Emotions, memories, and narratives

This paper explores the intuition that affective dispositions are the building blocks of personality. We understand personality along Aristotelian lines as the unified set of one’s affective dispositions. We start with some recent data showing that affective dispositions such as character and personality traits are key determinants of the sense of who we are. At first sight, this goes against mainstream tendencies to approach the issue of personal identity by reference to other processes and capacities, such as memories and narratives. This appearance is in our opinion misleading and we use affective dispositions as a privileged vantage point to understand the relations between our sense of who we are, memory, and narrative competency. The drift of our argument is that the sense of who we are, which crucially builds on affective states, has a deep impact on how we remember and narrate our lives.