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The introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes discussed in the book and its key insights. It highlights the legacy of reform, commenting on some of the connections between the nineteenth-century history explored in the book and later developments in twentieth- century Scotland, including the links between the earlier history and the seminal Kilbrandon Report in 1964.

This chapter discusses the link between parenting stress, parenting behavior, and children's developmental outcomes. It examines tests of potential causal influences based on longitudinal studies, experiments, and quasi-experimental designs.

Chapter 1 reviews prior research about the relationship between competitive success and long-term happiness, particularly three main lines of investigation in the field known as the scientific study of happiness. This field’s heavy reliance on cross-sectional self-report designs precludes a sound answer to the question of whether competitive success delivers a good life. The chapter introduces the Harvard Student Study (not to be confused with the Grant Study of Harvard students) and a new design of research for studying happiness, namely, a 46-year, mixed-methods longitudinal study of human development, which is centrally featured in the book. The chapter describes the history of the study, the study of lives research tradition in which it is conducted, and the study’s unique focus on the competitive journey and unparalleled data in the field of human development. Clinical life history interviews combined with survey self-reports lead to a fundamental rethinking of the success-happiness relationship and expose formative influences on happiness in the context of human development.

Chapter 3 describes the positions along the spectrum of intrapsychic brightness and darkness and variation in longitudinal trajectories in the studied sample. Brief psychobiographies illustrate college and adult spectrums of this construct of well-being observed in clinical life history interviews; shifts in the sample’s presentation of affect from college to late midlife; and how significant change, a longitudinal trajectory exhibited by roughly one-third of the sample, differs from two other, closely related, trajectories—insignificant change and stability—which together account for roughly two-thirds of the sample. The importance of an individual’s relationship to his or her central strivings (to be defined later as life goals) is explained, helping to delineate the spectrum of intrapsychic brightness and darkness.

Chapter 5 presents a model of human development that accounts for long-term stability in intrapsychic brightness and darkness, the dominant longitudinal pattern of well-being observed by the study. Participants show the interaction of their psychologies with the environment through decades-long self-reinforcing patterns of behavior in their education and career trajectories as well as relational lives. The chapter identifies a new concept derived from clinical life history interviews, namely the identity story—the story told by the person about important situations and events, important others, the world, and him or herself, which reveals values and long-term goals. The identity story serves as a lens, a narrative identity, for locating oneself in the world and reveals the central tendency of affect in the person’s experience, that is, one’s intrapsychic brightness or darkness. The model shows the influence of the identity story held about one’s early years, the Remembered Early Life (REL), which is relatively stable longitudinally. It shapes later identity stories and intrapsychic brightness and darkness both directly and through self-reinforcing patterns of behavior. The chapter illustrates these concepts and patterns with psychobiographical sketches of participants from earlier chapters.

Chapter 6 uses quantitative analyses to retest the qualitative model explaining longitudinal stability in intrapsychic brightness and darkness, the book’s construct of well-being, presented in chapter 5. It statistically retests and finds support for key relationships in that model, refines the model, and tests competing explanations for adult brightness and darkness. In the model, Remembered Early Life (REL) Affect predicts adult brightness and darkness with normative adult life course behaviors in work and family as a mediator. REL Affect is the common factor that explains the association between college and adult measures of brightness and darkness. The model explains adult brightness and darkness better than intelligence and academic performance, psychiatric intervention and mental illness, and objectively measured career success; objectively measured career success, in fact, does not associate with adult brightness and darkness. Finally, the chapter shows that REL Affect explains adult brightness and darkness better than five-factor model personality trait measures of neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness.