Life story coherence and psychological health in high school students

For many years psychological theorists have recognized that a unified self is vital to psychological health. Self-continuity refers to the unity of the self
across time and it is obtained by constructing a coherent story of ones life.The temporal and causal coherence of the story is dependent upon the ability to
establish the temporal order of past events and to explain how events are causally related to each other and to the self (self-event connections).
Establishing self-event connections can be adaptive if experiences are interpreted as having had positive outcomes for the self. However, it can also be
maladaptive if experiences are related to the self in negative ways.The aim of the present study was to examine whether different aspects of life story coherence are related to different aspects of psychological health in high school students. We hypothesized that a lack of temporal and causal coherence in the story would be associated with paranoid ideation and psychoticism and that a tendency to establish more negative and less positive causal connections
in the story would be associated with symptoms characteristic of mood disorders, such as depression.