| A broad array of research suggests that late adolescence and young adulthood brings about the emergence of the necessary skills and motives for narrative integration of self-defining memories. The current research identified two aspects of the moral self, moral centrality and internal motivation, and explored the interplay of moral identity and autobiographical reasoning associated with narrative construction across three different age groups. Forty-two adolescents (M = 16.49, SD = 1.21), 40 young adults (M = 19.78, SD = .81) and 49 adults over 35 years (M = 47.95, SD = 9.7) were asked to recall situations in which they did something right/wrong and felt good/bad. Recollections were coded for self-relevance and narrative integration and were compared with levels of moral centrality and internal moral motivation. Internal moral motivation and age predicted both self-relevance of memories across all events and narrative integration. Inconsistent with previous findings, midlife adults showed more self -- event connections than both adolescents and young adults, although these connections did not lead to increases in narrative integration. These findings suggest that the construction of the moral narrative identity is not unique to late adolescence and/or young adulthood, but is an ongoing developmental phenomenon that is constantly revisited through narrative reconstruction. |
