Narrative self‐transcendence: Decreased regret and increased acceptance over late midlife

Reischer, H.N., Couch, N.G., Wright, M.N., Duarte, A.J. and McAdams, D.P. (2025), Narrative Self-Transcendence: Decreased Regret and Increased Acceptance Over Late Midlife. J Pers. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.13022

Introduction

Self-transcendence—connectedness within and beyond the self—is a complex phenomenon theorized to increase with age, but evidence is mixed. This longitudinal study is the first to investigate changes in self-transcendence across late midlife using life story narratives.

Method

We tracked self-reported and narrative identity self-transcendence scores of 163 participants as they aged from M = 56.4 (SD = 0.95) to M = 64.5 (SD = 0.94). Participants were 64.4% women, 35.6% men; 55.2% White, 42.9% Black, 1.8% interracial/other; median income was $75,000–$100,000; median education was college graduate.

Results

Self-transcendence narrative themes of closure and self-actualization increased significantly over time, especially between ages 60–65, but self-reported self-transcendence did not change. These trends were not uniform; race-by-gender groups exhibited distinct trajectories over time.

Discussion

Late midlife is seen as ushering in opportunities for increased self-transcendence, especially acceptance of oneself and one's life. We found some of the strongest empirical evidence of this phenomenon to date. On average, US Black and White adults narrated their life stories with less regret and more satisfaction with self across late midlife. Findings demonstrate the utility of leveraging first-person narrative identity methods to collect and analyze data about rich, complex personality constructs and highlight positive changes associated with late midlife.

The diversity principle in the evaluation of evidence.

Couch, N. (2022) The diversity principle and the evaluation of evidence. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02065-5

Link to published article, and link to submitted version.

Abstract: The diversity principle — the intuitive notion that diverse evidence is, all else equal,more persuasive, suggestive, confirmatory, or otherwise better than less varied sets of evidence — is a clear component of scientific practice and endorsed by scientists and philosophers alike. There exists a great body of psychological research on people’s understanding and application of the diversity principle. Yet, it remains divided into multiple, distinct research communities which often come to conflicting conclusions. One reason this is so is that the range of tasks and domains investigated is appropriately wide. Without a common understanding of what it means for evidence to be diverse, however, it is hard to compare what are at times diverging results. To address this, I review three perspectives from philosophy on what makes diverse evidence valuable. I will use the perspectives to frame results from psychology and assess whether people understand the value of diverse evidence on both an intuitive and explicit level. My conclusions have a leveled optimism: While people are generally aware of the value of diverse evidence, they often struggle to apply what they know. I argue this is because people do not assess the diversity of their evidence as a matter of course but rely on its intuitive diversity as a cue to its evidential diversity. When this cue is absent, people can overlook otherwise obvious problems with their evidence. This has potentially dire consequences for how people seek out, evaluate, and understand evidence from a variety of domains, but leaves open the possibility that various interventions —such as education or reminders to attend to the quality of evidence — may increase people’s application of what they know. 20,068 word/75 pages.

The role of conceptual structure in mathematical explanation

Proceedings paper from CogSci 2018.

Link to submitted version.

Abstract. People’s reasoning about physical and social explanations is well understood (Keil, 2008). However, less is known about how people reason about mathematical explanations (Johnson et. al., 2017). Experiment 1 replicates the central result of Johnson et. al (2017), that people impose order on simple arithmetic explanations, as well as sets the limits of that preference. Experiment 2 extends the results of a second factor, the character of the relationship between the operations related by the explanation.