Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

As a cognitive bias, hubris leads entrepreneurs to overestimate both the likelihood of success and the contribution of firms’ resources to their success. Accordingly, in this chapter, we investigate how entrepreneurs’ hubris influences strategy formulation, performance attribution and responses to performance outcomes. We posit that heightened levels of  hubris in entrepreneurs diminish the significance of external performance in shaping strategy while amplifying the importance of relative performance. When evaluating performance, hubris plays a pivotal role: elevated levels of hubris lead entrepreneurs to attribute positive outcomes to themselves while shifting blame for negative outcomes onto external factors and others. In addition, we recognise that heightened hubris intensifies the commitment to chosen strategies, potentially escalating their pursuit despite adverse circumstances. In disentangling the effect of hubris bias in defining and interpreting firm performance, this chapter assists entrepreneurs in making more conscious and informed decisions.

Chapter 2 describes the original concepts and related research of the author Brave Heart and Indigenous colleagues. The new operationalization of historical trauma described in the Introduction is applied to this context, for example when it comes to discrimination, intergenerational transmission, and social pathologies. The chapter provides empirical material on, among others, the immediate consequences that fully or partially substantiate the assumptions, including assumed mediating factors of historical trauma effects such as traditional values or cultural identity. The chapter concludes by reviewing the first available studies on healing, involving an adjunct program to group therapy with traditional Indigenous content, as well as empowerment through entrepreneurship programs tailored to youth. The conclusion of the chapter is that not all the possibilities of a broader conceptualization of historical trauma in this area have been realized.

Studies investigating diverse phenomena as life story development, the reminiscence bump, emotional and important memories, and future expectations across different ages, as well as experimental and cross-cultural studies, provide converging evidence that cultural life scripts are decisive for individuals to organize autobiographical memories and future thoughts, to draft a meaningful life story, and to navigate their personal future within one’s culture. Recently, researchers have identified cultural life scripts as a type of master narrative (McLean & Syed, 2016), but both autobiographical memory and narrative identity research have overlooked the potential of conceptualizing cultural life scripts as master narratives. In this chapter, we conceptualize cultural life scripts as master narratives, possessing the five defining features of master narratives – utility, ubiquity, invisibility, rigidity, and compulsory nature. Based on the background of the substantial body of research, we propose that conceptualizing cultural life scripts as master narratives can enrich and inspire research on narrative identity approach and autobiographical memory.

Culture offers a unique set of values and traditions that profoundly impact how individuals narrate their life stories. When asked to recall important autobiographical memories, individuals can draw on internalized cultural norms and expectations to define what is appropriate for inclusion in their life stories. But how is the life story told when people choose a path that prevents them from experiencing culturally typical life events such as getting married and having children? This chapter explores the life stories of 48 religious sisters in comparison with the life stories of 48 women from the general population. Like many life stories, important memories of religious sisters center on important themes such as family life (i.e., parents and siblings), education, and work-related events. They rate their memories similarly in terms of emotional valence and subjective control. Moreover, both groups show a typical reminiscence bump in their memory distribution. Despite these remarkable overlaps, two issues are discussed as possibly specific to religious life stories: the predominance of early (negative) life experiences and the (redeeming) decision to join the consecrated life.

The chapter discusses the only partial coming to terms with the genocide trauma against the background of the socio-economic-political and cultural-religious conditions of this Southeast Asian country. The surviving victims and their descendants suffered severe marginalization in their role: their fates were not really dealt with publicly, and they were not granted the status of historical victors. The psychosocial and social science research conducted in relation to genocide survivors, generally from the late 1990s and largely only in the 2000s and 2010s, mirrored in many respects the international developments. It was mainly researchers from the Global North who published studies on the post-genocidal situation in Cambodia. However, anthropologists from the Global North dealt extensively with certain cultural Cambodian aspects of the genocide aftermath. One cultural syndrome garnered particular attention: baksbat, which is characterized by a subjective feeling of ‘broken courage’. This phenomenon manifests as both a normal reaction and a pathological, exaggerated reaction. The treatment approaches for survivors usually include Buddhist or ethnically mediated rituals as an amalgam alongside internationally developed testimony therapy.

The possible neural and neurochemical bases of the hubris syndrome are reviewed by considering relevant evidence from behavioural and cognitive neuroscience in relation to biological psychiatry. This multidisciplinary evidence includes studies of brain-damaged patients and functional neuroimaging and identifies the prefrontal cortex as a crucial region of a brain network undertaking decision-making. The prefrontal cortex is also identified as important for the subjective and behavioural expression of relevant personality traits such as narcissism and impulsivity. Factors that adversely affect so-called executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, such as stress, drug abuse and illness, are also taken into account to highlight possible neurochemical and endocrine influences. A novel hypothesis is presented which postulates a key role for the chronic stress of leadership status depleting monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, which interact with pre-existing temperamental traits, to produce dysfunctional modulation of decision-making circuits controlled by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

This chapter is an exception because it deals with a real threat to a section of the population that continues to this day. Furthermore, some of the victims of the mafia’s deadly violence (in connection with illegal business) are not seen as ‘innocent victims’, even if they were children and young people who themselves came into conflict with the mafia’s violence. Only one publication describes the mafia violence as a ‘historical trauma’, but many others have exactly the same characteristics as those that would be found in other historical traumas, such as the marginalization of the victims and their relatives. A disproportionate amount of attention is paid to researching the perpetrators rather than the victims. Dysfunctional familism and omertà are described as mediating factors. It is only in the last two decades that a social culture of remembrance has developed, which still has to prevail against the ignorance of the majority of society.

This chapter focuses on Alcibiades’ love–hate relationship with the people of Athens to explore the notion of hybris in the context of leadership. Drawing on the social identity theory of leadership, I argue that the Athenians’ ambivalent attitude towards Alcibiades was a result of his complex interaction with two central aspects of Athenian social identity. Insofar as the Athenians perceived themselves as an imperialist and aristocratic city, Alcibiades was a ‘prototypical’ Athenian in that he embodied and articulated the most extreme form of Athenian imperialism. Insofar as the Athenians perceived themselves as ‘middling’ citizens, however, Alcibiades’ private and public conduct (couched by Thucydides in the language of transgression and hybris) was an affront to the dominant egalitarian political ethos. The analysis of Alcibiades’ mutable relationship with the Athenian people highlights the ways in which a leader’s hybris can manifest itself and how it can impact negatively on the leadership process.

A truism across cognitive, clinical, and personality psychology is that coherence of personal narratives is good for us; overall, narrative coherence is conceptually related to fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety and a higher sense of well-being, meaning, and purpose in life. Yet the empirical findings are inconsistent. In this chapter, I explore theoretical and methodological challenges to the concept of narrative coherence, drawing heavily on Habermas’s (2008) model of global, temporal, and causal dimensions. I take a sociocultural developmental approach, in which I explore how relations between different aspects of coherence vary developmentally and by event type in ways that differentially relate to evolving autobiographical memory and well-being. A more nuanced approach to narrative coherence clarifies the ways in which different aspects of personal memories and narrative coherence do and do not relate to different aspects of well-being both over developmental time and as time since the event occurred.

Aristotle defines hybris as a way of mistreating (dishonouring) others. But he also emphasises its psychology, in ways that chime very well with the understanding of the concept in earlier literary sources. As well as indicating a failure to show other people the respect they deserve, hybris is a way of thinking too much of oneself. This affects one’s estimation of the role that luck plays in all human endeavour: the classic Aristotelian case is that of the rich, ‘lucky fools’ who think that their material good fortune is a sign that they excel in all respects; but ancient hybristai in general tend to develop the belief that they are invulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. In this way, hybris regularly entails a failure to deal adequately with risk. At the same time, it bears a relation to the myth of meritocracy, by which the fortunate convince themselves that their success is deserved.