Skip to main content
All Reviews
PsychologyWorth Reading
intermediate

The development of global coherence in life narratives across adolescence: Temporal, causal, and thematic aspects.

Tilmann Habermas & Cybèle de Silveira (2008)

Published
May 1, 2008
Journal
Developmental Psychology · Vol. 44 · No. 3
DOI
10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.707
View Original

At a GlanceAI

Shows how adolescents increasingly build coherent life stories across time, causes, and themes as they grow older.

SummaryAI

This paper matters because it links adolescence to the growing ability to tell a life story that “hangs together,” a key basis for narrative identity. It focuses on global coherence in life narratives and separates it into temporal (ordering in time), causal (how events lead to each other), and thematic (overall meaning) aspects. The novelty is treating coherence as a multi-part skill that can develop unevenly rather than as a single quality. The implication is that changes in how young people narrate their lives can be used to understand developmental shifts in identity and self-understanding.

Method SnapshotAI

A developmental study comparing adolescents’ life narratives and rating their temporal, causal, and thematic coherence.

BackgroundAI

Basic knowledge of developmental psychology and narrative identity (how people construct life stories about the self).

In Collections

Psychology14 papers

Narrative coherence in life stories

The essential papers that built our understanding of how people turn lived experience into coherent stories — and why that coherence matters for identity. From Linde's life stories as linguistic acts, through McAdams' narrative identity framework, to Habermas and Bluck's developmental account of the life story — this collection traces how the field learned to see personality not as a set of traits, but as a story being told.

ES
Evgeny Smirnov