Life-course dynamics: A research program in progress from the Netherlands.

In the Dutch research program “Life-Course Dynamics” three projects in progress are presented which study the self-organization of behavior over the course of life at different levels of theorizing on the basis of a longitudinal data set, generated by means of the Lifeline Interview Method (LIM). The first project describes different aspects of the dynamic structure and content of individual lives. It was found among other things that the structure of life is dominated by the Principle of the Constant Life Perspective, i.e., the sum of past and future autobiographical events, is constant over the lifespan, while their relation changes systematically with age. Content analysis and compression of the LIM data set of life events resulted in the composition of six modal “self-portraits” with regard to both past and future of young, middle-aged, and older men and women, respectively. The second project, based on the principles of gerodynamics and branching theory, studies how people manage their lives, and how they cope with transformations and react to affective-positive and negative life events. To this end, the content of the LIM narratives needs to be examined in terms of experienced past and expected future, age, gender, transformations, events, and affect, and in relation to measures of personality, coping, and locus of control. The third project studies autobiographical memory as a dynamic system of both retrospective and prospective memory, subject to continuous changes across the lifespan. It was found among other things that processes of development and aging account for the autobiographical memory “bump,” and that these processes might also account for the differential course of other neurobehavioral functions