Original Article
Time Perspective, Awareness of Narrative Identity, and the Perceived Coherence of Past Experiences Among Adults David John Hallford, Nicholas J. Fava, and David Mellor Deakin University, School of Psychology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abstract: The ability to mentally project oneself into the past and future is theoretically central to perception of a salient and cohesive narrative identity. Despite these theorized links, to date, the relationship between time perspective and narrative identity has not been empirically studied. We examined the association between these constructs in a sample of 212 participants (Mage = 28.3 years, SD = 10.9) who completed the Balanced Time Perspective Scale and the Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ). Congruent with our hypotheses, stronger past perspective and a bias for past perspective over future were associated with a stronger awareness of having a narrative identity and the perception of temporal, causal, and thematic coherency of past experiences. When the past and future time perspective scales were examined together as predictors of the ANIQ subscales, past time perspective emerged as a significant predictor of stronger awareness of a narrative identity through dimensions of perceived coherence of past experiences, whereas future time perspective was a weak, direct predictor of lower awareness. The findings indicate that individual differences in time perspective, and in particular a bias for past time perspective, are associated with a potentially more adaptive perception of narrative identity. Keywords: time perspective, narrative identity, autobiographical coherence
Narrative identity refers to the evolving stories that people develop about themselves and their lives. These stories relate to the reconstructed past, help us guide or predict the anticipated future (McAdams, 2008, p. 243), and are formed by meaningfully integrating information we possess about ourselves and the world. The development of a narrative identity, which emerges through adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha, 2001), helps us to organize and abstract memories of our experiences. Such self-defining narratives are considered fundamental components of the framework of personality, providing unity and purpose to the lives of individuals, as well as shaping behavior (McAdams & Pals, 2006; Singer 2004). As a construct closely related to other domains of psychological inquiry, such as memory, cognitive-affective states, and psychosocial development, narrative identity has garnered broad research interest. This research has often focused on the content of narratives, whereby individuals provide verbal or written accounts of events or sequences of events in their lives, which are then coded on various dimensions. This approach to narrative identity has borne much useful information, for example, that narrative themes of agency and redemption are associated with more positive well-being (McAdams & McLean, 2013) and Ó 2018 Hogrefe Publishing
predict behavioral change over time (Dunlop & Tracy, 2013), that autonomy and connectedness are related to meaning making about one’s one life (McLean, Breen, & Fournier, 2010), and that changes in agency in narrative identity precede positive mental health outcomes in psychotherapy (Adler, 2012). We recently proposed that the awareness that people have of their life stories, including how conscious they are of drawing on these to understand themselves and their lives, is also an important dimension of narrative identity to consider (Hallford & Mellor, 2017). This dimension, of awareness of life stories, might be thought of as a basic metacognition that experiences can be represented as stories that inform oneself of one’s identity. The salience of life stories is clearly related to their personal meaning and, inherently, their ability to be remembered (McLean, Syed, & Shucard, 2016; McLean, Syed, Yoder, & Greenhoot, 2014). However, salience and meaning are not synonymous constructs, theoretically or empirically (Hallford & Mellor, 2017). We have proposed that a stronger awareness of having life stories, even those with negative content, might be adaptive in general, given they still provide a sense that one’s experiences are interpretable, and potentially predictable in some way also. This is congruent with our Journal of Individual Differences (2019), 40(1), 45–54 https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000275
