How stable is the personal past? Stability of most important autobiographical memories and life narratives across eight years in a life span sample.

Christin Köber; Tilmann Habermas

doi:10.1037/pspp0000145

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How stable is the personal past? Stability of most important autobiographical memories and life narratives across eight years in a life span sample.

Christin Köber & Tilmann Habermas (2017)

Published: Oct 1, 2017
Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · Vol. 113 · No. 4
DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000145

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At a GlanceAI

Eight-year study shows what stays stable and what changes in people’s key autobiographical memories and life stories.

SummaryAI

This paper tests a common assumption in narrative identity research: that our “most important” memories and life story are relatively stable. Using an eight-year follow-up in a life-span sample, the authors examine how consistent people’s selected key autobiographical memories and broader life narratives remain over time. The novelty is the long time window and life-span perspective, which helps separate short-term fluctuations from longer-term continuity. The implications are practical for qualitative and narrative work: some parts of personal past are reliable anchors, while other parts may shift with age and changing self-understanding.

Method SnapshotAI

Longitudinal follow-up study comparing participants’ key autobiographical memories and life narratives across an eight-year interval.

BackgroundAI

Basic familiarity with autobiographical memory and narrative identity in personality or developmental psychology.

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.

Evgeny Smirnov

For me, the interesting takeaway here is that the more normative events there are in life, the more stable the life story is, and, therefore, in a certain sense, the higher the well-being. In general, it’s useful “not to stick your neck out.”

— ES