021125

What is the psychologically rich life?

Define: a psychologically rich life as a life full of experiences which generate a state of mental engagement and arousal.

(...), such a life will be characterized by complexity, in which people experience a variety of interesting things and feel and appreciate a variety of interesting things and feel and appreciate a variety of deep emotions via firsthand experiences or vicarious experiences such as novels, films, and sports on TV. 

Besser, L., & Oishi, S. (in press). The psychologically rich life. Philosophical Psychology.

McAdams (1993; 1995; McAdams & Pals, 2006; but see also DeYoung, 2015) has defined as levels of personality: traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity. This articulation of personality as multi-leveled was revelatory in organizing the dynamic assembly of constructs that make up personality, and in embracing the complexity of understanding the person.

From this, Adler et al. (2016) derived four constellations of narrative that are especially important to well-being: affective themes, motivational themes, themes of integrative meaning, and structural elements. These factors are also consistent with other approaches to organizing the field at the conceptual level (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams & McLean, 2013), and we review them in turn below.

Themes of Integrative Meaning. This component captures whether and how much reporters indicate interpretation or reflection in their narration of the event (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000). (...) Indeed, we apply the term autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) in the present project because it captures a greater range of constructs including meaning-made, the search for meaning or other reflective processes, and connections between events themselves. However, broadly, the function of this reasoning process is to make sense of the important events of one’s life, establishing personal temporal continuity (Pasupathi et al., 2007).

Individuals may approach this meaning-making task in a variety of ways. For example, assimilative approaches weave new experiences into existing narrative plotlines, whereas accommodative approaches require the substantial revision of one’s current self-stories or the creation of new narrative plotlines in order to include new experiences. Further, some events that we experience do not become integrated into our broader sense of self-understanding, and some do; and in order to do that integration, some meaning must be made.

The Relation between Narrative Identity and Well-being

Adler et al. (2016) reviewed the extant research on the relation between narrative features and well-being, providing evidence that each of the conceptual groupings is indeed related to well-being and demonstrates incremental validity in the association with and prediction of wellbeing above and beyond other variables such as demographics and dispositional traits.

Personality psychologists have struggled to find a conceptual framework that might integrate what they know about individual persons and guide their explorations of the unknown.

What many personality researchers actually do is to focus on particular constructs (e.g., the need for achievement, self-monitoring) or questions (e.g., What are the predictors of psychological well-being? Is altruistic behavior more a function of traits or situations?) about human individuality and social behavior, but leaving unsketched or sketchy the big picture of how their constructs, their questions, and their findings fit into a general framework for understanding individual persons.

According to Mischel, persons should be understood in terms of domain-specific cognitive encoding strategies, self-regulatory systems and plans, and other "cognitive social-learning person variables" (1973, p. 252) that specify how a person makes sense of and interacts within a particular setting. 

McAdams, D. P. (1996). Personality, modernity, and the storied self: A contemporary framework for studying persons. Psychological inquiry, 7(4), 295-321.