 5. Narrative Identity and the Life Story 127
to be associated with increasing age and 
with indices of both psychological maturity 
and well-being (McLean & Breen, 2009; 
Tavernier & Willoughby, 2012). However, 
too much meaning making can sometimes 
be a bad thing, at least for certain groups. 
McLean, Breen, and Fournier (2010) have 
shown that higher levels of meaning mak -
ing among young adolescent males is associ -
ated with poorer  psychological functioning, 
perhaps because this form of advanced au -
tobiographical reasoning may indicate that 
these young males are facing serious life 
problems—  problems that seem to demand 
forms of reasoning that they have not yet 
mastered.
Overall, studies have shown that people en -
gage in greater levels and more sophisticated 
forms of autobiographical reasoning as they 
move from the adolescent and early adult 
years up through midlife (Baddeley & Sing -
er, 2007). Pasupathi and Mansour (2006) 
found that autobiographical reasoning in 
narrative accounts of life turning points in -
creases with age up to midlife. Middle-  aged 
adults showed a more interpretive and psy -
chologically sophisticated approach to life 
storytelling compared to younger people. 
Bluck and Gluck (2004) asked adolescents 
(ages 15–20), young adults (ages 30–40), 
and older adults (age 60 and over) to recount 
personal experiences in which they dem -
onstrated wisdom. Young adults and older 
adults were more likely than the adolescents 
to narrate wisdom scenes in ways that con -
nected the experiences to larger life themes 
or philosophies. In a study that asked people 
to conceive of their entire lives as scripts 
punctuated by a sequence of seven scenes, 
Bohn (2010) found that older adults created 
more realistic and less idealized scripts com -
pared to younger adults.
Singer, Rexhaj, and Baddeley (2007) 
found that adults over the age of 50 nar -
rated self-  defining memories that expressed 
a more positive emotional tone and greater 
interpretive meaning compared to those of 
college students. Older adults, compared to 
college students, described important mem -
ories in their lives that exhibited greater lev -
els of thematic coherence and more emphasis 
on the stability of personality in a study con -
ducted by McLean (2008). In another study, 
older adults exhibited less conflict in their life stories compared to younger adults (Rice 
& Pasupathi, 2010). Kingo, Berntsen, and 
Krojgaard (2013) found that older adults 
(through age 70) tended to provide more 
emotionally vivid and coherent accounts of 
earliest memories than did younger adults. 
Bluck, Alea, Baron-Lee, and Davis (2016) 
discovered that the story aside,  or a digres -
sion that elaborates on a point or offers an 
important life lesson, is one narrative device 
through which older adults often convey im -
portant meanings in life narrative accounts. 
Such findings dovetail with Pennebaker and 
Stone’s (2003) demonstration, based on lab -
oratory studies of language use and analyses 
of published fiction, that adults use more 
positive and fewer negative affect words, 
and demonstrate greater levels of cognitive 
complexity, as they age, at least up through 
midlife (the 40s and 50s). The findings are 
also consistent with a broader literature in 
lifespan developmental psychology showing 
that middle-  aged adults tend to express the 
most complex, individuated, and integrated 
self- conceptions, and with research on epi -
sodic memory and aging, showing a positive 
memory bias among older adults (Kennedy, 
Mather, & Carstensen, 2004).
Findings regarding age differences in life 
stories have come mainly from cross section -
al studies. Only a handful of longitudinal 
studies has directly examined how stories 
change over time. In a 3-year longitudinal 
study that asked college students to recall 
and describe 10 key scenes in their life sto -
ries on three different occasions, McAdams, 
Bauer, et al. (2006) found that only 28% of 
the episodic memories described at time 1 
were repeated 3 months later (time 2), and 
22% of the original (time 1) memories were 
chosen and described again 3 years after 
the original assessment (time 3). Despite 
changes in manifest content, however, the 
authors documented noteworthy longitudi -
nal consistencies (in the correlation range of 
.35 to .60) in certain emotional and moti -
vational qualities in the stories (e.g., posi -
tive emotional tone and strivings for power/
achievement) and in the level of narrative 
complexity. Furthermore, over the 3-year 
period, students’ life-  narrative accounts be -
came more complex, and they incorporated 
a greater number of themes suggesting per -
sonal growth and integration.