The contributors to the present volume take the psychological study of the life story into new directions. Coming from diverse backgrounds like developmental, memory, personality, social, and clinical psychology, they share an interest in life as a frame of reference for biographical narrating and remembering. We have crossed intellectual and life paths at different times in the past 30 years, becoming cherished colleagues and friends. I cannot adequately express how grateful for and delighted I am by the contributions.

Cultural life scripts refer to typical life events and their expected timing within a given culture. Although life scripts tend to be substantially similar across cultures, a few studies examining subcultures (e.g., ethnicity, religious affiliation) reported some differences in event content (Bohn & Bundgaard-Nielsen, 2021) and normativity (Hatiboğlu & Habermas, 2016; Tungjitcharoen & Berntsen, 2022). Here, we report data from a study exploring life story events and life scripts of a subsection of society: LGBQ individuals in Turkey. We collected life scripts and life story events from LGBQ and cis-heterosexual adults living in Turkey. Participants also filled out questionnaires regarding well-being and life satisfaction, along with questions on sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Life story–life script overlap was stronger for cis-heterosexuals than for the LGBQ group largely due to differences in life script typicality. Well-being was associated with life script positivity for cis-heterosexual participants but with life story positivity for LGBQ participants. Results are discussed in terms of life script framework and identity development.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.

Chapter 3 draws on the rich psychological-psychiatric and related literature on the sequelae of the Holocaust. This was the basis for many of the propositions of the historical trauma concept among Indigenous Americans. In this field, many Jewish or Israeli researchers have contributed important theories and concepts, such as the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder with its precursor terms, the memorial concept ‘Zachor’, survivor guilt, and the just-world hypothesis, among others. In this area, inter- or transgenerational transmission has been extensively studied. The collective narrative of Anne Frank’s memories helped these topics to achieve a level of international acknowledgment that they did not have before. To this day, descendants still experience discrimination. As remedies, significant contributions were made to the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, although these remained largely an individual and not community-based approach. Research into the effectiveness of memorial visits was initiated here in isolated studies.

The extent to which people succeed in integrating several perspectives in their narratives of an emotionally charged event suggests how well the narrator has coped with it. Through temporal and social perspective taking, narratives promote emotion regulation and help making sense of experience. The present work will discuss the close entanglement of emotion regulation, perspective taking, and narrative. First, we will discuss how adverse childhood experiences and interpersonal potentially traumatic experiences during childhood harm the development of emotion regulation and perspective taking skills. Second, we will highlight how this reflects in emotion and trauma narratives of children and adults who have gone through child maltreatment. Finally, we will argue that narratives not only reflect the extent to which a person copes with the event narrated but also promote coping itself, by restructuring the autobiographical memory due to perspective taking and emotion regulation in an interpersonal elicitation context.

This chapter recounts the history of the functional approach to autobiographical memory and lays out ways to move the field forward. In the 1970s, prominent cognitive psychologists called for research to expand beyond controlled experimental laboratory procedures to examine memory in everyday life. Early research theorized three broad functions from which a self-report measure was developed. The functional approach is intuitively appealing, but its growth has been somewhat haphazard. One barrier may be the lack of a solid, agreed-upon, definition. To aid the field in moving forward, we present a clear, detailed definition of function. Using criteria related to this definition allows other candidate functions to be rigorously considered. Two candidate functions are explored. Existing work suggesting that emotion enhancement may be a function of autobiographical memory is reviewed and compared with our definition. We then elaborate on a new proposal that social status may be a function of autobiographical remembering. Finally, a brief discussion of how narrative approaches to recalling the personal past might be used to study functions of autobiographical memory is presented.

Vicarious life stories are mental representation of other people’s life stories that integrate the other person’s past with the person’s lived present and projected future, for example “my mother’s story.” Taking as our starting point the influential paper by Habermas and Bluck (2000), which pointed to parallels between personal and vicarious life stories, we expand the conceptual space for vicarious life stories to include vicarious life story schema, vicarious memory and future projection, and biographical reasoning. We then discuss the potential differences between vicarious and personal life stories, including their different sources (direct experience versus conversation). In the second part of the chapter, we review empirical studies showing that vicarious life stories are related to personal life stories and discuss the possible explanations for these relations, as well as associations between vicarious life stories and mental health. Finally, we argue that vicarious life stories serve unique social functions in attachment relationships and in supporting sophisticated perspective-taking as a part of empathic understanding of the other person.

The chapter on the consequences of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi brings many constructive contributions that have been made to improve the situation of those affected. Nevertheless, the consequences of this very short-lived genocide were immense. PTSD and trauma-related cultural syndromes were described as direct consequences, although the latter faced an impediment in prevailing against the dominance of the international (and Global North) vocabulary. Research attributed long-lasting societal problems, which were partially addressed by home-grown governmental programs. A very important topic discussed in the chapter is that of international aid organizations, which were also the producers of scientific contributions in most cases. These include contributions on interethnic trust and reconciliation. Some, especially local authors, refer to African values such as Ubuntu, which they argue should play a role in healing or reconciliation.

In this chapter, we are concerned with ordinary hubris – what social and personality psychologists empirically study under the heading of self-enhancement. This umbrella term refers to both (a) the motive to augment or protect the positivity of the self, and (b) probable manifestations of that motive at a cognitive or behavioural level. We review five such manifestations: the better-than-average effect (regarding oneself as superior to others); the self-serving bias (taking credit for success but disavowing blame for failure); selective memory (forgetting one’s weaknesses but not one’s strengths); overclaiming (endorsing flattering falsehoods about oneself); and socially desirable responding (strategically acting to gain social approval). We also discuss the case of excessive self-enhancement: narcissism. This personality trait combines self-serving grandiosity with manipulative propensity. Narcissists irrationally over-exhibit all five key manifestations of self-enhancement but are likely to be over-represented among movers and shakers. We conclude with a nuanced consideration of self-enhancement’s costs and benefits.

This chapter seeks to introduce recent research on leadership hubris, particularly relating to political and business leaders. It offers an overview of key insights, concepts and theories suggesting three possible dimensions of the specific problem of leadership hubris and its consequences for leadership effectiveness. It also aims to highlight relationships and divergences between approaches and findings of classical scholars and of psychologists, neurologists and leadership researchers concerned with the experience and impact of modern, hubristic leadership. It aims to show how current understanding of hubris has developed from the ancient. While criminal charges may no longer be brought against those accused of hubris in their leadership roles, they may well be considered to be suffering from an acquired personality disorder. Alternatively, their dysfunctional leadership may be attributed to the negative consequences of a wider social process involving, in addition to the leaders themselves, a conducive context and followers rendered susceptible to such leadership by such processes of which both they and their leaders are victims.

Chapter 4 offers larger excursions into other concepts and ideas that have been discussed in the context of African American or Black Psychology for decades. Among other things, it goes back to W. E. B. Du Bois, but also to more controversial concepts such as that of the ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’. The consequences of racism are given a great deal of coverage. The relevant research on the disadvantages and inequalities of African American communities is discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on cultural mistrust and medical mistrust, the latter of which stands in the way of epidemiological research. The positive value orientations of Afrocentrism and associated Black Psychology identity studies are a preparation for the presentation of the remedies, which include empowerment, storytelling, and counter-narratives. All of this has a broad basis in the work of African-American expert authors.

The present chapter describes the twofold interest of the life story investigation in people experiencing mental disorders. First, life narratives provide substantial insights into mental conditions from a first-person perspective. They represent valuable testimonies of patients’ disrupted life trajectories and allow us to understand the subjective experience of mental illness. Second, analyzing the coherence and characteristics of patients’ life stories also enhances our understanding of psychopathology. We present and discuss the alterations of narrative identity possibly caused by mental disorders, either hindering the development of or disrupting the acquired abilities necessary to craft a coherent and meaningful life story. Reversely, low aptitudes in narrating one’s entire life, selecting relevant life experiences, and assembling them into a coherent story might also play a role in both the initiation and maintenance of mental disorders. Building upon these twofold interests, this chapter will open therapeutic perspectives. The importance of working with narrative material when investigating patients’ memories in psychotherapy and how to do so will be discussed.