In this commentary, we suggest that a model explaining the dissociation between the evaluation of personal and public past and future events proposed by Liu and Szpunar (2023) might profit from considering more systematically the cultural-historical context of selecting and evaluating events. This would entail identifying psychological mechanisms which, in combination with contextual variation, predict the proposed dissociation or other evaluative configurations. We suggest combining self-enhancement with independent versus interdependent self-construal and current historical state of affairs to explain the evaluation of events. Second, we argue that taking into account the narrative context of events not only in theory but also methodologically might render the model more powerful. We point to intersections between individual life narratives and collective histories of nations and highlight their differences in scriptedness. These additional considerations may contribute to explaining different appraisals of personal and national events.

The affective tone of autobiographical memories may be influenced by age in two ways—by the current age of the remembering individual and by the age of the remembered self at the time of the remembered event. While aging has been associated with more positive autobiographical memories, young adulthood is remembered more positively than other parts of life. We tested whether these effects also show in life story memories and how they act jointly on affective tone; also, we wanted to explore their effects on remembered lifetimes other than early adulthood. We tested effects of current age and age at event on affective tone with brief entire life narratives provided up to five times across 16 years by 172 Germans of both genders, ages 8 to 81 years. Multilevel analyses found an unexpected negativity effect of aging for current age and confirmed a “golden 20s” effect of remembered age. In addition, women told more negative life stories, and affective tone dipped in early adolescence for current age and was remembered as such up to mid-adulthood. Thus, the affective tone of life story memories is jointly influenced by current and remembered age. The absence of a positivity effect in aging is explained by the specific requirements of telling an entire life. We suggest the turmoil of puberty as a reason for the early adolescence dip. Gender differences are potentially explained by differences in narrative style, in depression rates, and in real-life challenges.