The Study of Lives Research Group at Northwestern University is dedicated to interdisciplinary research on personality development and the biographical study of individual human lives across the life course.  Directed by Dan P. McAdams, the group brings together graduate and undergraduate students in Clinical Psychology, Northwestern’s Personality/Development/Health (PDH) program, the Human Development and Social Policy (HDSP) doctoral program, and other departments and programs at Northwestern University around a common interest in the scientific study of human lives. 

A Passionate Team

Among the topics of greatest interest for the group are life stories and narrative identity, generativity at midlife, personality traits and values, political psychology, narrative and culture, and psychological biography.

A Succesor to the Foley Center for the Study of Lives

The Study of Lives Group is the successor to the Foley Center for the Study of Lives, which pursued the same general research mission at Northwestern from 1997 through 2019, supported by grants from the Foley Family Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Foley Center was dedicated to advancing the rich intellectual tradition associated with such mid-20^th century luminaries in psychology as Henry A. Murray, Robert White, Erik Erikson, David McClelland, Silvan Tomkins, and those other scholars who established the idea of “personology” in the social sciences as the scientific study of the whole person in biographical and cultural context.

Recent Books by Dan P. McAdams