Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in Psychology and Social Relations, with a concentration in Personality and Developmental Psychology. The author of nearly 300 articles and chapters and 8 books, McAdams has conducted research in the areas of narrative identity, generativity, leadership, psychological biography, culture and the self, and themes of power, love, redemption and contamination in human lives. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he pioneered and established the life-story approach to the study of personality and life-span developmental psychology. His book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford University Press, 2006) won the American Psychological Association's William James Award for the best general-interest book published in psychology in 2006. He is also the winner of the Jack Block Award for career contributions to personality psychology, the Henry A. Murray Award for excellence in the study of lives, and the Theodore Sarbin Award for contributions to philosophical and theoretical psychology. McAdams is the author most recently of The Art and Science of Personality Development (2015, Guilford Press) and the forthcoming The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (Oxford University Press).

William L. Dunlop was an associate professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, and a visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, before his death in September of 2021. He was a leading authority on the study of meaning making, life narrative, volitional personality change, idiographic and nomothetic methods in personality science, the contetualization of personality and identity, and the development of personal relationships. Professor Dunlop was named a Rising Star by the Association for Research in Personality. 

About the Authors v

Preface xv

Case Studies xvii

Part i Personality, Human Nature, and Culture

1 Persons 2

2 The Evolution of Human Nature 34

3 Social Learning and Culture 66

Part ii The Person as Social Actor

4 Dispositional Traits 100

5 Emotional Life: Extraversion and Neuroticism 127

6 Self-Regulation: Agreeableness and Conscientiousness 159

7 Expanding Your Mind: Openness to Experience 191

8 Stability and Change in Personality Traits 218

Part iii The Person as Motivated Agent

9 Human Motivation: Needs and Goals 252

10 The Moral Animal 287

11 Self and Other 318

Part iv The Person as Autobiographical Author

12 Life Stories 358

13 Narrative, Culture, and the Adult Life Course 392

14 Psychological Biography and the Narrative Study of Lives 427

Part v Application to the Clinical Realm

15 Personality Disorder 466

Glossary G-1

References R-1

Credits C-1

Name Index I-1

Subject Index I-0

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