Autobiographical Narratives Reflect, Repair, and Rewrite Self-Views

Abstract

Sedikides’s immunity model of psychological homeostasis (this issue) presents a theoretical framework to understand a variety of self-protective social and cognitive psychological tendencies and biases, and in so doing encompasses a broad range of social-cognitive phenomena such as selfhandicapping (Jones & Berglas, 1978), social comparison (Festinger, 1954), and the fading affect bias (Ritchie et al., 2006). Here, we offer an examination and extension of the theoretical principles outlined by Sedikides as well as a discussion of future directions that follow from the ideas proposed in the target article. We focus our commentary on autobiographical narratives and how these narratives function to reflect, repair, and rewrite the self-concept. We will examine the dynamic relationship between autobiographical narratives and current self-views as well as the important role of social and cultural influences on narrative construction, perspectives that received less attention in the target article but which merit careful consideration when developing a greater understanding of the self-construction process.