ReviewLife Story Chapters: Past and Future, You and Me

We review research on life story chapters, defined as important extended time periods in individuals' lives with identifiable beginnings and endings (e.g., “my marriage”). Studies show that individuals form chapters for the personal past and future, and for other people's past and future lives (vicarious chapters). Research also indicates that emotional qualities of both past and future chapters are related to well-being, and that mentally constructing fewer and temporally less extended future chapters could underlie the sense of limited remaining time experienced by older adults. Qualities of vicarious life story chapters are related to characteristics of chapters in the individual's own life, suggesting potentially important interactions between how individuals represent their own lives and how they represent close others' lives. Life story chapters are more than an important part of autobiographical memory; they are centrally involved in time perspective, well-being, and social cognition.