Time Perspective, Awareness of Narrative Identity, and the Perceived Coherence of Past Experiences Among Adults David John Hallford, Nicholas J. Fava, and David Mellor

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 (M age = 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 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

findings that a stronger awareness of narrative identity correlates with personal resources such as meaning in life, selfesteem, and self-efficacy (Hallford & Mellor, 2017). Further, this suggests that an awareness of narrative identity might be influenced by, but partially independent of, other factors of interest in narrative identity, such as emotional valence (Berntsen & Rubin, 2002), growth (Bauer, McAdams, & Sakaeda, 2005), and the aforementioned personal meaning (Singer, 2004). In addition to a basic awareness of life stories, their cohesiveness is an important factor related to well-being (Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Bauer, McAdams, & Pals, 2008). Indeed, for individuals to form meaningful narratives about their lives, they must be able to integrate autobiographical information, and clearly identify emergent stories through self-reflection or interaction with others. Habermas and Bluck (2000) propose four types of coherence that develop throughout childhood and adolescence, namely perceiving the order or sequence of events over time, understanding the causal associations between different events and the self, identifying overarching themes from multiple events or circumstances, and cultural norms about what a narrative should contain or the accepted sociocultural significance of particular events. The coherence of narratives is typically coded from transcripts using an objective scale referencing abilities in some or all of these types of coherence (e.g., Reese et al., 2011). However, in addition to this, the subjective perception of coherence –that is, the metacognitive awareness that one can perceive relationships between past experiences in terms of temporal ordering, causal connections, and abstracted themes –might also be a useful approach of inquiry. Indeed, the subjective perception of having coherence in and across past experiences is related to higher well-being, as well as objective assessments of the coherence of written narratives of past events (Hallford & Mellor, 2017). Further, these different forms of perceived coherence predict independent variance in the awareness of having a life narrative (Hallford & Mellor, 2017), therefore uniquely contributing to the subjective salience of life stories. Notably, a stronger awareness of a narrative identity may not necessitate that these stories are coherent. Indeed, one might have a strong awareness of incoherence in life stories. One group who exemplifies this is those individuals with borderline personality disorder, which has the defining characteristics of an awareness of an unstable and fragmented identity (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Individuals with this personality disorder demonstrate poorer coherence of life stories compared to healthy controls (Adler, Chin, Kolisetty, & Oltmanns, 2012). Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe, and Houle (2016) suggest that narrative identity can provide valid, incremental prediction of well-being alongside common dispositional

personality traits, and dimensions of salience and cohesiveness might be relevant factors in this, as they are related to higher psychological well-being (Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Waters & Fivush, 2015). Given this, further understanding of individual differences that affect the awareness and perceived cohesiveness of life stories may clarify how they develop and are maintained, and point to methods of strengthening narrative identity on these dimensions.

One individual difference that may be associated with the salience and cohesion of our life stories, but to date has not been examined in detail, is time perspective. Time perspective refers to the orientation of one’s cognitive processing to emphasize particular time frames, that is, the past, present, or future. Zimbardo and Boyd (1999) proposed that people develop tendencies in the use of time perspective which lead to dominant or dispositional frames through which they interpret the world. For example, during decision-making, individuals may show a tendency to preferentially use information from their personal past experience, place higher value on present contextual variables, or more strongly rely on anticipated outcomes. Numerous studies have provided evidence for the influence of time perspective on various judgments, decisions, and actions. For example, present time perspective has been shown to be an independent predictor of risky driving behavior (Zimbardo, Keough, & Boyd, 1997) and future time perspective has been found to be a predictor of career commitment (Park & Jung, 2015). We contend that differences in time perspective may be associated with the salience and perceived coherence of a narrative identity. Moreover, differences in time perspective may influence the perceived coherence of past experiences, that is, how we interpret their relationship to one another in terms of temporal ordering, causal associations, and the abstraction of experiences into themes about the self (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Perhaps most essential to this contention is that people must possess some basic metacognitive awareness of a temporal frame in order to develop and perceive a narrative identity, to understand that stories about one’s life are extended over time. To develop meaningful narratives that connect personal experiences to one another, one must possess the capacity to explore temporal frames beyond the present. A tendency to reminisce on past experiences may mean more time thinking about when they occurred and how they are related, as well as a stronger integration of events into cohesive stories that are better encoded and more familiar. Conversely, having a dominant futurist time perspective, while useful in many respects (e.g., in motivation or goal setting; Boniwell, 2009; Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), might potentially be limiting in the development and salience of a narrative identity due to the marginalization of past, identity-shaping

experiences. The imagined future and its relationship with self-narrative have been somewhat neglected in research (Syed & McLean, 2016). We suggest that this is due to future thinking providing information about what one’s future identity might become, rather than what it is, and therefore that anticipated experiences have the potential to shape identity in the future rather than defining it in the present. Given this, having a predominantly futurist time perspective might be related to less awareness of life stories as shaped by past experiences, and less coherence of personal memories due to a reduced propensity to think about past experiences and how they relate to one another. In contrast to the above, an expansive time perspective, whereby past and future temporal frames are both emphasized in cognitive processing, may be the most adaptive and flexible time-related disposition to possess (Boniwell & Zimbardo, 2004). Indeed, having an expansive time perspective, relative to a more restrictive time perspective, is related to increased satisfaction with life, happiness, and self-determination (Zhang, Howell, & Stolarski, 2013), and more positive mood states (Stolarski, Matthews, Postek, Zimbardo, & Bitner, 2014). An expansive time perspective may also be predictive of a more salient and cohesive narrative identity, as it may facilitate the extension of narratives over a bidirectional temporal plane to incorporate the events of one’s past with anticipation of one’s future (Boniwell & Zimbardo, 2015). Conversely, a disposition to be more restrictive in terms of time perspective may be associated with less rich and integrated narratives about the self.

To date, little research has investigated time perspective in relation to the salience of narrative identity and the subjective coherence of past experiences. The current study aimed to address this gap in the literature by examining whether different temporal frames might be associated with the awareness of a narrative identity. Further, we investigated whether time perspective is associated with how coherent we perceive our past experiences to be in terms of their temporal ordering, causal connection to another, and relatedness in terms of abstract themes about the self. Finally, given that the ability to establish coherency across past experience, structurally and in a way that integrates various experiences and information about the self, is essential to the development of meaningful narrative identity (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas, Bluck, & McAdams, 2001), we also sought to test a mediation model to assess whether time perspective was indirectly associated with a stronger awareness of narrative identity via perception of coherency in past experiences.

It was hypothesized that higher reported levels of past and future time perspectives would correlate with a stronger awareness of a narrative identity and perceived temporal, causal, and thematic coherence of past experi

ences. Further, it was hypothesized that when these time perspectives were considered together, a bias for past time perspective would, relative to future, be more strongly associated with these narrative identity variables, and that they would interact so that awareness and perceived coherence would be strongest for those concurrently high on past and future time perspectives. Lastly, it was predicted that the association between time perspective and awareness of narrative identity would be mediated by higher perceived coherence of past experiences.

Method

Participants

The sample comprised 212 participants, with a mean age of 28.3 years (SD = 10.9). Sixty-nine percent of the sample were females. With respect to country of origin, 40.6% participants were from Australia, 27.8% from the USA, 6.1% from Canada, 4.7% from India, 3.3% from the UK, 1.9% from New Zealand, and the remaining were from various other countries. The participants were recruited online from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk is a crowdsourcing website that facilitates recruitment of participants to complete tasks in exchange for token payment. Data from MTurk have been shown to be psychometrically reliable and valid (Paolacci & Chandler, 2014). Using G*Power 3.1.9.2, we estimated that at .80 power and an alpha level set at .05, the study was powered to detect correlations of at least a small effect (r = .17), small-to-moderate amounts of variance in the regression analyses (f 2

= .05), and would provide at least 10 cases for each parameter estimated in the mediation model, as recommended by Kline (2015).

Materials

Narrative Identity and Perceived Coherence of Past Experiences The Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ; Hallford & Mellor, 2017) is a self-report measure comprised of 20 items. Respondents are prompted to think generally about their lives, rather than retrieving specific memories. A 5-item subscale measures the awareness of having stories about one’s life that provide information about personal identity (e.g., “My sense of self is embedded in memories of my life”). The three remaining 5-item subscales measure the perception of how coherent one’s autobiographical memories are with respect to understanding when, and the order in which, events occurred in one’s life (temporal coherence. e.g., “I can put the events of my life in the order of when they occurred”), how events are causally linked with

one another (causal coherence, e.g., “I understand how my life experiences are associated with one another”), and how clearly themes about the self can be interpreted by assessing events over the lifetime (thematic coherence, e.g., “When I think or talk about experiences in my past I can see themes about the kind of person that I am”). Participants responded to the ANIQ items on an end-defined scale ranging from 0 (= completely disagree) to 10 (= completely agree). The ANIQ has shown good psychometric properties, including high test–retest reliability and convergent and divergent validity. Importantly, criterion validity has been shown across two studies where subjective ratings on the ANIQ subscales have been shown to significantly correlate with objective ratings of the coherence of written narratives about significant personal events that were turning points in people’s lives (Hallford & Mellor, 2017) and important relationships (Soroko, Janowicz, Frackowiak, Siatka, & Hallford, 2017). In the current study, the subscales were found to have good internal reliability, with Cronbach’s α of .94 for the awareness subscale, .97 for temporal coherence, .91 for causal coherence, and .93 for thematic coherence.

Time Perspective The Balanced Time Perspective Scale (Webster, 2011) is a 28-item questionnaire that includes two subscales, past and future, that assess temporal bias. Examples of items from the past subscale are “Reminiscing about my past gives me a sense of purpose in life” and “Tapping into my past is a source of comfort for me” and from the future subscale “I enjoy thinking about where I’ll be a few years from now” and “My future development is something I frequently think about”. Participants responded to the BTPS on an 11-point, end-defined scale ranging from 0 (= completely disagree) to 10 (= completely agree). The BTPS past and future subscales have been shown to have high internal reliability, as well as construct and criterion validity (Webster, 2011). The scales were observed to have high internal reliability in the current study (past, α = .95; and future, α = . 97). To assess bias in past or future time perspective, an additional subscale was created by subtracting standardized future scores from standardized past scores, with higher scores reflecting a bias toward past time perspective. To assess an expansive or restrictive time perspective, an interaction term was created from the standardized past and future scores, with higher scores indicating a more expansive time perspective.

Procedure

Ethics approval was obtained from the university human research ethics committee prior to commencement of the study. Participants elected to take part in the study from

Figure 1. Hypothesized path model of direct and indirect effects of time perspective on awareness of narrative identity.

the MTurk website and were then directed to an external website that hosted the study survey. They were first presented with the plain language statement describing the study and participant requirements, and then prompted to complete demographic information and the study questionnaires. Informed consent was implied by completion and submission of the questionnaire. Participants were compensated with a nominal sum of money for their time.

Data Analyses

SPSS 23.0 was used to perform all statistical analyses. Pearson correlation analyses were conducted to assess the zeroorder correlations between the study variables using standardized scores. Fisher’s z-test was used to assess for significant differences between the magnitude of correlation between the ANIQ and time perspective subscales. Following this, a series of regression analyses were conducted where each of the ANIQ subscales was regressed onto the time perspective subscales and their interaction term to ascertain the unique variance accounted.

Path analysis was used to test the mediation model. Figure 1 shows the mediation model to be tested. As indicated, pathways were estimated from the past and future time perspective variables (for which a correlation was estimated) to the perceived coherence variables, and also directly to the awareness of narrative identity variable. The coherence variances were correlated with one another, and pathways were estimated between these variables and awareness. A single-step model with maximum likelihood estimation was conducted in AMOS 22.0 to assess for direct and indirect effects simultaneously. Bootstrapping with 5,000 samples (Hayes, 2009) was used to test for indirect effects, as it

ANIQ Awareness ANIQ Temporal ANIQ Causal ANIQ Thematic Past TP Future TP TP Bias TP Expansive Mean (SD)

ANIQ Awareness

ANIQ Temporal .55***

ANIQ Causal .83*** .63***

ANIQ Thematic .83*** .49*** .83***

Past TP .72*** .38*** .67*** .66***

Future TP .30*** .23** .34*** .31*** .53***

TP Bias .43*** .16* .34*** .36*** TP Expansive .04 .06 .06 .08

.48*** .48***

.51***

.08 .44*** 33.2 (11.6) 34.3 (11.8) 34.7 (9.9) 34.6 (10.8) 78.7 (32.2) 97.3 (31.2)

Notes. ANIQ = Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire, TP = Time Perspective. Higher scores on the TP Bias variable indicate favoring past TP, while lower scores indicate favour future TP. TP Expansive represents the interaction between past and future TP, with higher scores indicating a more expansive TP. ***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, all two-tailed.

is the most statistically powerful approach available (MacKinnon, Lockwood, & Williams, 2004; Williams & MacKinnon, 2008). A bias-corrected and accelerated 95% confidence interval (CI) was obtained, whereby confidence intervals that did not span across zero were indicative of significant indirect effects at the p < .05 level. The following fit indices were used to assess how well the data fit the model: the chi-square value (CMIN) and corresponding p-value, the relative chi-square statistic (CMIN/df), the root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA), the standardized root-mean-square residual (SRMR), and the comparative fit index (CFI). Guidelines by Hu and Bentler (1999) were used for the purpose of assessing model fit (RMSEA
.06, SRMR
.09, and CFI  .95).

Results

Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of the study variables and their intercorrelations. To assess whether there might be differences in these intercorrelations based on country of origin, we compared the strength of correlations between the two largest groups (i.e., Australia and USA) using Fisher’s z-tests. There were no significant differences in how the ANIQ or time perspectives variables correlated with one another (Fisher’s z-test all z < 1.31, all p-values > .190). Given the small size of the other country of origin groups, we deemed that other such comparisons would be unreliable.

Regarding the total sample, as hypothesized, past and future time perspectives were found to correlate with the awareness of narrative identity and perceived coherence subscales of the ANIQ. The results of Fisher’s z-tests (Table 2) showed that the awareness of narrative identity and causal and thematic coherence subscales on the ANIQ correlated more strongly with past time perspective compared to future time perspective, whereas the strength of

correlations between past and future perspectives were not found to significantly differ for the temporal coherence subscale. The correlations between the time perspective balance variable and subscales of the ANIQ indicated that more strongly favoring a past time perspective was associated with a stronger awareness of narrative identity and more perceived coherence of past experiences. Table 3 shows the results of a series of multiple regressions indicating that time perspective predicted a substantial amount of variance in the ANIQ subscales (adjusted R 2

= .44–.53), although notably less for temporal coherence (adjusted R 2

= .15). For the three perceived coherence subscales, only past time perspective predicted unique variance. However, for the awareness subscale, the past subscales predicted more awareness, while the future subscale predicted less awareness. The interaction term for temporal coherence was significant and indicated that an interaction of higher past and future time perspectives predicted more perceived temporal coherence.

As the results of the multiple regressions showed that future time perspective did not contribute unique variance to any of the coherence variables, these pathways were not estimated in the path analysis. The results showed that the model was a good fit to the data, CMIN = 0.83 (df= 3, p = .478), CMIN/df = 2.49, RMSEA = .00 (95% CI [.00, .10]), SRMR = .014, CFI = 1.00. Figure 2 shows the final model with estimated pathways. Past and future time perspectives correlated with one another (r = .53, p < .001), and all three coherence subscales correlated significantly with one another (r = .34–.69, all p < .001). Past time perspective was observed to have direct, significant associations with all three coherence variables, as well as a direct significant association with awareness of narrative identity. The results from the bootstrapping tests showed that higher scores on past time perspective also had a significant indirect association with higher awareness of narrative identity through higher scores on the coherence variables with a large standardized indirect effect of .49,

ANIQ subscale Past time perspective Future time perspective Fisher’s z-test

Awareness .73*** .30*** Temporal coherence .38*** .23** Causal coherence .67*** .34*** Thematic coherence .66*** .31***

Notes. ANIQ = Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire. ***p < .001, **p < .01. z = 6.33, p < .001 z = 1.82, p = .068 z = 4.67, p < .001 z = 4.94, p < .001

Table 3. Summary of regression analyses of time perspective subscales and interaction terms predicting ANIQ subscales

Awareness Temporal coherence Causal coherence Thematic coherence β p-value β p-value β p-value β p-value

Past .80 < .001 .32 .000 .69 < .001 .71 .000

Future

Past  Future interaction

F R 2 Adjusted R 2

.15 .023 .14 .112 .04 .563 .11 .123 .05 .343 .16 .029 .03 .624 .07 .201 122.0 < .001 14.3 < .001 57.4 < .001 56.8 < .001 .54 .17 .45 .45 .53 .15 .44 .44

Notes. ANIQ = Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire. All variable scores are standardized.

Figure 2. Results of the final path analysis model, showing standardized regression coefficients and squared multiple correlations (underlined), *p < .05, ***p < .001.

95% CI [.43, 56], p < .001. Consistent with the results of the multiple regressions, future time perspective was observed to have a small, but significant negative association with awareness of narrative identity. All three coherence vari

ables had significant associations with awareness of narrative identity, although temporal coherence’s effect was smaller than that of causal and thematic coherence (p < .05, as indicated by nonoverlapping 95% CI).

Discussion

This study examined the relationship between time perspective, awareness of narrative identity, and the perceived coherence of past experiences. Congruent with our hypotheses, stronger past and future time perspectives correlated with a stronger awareness of having a narrative identity and the perception that past experiences were coherent in relation to one another. This indicated that the tendency to have positive attitudes toward remembering the personal past and imagining the future, and in particular drawing significance and comfort from favoring a past perspective in particular, was related to stronger awareness of having stories about one’s life that facilitate self-understanding. Further, these tendencies were related to more perceived coherency of past experiences in terms of the perceived timing and order in which experiences in life occurred, how they were causally related to one another, and how different experiences could be abstracted into themes about one’s life and oneself. However, when the time perspective scales were examined together as predictors of the ANIQ subscales through multiple regressions and path analysis, only past time perspective emerged as a significant positive predictor of awareness of narrative identity and perceived coherence. These findings contrast with the zero-order correlations showing future time perspective to be positively associated with awareness and all types of coherence, albeit of a lower magnitude than past time perspective. It is possible that the past and future time perspective scales are associated with a shared, latent variable of mentally representing life experiences. Indeed, these two cognitive processes are sometimes referred to jointly as mental time travel and overlap in terms of their component processes and brain networks (Schacter et al., 2012). This may explain why future time perspective was no longer a positive predictor when this shared variance was accounted for by other variables. This was supported by a lack of interaction effect, with the exception of temporal coherence (discussed below), indicating that there was no additive effect when these variables were considered together in predicting awareness or perceived coherence. Indeed, the predilection to think about the future was observed to be predictive of lower salience of life stories, although this effect size was small.

Narrative identity is generally considered to involve not only information in storied form about the past, but also some narration of the anticipated future (McAdams, 1985). Indeed, just as thinking about past experiences can contribute to a sense of self and identity, so too can the anticipation of significant future events that we might experience (D’Argembeau, Lardi, & Van der Linden, 2012). However, in this study, we found that a future time perspective was not related to higher awareness of narrative iden

tity, rather it was related to lower awareness. As noted, this may reflect the possibility that while we create narratives of our possible futures, they represent events that have the potential to alter our identity, rather than experiences by which we define our identity. This points to a possible distinction between narratives of the past or present self, and narratives of the future self, with future time perspective not uniquely related to the former two. The exception in our study was temporal coherence, whereby a more positive disposition toward past and future thinking both independently predicted stronger perceived coherence of the ordering of events. This might reflect an overlap in how thinking about sequences of past and or possible future events requires, and might promote, the basic ability to sequence mental representations. Moving forward, researchers may wish to examine written narratives about future events, and assess how closely they approximate, or differ from, narratives derived from past experiences. A range of research questions arise from this line of inquiry, such as do stories of redemption in one’s past also predict narratives about oneself in the future that involve overcoming adversity, or does perception of narrative coherence differ in nature between past or future narratives.

The findings from this study indicate that a disposition to emphasize a past temporal frame as having significance and providing comfort is strongly associated with more subjectively coherent and integrated understandings of past experiences, possibly through better encoding in memory and an increased sense of familiarity. Our path analysis supports the prediction that this disposition is also associated with more salient life stories directly, and indirectly through subjectively coherent personal memories. A stronger tendency to recall and review past experiences in life might promote familiarity and better encoding in memory of the order in which these memories occurred, the way in which experiences lead to one another in a manner, and how they might be abstracted to form overarching themes. This increased coherence then provides the basis from which higher-order and abstracted stories about the self can be constructed. Indeed, all three of these types of perceived coherence were observed to predict unique variance in the salience of having life stories. This is consistent with previous findings (Hallford & Mellor, 2017), and the notion that each type of coherence contributes uniquely to the process of developing narratives about oneself.

Narratives about one’s experiences are considered to be somewhat prerequisite to the extraction of meaning about one’s life, and a meaningful self-identity (Singer, 2004). Similarly, although future time perspective is associated with more goal-directed behavior (Lens, Paixao, Herrera, & Grobler, 2012), one may be less likely to feel self-efficacious and capable of achieving goals in the absence of

self-narratives with content relating to agency and the past overcoming of challenges in one’s life (e.g., Adler, Skalina, & McAdams 2008). Narratives may be understood as a guide for future behavior, but these findings suggest that the subjective coherence and awareness of these narratives, and by extension their possible contribution toward adaptive psychological functioning (Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999), seem to be associated primarily with thinking about the past.

Research utilizing this self-report measure of the awareness of life stories and perceived coherence of experiences is in early infancy. Although it has been shown that awareness of narrative identity correlates with adaptive psychological resources, and can be increased through specific reminiscence activities (see Hallford & Mellor, 2016), many questions regarding its role in psychological functioning are yet to be answered. For example, although a future temporal bias did not contribute to awareness of life stories in our study, this may be different in younger individuals. Given the stronger emphasis on future events observed in adolescence and emerging adulthood (Carstensen, 2006), individuals at this age might imagine possible future events more often to conceptualize their current identity, drawing inspiration for their identity from what they anticipate they will experience. Future studies might also test whether awareness of narrative identity moderates the previously demonstrated relationship between objectively assessed coherence and psychological well-being (Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Bauer et al., 2008). More broadly, the incremental validity of narrative identity in well-being (Adler et al., 2016) might be accounted for, in part, by a stronger awareness of life stories, with perceived coherence and past time perspective both contributing to this awareness. Further, it would be interesting to assess whether coherent objective accounts of life stories might interact with stronger self-reported awareness of these stories to produce more coherent narratives of the future self, as assessed objectively or subjectively.

Several limitations of this study should be noted, such as the modest sample size. Replication may assist in establishing the robustness of these findings. Moreover, the correlational nature of the design precludes causal inferences. Although previous experimental research has provided evidence that thinking about the past can cause a small increase in the awareness of life stories (Hallford & Mellor, 2016), this has not yet been demonstrated in the case of autobiographical coherence and its place in this causal chain. Therefore, future research may seek to include perceived coherence as a mediator in experimental designs. Tests of indirect effects between variables, such as conducted herein, have inherent limitations regarding directionality, and it can only be ascertained from them that variables are related with one another in some form.

Although we specified a particular model in this study, as noted above, further tests are needed to establish the causal relationships. Future studies seeking to replicate or build on these findings might also seek to assess whether cultural background affects the associations between time perspective and perceived narrative coherence. Our sample was predominantly from Australia and the USA, with other country of origin groups too small in number to facilitate reliable comparisons. However, given previous findings showing cross-cultural differences in time perspective (Sircova et al., 2015) and how autobiographical memory is used in forming stories about the self (see Fivush & Nelson, 2004), the moderating factor of cultural heritage might also be examined.

In conclusion, the current study indicated that favoring a past temporal perspective is more strongly associated with a more salient narrative identity and coherency of past experiences, while favoring a future time perspective may marginally decrease the salience of one’s narrative identity.

Acknowledgments

Funding: No funding was provided for this research. Declaration of Conflicting Interest: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Received August 15, 2017 Revision received May 14, 2018 Accepted May 19, 2018 Published online November 16, 2018

D. J. Hallford Deakin University School of Psychology 221 Burwood Highway Burwood 3125 Melbourne, Victoria Australia david.hallford@deakin.edu.au