Editor's Statement

Abstract

Summer is always a welcome season for many people. Welcome to our summer issue for Volume 42, Issue 4. We have five innovative articles dealing with narrative identity and storytelling, daydreaming, divergent thinking, memory among friends and twins, and fantasies of revenge. The first pair of studies examines narrative identity in terms of understanding ourselves through storytelling. The first study authored by Alexander Wong and Shrija Dirghangi examines self-identity by examining self and other ratings. They discuss narrative identity in which individuals understand themselves through story telling. They discuss five studies reporting on the validity and reliability of a scale to determine how Big 5 personality traits are associated with narrative identity. They contrasted selfrating of identity with informant ratings. For example, it is interesting how cinematic self and informant reports are associated with extraversion while only cinematic self is negatively associated with neuroticism, but not for informants. The second study explores future projections across the lifespan. It is conducted by Alain Fritsch, Virginie Voltzenlogel, and Christine Cuervo-Lombard. They discuss how personal identity develops from adolescence through narratives. People often remember past events to ground themselves for self-development. People can be mental time travelers by projecting themselves into the future as well as reliving the past, which is linked to the episodic memory system. It is especially intriguing how future projections of young and middle-age adults were similar, yet quite different from older adults due to retirement. The third article is by Melina West, Eli Somer, and Inge-Marie Eigsti. They examine autism as it relates to maladaptive daydreaming and divergent thinking. Over 540 participants were surveyed among several social platforms (e.g., Redditt, Facebook, International Consortium for Maladaptive Daydreaming Research). Additionally, another sample was recruited via Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK), an online research collaborative of participants with professional ASD diagnoses. Using partial correlational analyses and hierarchical multiple linear regression models, they examined the effect of ASD traits (daydreaming community sample only), ADHD symptoms (ASD sample only), diagnostic age (ASD sample only), and divergent thinking originality and fluency while controlling for demographic variables (age, gender, level of education, and psychiatric Editorial