Traits and stories: links between dispositional and narrative features of personality.

Dispositional traits and life narratives represent two different levels of personality that have not previously been empirically linked. The current study tested five hypotheses connecting Big-Five traits to life-narrative indices of emotional tone, theme, and structure. Students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) completed a self-report measure of the Big-Five traits and provided extended written accounts of either ten (students) or eight (adults) key life-narrative scenes, including life high points, low points, and turning points. Content analysis of the narrative data revealed that for both samples Neuroticism was positively associated with an emotionally negative life-narrative tone, Agreeableness was correlated with narrative themes of communion (e.g., friendship, caring for others), and Openness was strongly associated with the structural complexity of life narrative accounts. Contrary to prediction, however, Conscientiousness was not consistently associated with themes of agency (e.g., achievement, self-mastery) and Extraversion was unrelated to positive narrative tone. The results are discussed in the context of contemporary research and theorizing on the narrative study of lives and the relation of narrative research in personality to more conventional, trait-based approaches.

[1]  D. Watson,et al.  Negative affectivity: the disposition to experience aversive emotional states. , 1984, Psychological bulletin.

[2]  L. A. Pervin.  Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research , 1992 .

[3]  George C. Rosenwald,et al.  Storied lives : the cultural politics of self-understanding , 1993 .

[4]  D. McAdams,et al.  Stories of commitment : The psychosocial construction of generative lives , 1997 .

[5]  Religious Identity among Students at a Private College: Social Motives, Ego Stage, and Development. , 1981 .

[6]  B. Thurston,et al.  The duality of human existence , 1966 .

[7]  R. Piorkowski,et al.  The role of motives in the content and structure of autobiographical memory. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[8]  D. McAdams,et al.  Generativity and adult development : how and why we care for the next generation , 1998 .

[9]  D. McAdams,et al.  Personality reconsidered: a new agenda for aging research. , 2003, The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences.

[10]  Philip E. Tetlock,et al.  Cognitive style and political belief systems in the British House of Commons. , 1984 .

[11]  A. Tellegen,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES An Alternative "Description of Personality": The Big-Five Factor Structure , 2022 .

[12]  W. Nasby,et al.  The life voyage of a solo circumnavigator: integrating theoretical and methodological perspectives. , 1997, Journal of personality.

[13]  G. S. Gregg,et al.  Multiple identities and the integration of personality. , 1995, Journal of personality.

[14]  Murray R. Barrick,et al.  THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS AND JOB PERFORMANCE: A META-ANALYSIS , 1991 .

[15]  S. Srivastava,et al.  The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. , 1999 .

[16]  D. McAdams,et al.  Power, Intimacy and the Life Story: Personological Inquiries into Identity , 1985 .

[17]  D. McAdams.  What Do We Know When We Know a Person , 1995 .

[18]  Seymour Epstein,et al.  The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. , 1979 .

[19]  Peter Salovey,et al.  The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality , 1993 .

[20]  D. McAdams,et al.  Narrating life's turning points: Redemption and contamination. , 2001 .

[21]  B. Roberts,et al.  Broad Dispositions, Broad Aspirations: The Intersection of Personality Traits and Major Life Goals , 2000 .

[22]  D. McAdams,et al.  The Psychology of Life Stories , 2001 .

[23]  D. McAdams,et al.  When Bad Things Turn Good and Good Things Turn Bad: Sequences of Redemption and Contamination in Life Narrative and their Relation to Psychosocial Adaptation in Midlife Adults and in Students , 2001 .

[24]  David B. Pillemer,et al.  Momentous Events, Vivid Memories , 2000 .

[25]  P. Costa,et al.  Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. , 1997 .

[26]  P. Costa,et al.  Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[27]  A. Boxer,et al.  Generativity, social context, and lived experience: Narratives of gay men in middle adulthood. , 1998 .

[28]  M. Conway,et al.  The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. , 2000, Psychological review.

[29]  D. McAdams,et al.  Can personality change? Levels of stability and growth in personality across the life span. , 1994 .

[30]  D. McAdams.  Experiences of intimacy and power: Relationships between social motives and autobiographical memory. , 1982 .

[31]  D. McAdams,et al.  CHAPTER 3 – Human Motives and Personal Relationships , 1984 .

[32]  Joyce Hogan,et al.  Personality Measurement and Employment Decisions. Questions and Answers. , 1996 .

[33]  S. Schwartz,et al.  The Big Five Personality Factors and Personal Values , 2002 .

[34]  J. Bruner.  Actual minds, possible worlds , 1985 .

[35]  D. Winter,et al.  Traits and motives: toward an integration of two traditions in personality research. , 1998, Psychological review.

[36]  J. Singer,et al.  Seeing one's self: locating narrative memory in a framework of personality. , 1995, Journal of personality.

[37]  N. Eisenberg,et al.  Agreeableness: A Dimension of Personality , 1997 .

[38]  B. Woike,et al.  Most-memorable experiences: evidence for a link between implicit and explicit motives and social cognitive processes in everyday life , 1995 .

[39]  P. Costa,et al.  Openness to experience and ego level in Loevinger's Sentence Completion Test: Dispositional contributions to developmental models of personality. , 1980 .

[40]  D. McAdams,et al.  Themes of Agency and Communion In Significant Autobiographical Scenes , 1996 .

[41]  Dorothy Tate,et al.  On Ego Development , 1958 .

[42]  L. Clark,et al.  Extraversion and Its Positive Emotional Core , 1997 .

[43]  D. McAdams.  The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self , 1997 .

[44]  B. Woike,et al.  Motive-related memories: content, structure, and affect. , 2001, Journal of personality.

[45]  John A. Johnson,et al.  Handbook of personality psychology. , 1997 .

[46]  S. Bluck,et al.  Getting a life: the emergence of the life story in adolescence. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[47]  D. McAdams,et al.  The Person: An Integrated Introduction to Personality Psychology , 2000 .

[48]  Charles P. Smith.  Motivation and personality: Name Index , 1992 .

[49]  Personality and motivation: Personal action and the conative evolution. , 1999 .

[50]  W. Mischel,et al.  A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. , 1995, Psychological review.

[51]  P. Suedfeld,et al.  Motivation and personality: Conceptual/integrative complexity , 1992 .

[52]  V. Derlega,et al.  Communication, intimacy, and close relationships , 1984 .

[53]  O. John,et al.  Handbook of personality: Theory and research, 2nd ed. , 1999 .

[54]  Amia Lieblich,et al.  Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition , 2001 .

[55]  Todd F. Heatherton,et al.  Can Personality Change , 1994 .