Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest among theorists and researchers in autobiographical recollections, life stories, and narrative approaches to understanding human behavior and experience. An important development in this context is D. P. McAdams's life story model of identity (1985, 1993, 1996), which asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self. The idea that identity is a life story resonates with a number of important themes in developmental, cognitive, personality, and cultural psychology. This article reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self-understanding, autobiographical memory, personality structure and change, and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity.

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Generativity may be conceived in terms of 7 interrelated features: cultural demand, inner desire, generative concern, belief in the species, commitment, generative action, and personal narration. Two studies describe the development and use of 3 assessment strategies designed to tap into the generativity features of concern, action, and narration. A self-report scale of generative concernthe Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS)-exhibited good internal consistency and retest reliability and showed strong positive associations with reports of actual generative acts (e.g., teaching a skill) and themes of generativity in narrative accounts of important autobiographical episodes. In 1 sample of adults between the ages of 19 and 68, LGS scores of fathers were higher than those of men who had never had children.

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Individual differences in personality may be described at three different levels. Level I consists of those broad, decontextualized, and relatively nonconditional constructs called "traits," which provide a dispositional signature for personality description. No description of a person is adequate without trait attributions, but trait attributions themselves yield little beyond a "psychology ofthe stranger." At Level II (called "personal concems"), personality descriptions invoke personal strivings, life tasks, defense mechanisms, coping strategies, domain-specific skills and values, and a wide assortment of other motivational, developmental, or strategic constructs that are contextualized in time, place, or role. While dispositional traits and personal concerns appear to have near-universal applicability. Level III presents frameworks and constructs that may be uniquely relevant to adulthood only, and perhaps only within modern societies that put a premium on the individuation of the self. Thus, in contemporary Western societies, a full description of personality commonly requires a consideration of the extent to which a human life expresses unity and purpose, which are the hallmarks of identity. Identity in adulthood is an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstmcted past, perceived present, and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose, and meaning. At Level III, psychologists may explore the person's identity as an internalized and evolving life story. Each of the three levels has its own geography and requires its own indigenous nomenclatures, taxonomies, theories, frameworks, and laws.One of the great social rituals in the lives of middle-class American famihes is "the drive home." The ritual comes in many different forms.

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Narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose. In recent studies on narrative identity, researchers have paid a great deal of attention to (a) psychological adaptation and (b) development. Research into the relation between life stories and adaptation shows that narrators who find redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity, and who construct life stories that feature themes of personal agency and exploration, tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity. Researchers have tracked the development of narrative identity from its origins in conversations between parents and their young children to the articulation of sophisticated meaning-making strategies in the personal stories told in adolescence and the emerging adulthood years. Future researchers need to (a) disentangle causal relations between features of life stories and positive psychological adaptation and (b) explore further the role of broad cultural contexts in the development of narrative identity.