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Updated: Oct 22, 2025

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotional Autobiographical Recollection
Published on: August 26, 2011
Stability and change in autobiographical reasoning: A 4-year longitudinal study of narrative identity development
Kate C McLean1, David Dunlap1, Sarah C Jennings2
1Department of Psychology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA.
Objective:
Research on personality development has traditionally focused on rank-order stability and mean-level change in the context of personality traits. The present study expands this approach to the examination of change and stability at another level of personality-narrative identity-by focusing on autobiographical reasoning. Drawing from theory in personality and developmental science, we examine stability and change in exploratory processing and positive and negative self-event connections.
Method:
We take advantage of a longitudinal study of emerging adult personality and identity development, which includes four waves of data across 4 years, examining reasoning in two domains of identity, academics, and romance (n = 1520 narratives; n = 176-638 participants, depending on the analysis).
Results:
We found moderate rank-order stability in autobiographical reasoning, but more so for exploratory processing than self-event connections. We found mean-level increases for exploratory processing in the context of romance and stability in the context of academics. For self-event connections, we saw a decrease for positive connections, and for negative connections about romance, with stability for negative connections about academics.
Conclusions:
Implications include developmental differences in types of reasoning as well as the sensitivity of narrative identity to revealing the contextual nature of personality development.
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