., & Barnett, M. A. (1995). Correlates of reminiscence
activity among elderly individuals. International Journal of Aging and
Human Development, 41, 169-181.
Randall, W. L. (1999). Narrative intelligence and the novelty of our lives.
Journal of Aging Studies, 13, 11-28.
Rather, H. H., Smith, B. S., & Padgett, R. J. (1990). Children's organisa-
tion of events and event memories. In R. Fivush & J. A. Hudson (Eds.),
Knowing and remembering in young children (pp. 65-93). Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Rholes, W. S., Newman, L. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1990). Understanding self
and other: Developmental and motivational aspects of perceiving per-
sons in terms of invariant dispositions. In E~ T. Higgins & R. M.
Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Vol. 2. Foun-
dations of social behavior (pp. 369-407). New York: Guilford Press.
Rholes, W. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1986). Children's impressions of other
persons: The effects of temporal separation of behavioral information.
Child Development, 57, 872-878.
Robinson, J. A. (1996). Perspective, meaning, and remembering. In D. C.
Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: Studies in autobiographical mem-
ory (pp. 218-243). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, J. A., & Taylor, L. R. (1998). Autobiographical memory and
self-narratives: A tale of two stories. In C. P. Thompson, D. J. Hermarm,
D. Bruce, J. D. Read, D. G. Payne, & M. Toglia (Eds.), Autobiograph-
ical memory: Theoretical and applied perspectives (pp. 125-144). Mah-
wah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rosenthal, G. (1993). Reconstruction of life stories. In R. Josselson & A.
Liebich (Eds.), The narrative study of lives (Vol. 1, pp. 59-91). New-
bury Park, CA: Sage.
Rosenthal, G. (1995). Erlebte und erziihlte Lebensgeschichte [The lived
and recounted life story]. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus.
Rubin, D. C., Rahhal, T. A., &Poon, L. W. (1998). Things learned in early
adulthood are remembered best. Memory and Cognition, 26, 3-19.
Rubin, D. C., Wetzler, S. E., & Nebes, D. (1986). Autobiographical
memory across the lifespan. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical
memory (pp. 202-221). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ruble, D. N., & Dweck, C. S. (1995). Self-perceptions, person concep-
tions, and their development. In N. Eisenberg (Ed.), Review of social
psychology: Vol. 15. Social development (pp. 109-139). Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ruth, J. E., Birren, J. E., & Polkinghorne, D. E. (1996). The projects of life
reflected in autobiographies of old age. Ageing and Society, 16, 677-
699.
Rybaczyk, B., & Bellg, A. (1997). Listening to life stories: A new approach
to stress intervention in health care. New York: Springer.
Sander, U., & Vollbrecht, R. (1985). Zwischen Kindheit und Jugend:
Triiume, Hoffnungen und Alltag 13-bis 15-Ji~hriger [Between childhood
and adolescence: Dreams, hopes, and everyday life of 13- to 15-year-
olds]. Weinheim, Germany: Jnventa.
Sanders, T. J. M., Spooren, W. P. M., & Noordman, L. G. M. (1992).
Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 15,
1-35.
Schafer, R. (1983). The analytic attitude. New York: Basic Books.
Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1995). Knowledge and memory: The real
story. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Advances in social cognition (Vol. 8, pp.
1-86). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schorsch, S. (1992). Die Entwicklung von Konzepten ~iberdas Lebensalter
bei Kindern und Jugendlichen [Development of concepts of life-phases
in children and adolescents]. MOnster, Germany: Waxmann.
768 HABERMAS AND BLUCK
Schrauf, R. W., & Rubin, D. C. (1998). Bilingual autobiographical memory
in older adult immigrants: A test of cognitive explanations of the
reminiscence bump and the linguistic encoding of memories. Journal of
Memory and Language, 39, 437-457.
Schiatze, F. (1981). Prozel3strukturen des Lebenslaufs [Process-structures
of the life course]. In J. Matthes, A. Pfeifenberger, & M. Stosberg (Eds.),
Biographie in handlungswissenschafllicher Perspektive (pp. 67-129).
Ntirnberg, Germany: Verlag der Nttrnberger Forschungsvereinigung.
Schiitze, F. (1982). Narrative Repr'~entation kollektiver Schicksalsbetrof-
fenheit [Narrative representations of collective experiences]. In E. L~n-
mert (Ed.), Erziihlforschung (pp. 568-590). Stuttgart, Germany:
Metzler.
Schtltze, F. (1984). Koguitive Figuren des autobiographischan Stegreifer-
z~thlens [Cognitive structures of improvised personal narratives]. In M.
Kohli & G. Robert (Eds.), Biographie und soziale Wirklichkeit (pp.
78-118). Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler.
Schwanenflugel, P. J., Henderson, R. L., & Fabrieius, W. V. (1998).
Developing organization of mental verbs and theory of mind in middle
childhood: Evidence from extensions. Developmental Psychology, 34,
512-524.
Secord, P., & Peevers, B. (1974). The development and attribution of
person concepts. In T. Mischel (Ed.), Understanding other persons (pp.
117-142). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Seiffge-Krenke, I. (1985). Die Funktion des Tagebuchs bei der Bew~ilfi-
gung alterstypischer Probleme in der Adoleszenz [Uses of the diary for
coping with typical problems of adolescence]. In R. Oerter (Ed.), Le-
bensbewilltigung im Jugendalter (pp. 131-159). Mtinchen, Germany:
Edition Psychologic.
Seixas, P. (1996). Conceptualizing the growth of historical understanding.
In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The handbook of education and
human development: New models of learning, teaching, and schooling
(pp. 765-783). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Selman, R. (1980). The development of social understanding. New York:
Academic Press.
Selman, R., Lavin, D., Cooney, E., Jacobs, N., & Brion-Meisels, S. (1979).
Assessing interpersonal understanding: An interview and scoring man-
ual infive parts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Judge Baker Social Reason-
ing Project.
Settersten, R. A., & Mayer, K. U. (1997). The measurement of age, age
structuring, and the lifecourse. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 233-
261.
Shemilt, D. (1980). History 13-16." Evaluation study. Edinburgh, Scotland:
Holmes McDougall.
Sherman, E. (1994). The structure of well-being in the life narratives of the
elderly. Journal of Aging Studies, 8, 149-158.
Silver, R. L., Boon, C., & Stones, M. H. (1983). Searching for meaning in
misfortune: Making sense of incest. Journal of Social Issues, 39, 81-
102.
Singer, B., Ryff, C. D., Carr, D., & Magee, W. J. (1998). Linking life
histories and mental health: A person-centered strategy. Sociological
Methodology, 28, 1-51.
Singer, J. A., & Salovey, P. (1993). The remembered self: Emotion and
memory in personality. New York: Free Press.
Smith, L. (1991). Age, ability, and intellectual development in Piagetian
theory. In M. Chandler & M. Chapman (Eds.), Criteria for competence:
Controversies in the conceptualization and assessment of children's
abilities (pp. 69-91). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Snow, C. (1990). Building memories: The ontogeny of autobiography. In
D. Cichetti & M. Beeghly (Eds.), The self in transition: Infancy to
childhood (pp. 213-241). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Soft, M. (1989). Jugend im Tagebuch: Analysen zur lch-Entwicklung in
Jugendtagebiichern verschiedener Generationen [Ego-development as
reflected in diaries of three generations]. Weinheim, Germany: Juventa.
Staudinger, U. M. (1999). Social cognition and a psychological approach to
an art of life. In F. Blanchard-Fields & T. Hess (Eds.), Social cognition,
adult development and aging (pp. 343-375). New York: Academic
Press.
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in
elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New directions in
discourse processing (pp. 53-120). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Stem, D. N. (1989). Developmental prerequisites for the sense of a narrated
self. In A. M. Cooper, O. F. Kemberg, & E. S. Person (Eds.), Psycho-
analysis: Toward the second century (pp. 168-178). New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Straub, J. (in press). Biographische Sozialisation und narrative Kompetenz
[Biographical Socialization and narrative competence]. In E. M. Hoem-
ing (Ed.), Biographische Sozialisation. Stuttgart, Germany: Enke.
Strube, G., Gehringer, M., Ernst, I., & Knill, K. (1985). Knowing what's
going to happen in life, Vols. 1 & 2. (Tech. Rep. Nos. 13 & 14).
Mtinchen, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research.
Strube, G., & Weber, A. (1988). Die Entwicklung der zeitlichen Einord-
nung und Datierung yon Ereignissen [Development of dating and tem-
poral sequencing of events]. Zeitschrift fiir Entwicklungspsychologie
und Piidagogische Psychologie, 20, 225-238.
Suedfeld, P., Fell, C., & Krell, R. (1998). Structural aspects of survivors'
thinking about the Holocaust. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 11, 323-336.
Sun, L. C. H. (1998). The loss of narrative innocence: The development of
narrative consciousness from child to adolescent. Narrative Inquiry, 8,
203-212.
Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of
cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161-1173.
TenHouten, W. D. (1999). Text and temporality: Patterned-cyclical and
ordinary-linear forms of time-consciousness inferred from a corpus of
Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian life-historical interviews.
Symbolic Interaction, 22, 121-137.
Tessler, M., & Nelson, K. (1994). Making memories: The influence of joint
encoding on later recall by young children. Consciousness and Cogni-
tion, 3, 307-326.
Thompson, C., Skowronski, J. J., Larsen, S. F., & Betz, A. L. (1996).
Autobiographical memory. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Thompson, C. B. (1982). Diary-keeping as sex-role behavior. Bulletin of
the Psychonomic Society, 20, 11-13.
Thompson, E., Boggiano, A. K., Costanzo, P., Matter, J.-A., & Ruble,
D. N. (1995). Age-related changes in children's orientation toward
strategi c peer interaction: Implications for social perception and behav-
ior. Social Cognition, 13, 71-104.
Thompson, S. C., & Janigan, A. S. (1988). Life schemes: A framework for
understanding the search for meaning. Journal of Social and Clinical
Psychology, 7, 260-280.
Trabasso, T., Secco, T., & van den Brock, P. (1984). Causal cohesion and
story cohesion. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.), Learning
and comprehension of text (pp. 83-111). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Trabasso, T., Suh, S., & Payton, P. (1995). Explanatory coherence in
understanding and talking about events. In A. Gemsbacher & T. Givon
(Eds.), Coherence in spontaneous text (pp. 189-214). Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins.
Tryphon, A., & Montangero, J. (1992). The development of diachronic
thinking in children: Children's ideas about changes in drawing skills.
International Journal of Behavioral Development, 15, 411-424.
Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1977). Preschool children's intraconversational narra-
fives. Journal of Child Language, 6, 91-109.
van den Brock, P. W. (1989). Causal reasoning and inference making in
judging the importance of story statements. Child Development, 60,
286-297.
van den Brock, P. W. (1997). Discovering the cement of the universe: The
development of event comprehension from childhood to adulthood. In
P. W. van den Brock, P. Bauer, & T. Bourg (Eds.), Developmental spans
 EMERGENCE OF THE LIFE STORY
in event comprehension and representation: Bridging fictional and
actual events (pp. 321-342). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbanm.
van den Broek, P. W., Lorch, E. P., & Thudow, R. (1996). Children's and
adults' memory for television stories: The role of causal factors, story-
grammar categories, and hierarchical level. Child Development, 67,
3010-3028.
van den Broek, P. W., Naslund, J. C., Ivers, C., & Verduin, C. J. (1996).
Children's awareness of the global structure of narrative texts: Evidence
from the selection of titles. Unpublished manuscript.
van der Kolk, B. A., & Fisler, R. (1995). Dissociation and the fragmentary
nature of traumatic memories: Overview and exploratory study. Journal
of Traumatic Stress, 8, 505-525.
van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of discourse compre-
hension. New York: Academic Press.
Varnhagen, C. K., Morrisun, F. J., & Everall, R. (1994). Age and schooling
, effects in story recall and story production. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 30, 969-979.
Vinh-Bang. (1978). Die kiinische Methode und die Forschung in der
Kinderpsychologie [The clinical method in developmental research]. In
B. Inhelder & H. Chipman (Eds.), Von der KinderweIt zur Erkenntnis
der Welt (pp. 83-97). Wiesbaden, Germany: Akademische Verlagsge-
sellschaft.
Vygotsky, L. S., & Luria, A. R. (1993). Studies on the history of behavior:
Ape, primitive, and child. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (Original work pub-
lished 1930)
Ward, M. J., & Carlson, E. A. (1995). Associations among adult attach-
ment representations, maternal sensitivity, and infant-mother attachment
in a sample of adolescent mothers. Child Development, 66, 69-79.
Watt, L. M., & Wong, T. P. (1991). The taxonomy of reminiscence and
therapeutic implications. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 16,
37-57.
Webster, J. D. (1993). Construction and validation of the Reminiscence
Functions Scale. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 48,
256-262.
Weisser, S. O. (1996). "What kind of life have I got?" Gender in the life
View publication stats
769
story of an "ordinary" woman. In S. Smith & J. Watson (Eds.), Getting
a life: Everyday uses of autobiography (pp. 249-270). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Welch-Ross, M. K. (1995). An integrative model of the development of
autobiographical memory. Developmental Review, 15, 338~365.
White, H. (1987). The content of the form: Narrative discourse and
historical representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Williams, J. P. (1993). Comprehension of students with and without
learning disabilities: Identification of narrative themes and idiosyncratic
text representations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 631-642.
Wineburg, S. S. (1996). The psychology of learning and teaching history.
In D. C. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.), The handbook of educational
psychology (pp. 423-437). London: Prentice Hall.
Young, R. A., Friesen, J. D., & Borycki, B. (1994). Narrative structure and
parental influence in career development. Journal of Adolescence, 17,
173-191.
Ynill, N. J. (1997a). Children's understanding of traits. In S. Hala (Ed.),
The development of social cognition (pp. 273-295). London: Psychology
Press.
Yuill, N. J. (1997b). English children as personality theorists: Accounts of
the modifiability, development, and origin of traits. Genetic, Social, and
General Psychology Monographs, 123(1), 5-26.
Yuill, N. J., & Pearson, A. (1998). The developmental bases for trait
attribution: Children's understanding of traits as causal mechanisms
based on desire. Developmental Psychology, 34, 574-586.
Ziunecker, J. (1985). Literarische und iisthetische Praxen in Jugendkultur
und Jugendbiographie [Literary and aesthetic practices in youth culture
and youth biography]. In A. Fischer, W. Fuchs, & J. Zinnecker (Eds.),
Jugendliche und Erwachsene 1985: Vol. 2. Generationen im Vergleich
(pp. 143-348). Opladen, Germany: .Leske & Budrich.
Received December 29, 1998
Revision received March 29, 2000
Accepted March 29, 2000