How Life Stories May Reveal Personality Functioning

A new study suggests that the way people describe major life events may offer clues about personality functioning and everyday struggles.

Mind

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A recent psychology study explored whether the way people tell stories about major events in their lives can reveal something about how well they are functioning psychologically. Researchers studied 140 young adults, including college students and people with borderline personality disorder or related traits. Participants described two important life events as if they were chapters in a book, and trained coders examined the stories for patterns involving personal control, connection with others, reflection, growth, and deterioration. The strongest pattern involved deterioration, meaning a person described an experience as permanently damaging them or revealing something fundamentally wrong with who they are. Higher deterioration was associated with poorer personality functioning and was also linked to greater everyday functional impairment. The study found that participants whose stories contained stronger deterioration were nearly three times as likely to meet the study threshold for a personality disorder. The findings do not mean that a negative life story can diagnose a personality disorder. The researchers note important limits, including reliance on self-reported diagnoses or symptoms, a broad measure of functional impairment, and uncertainty about how specific these narrative patterns are to personality pathology. Future research will need to compare personality disorders with other conditions and account more carefully for trauma and other experiences that can shape how people understand their lives.

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