Abstract
In his target article, McAdams brings together three domains in the field of psychology in which challenging developments have been observed over the past decades: trait psychology, narrative psychology, and culture. Trait psychology has been rejuvenated by crossnational and cross-cultural research projects on the "Big Five". The narrative approach has cropped up in a great diversity of psychological subdisciplines, including personality psychology, and is on its way to being accepted as a respected development in academic psychology. The notion of culture has also received enormous interest, particularly in discussions around modernity and postmodernity and their implications for psychology as a science. Scientists in and outside psychology are becoming aware that culture is implicit not only in their personal views, but also in the theories and concepts that form the basis of their professional activities. McAdams's contribution has the merit that it provides an intriguing conceptual framework that aims at integrating a diversity of psychological developments that interact in many ways, but that have never been analyzed on their mutual implications from a metatheoretical point of view.
