The development of past and future life stories in adolescence: Overall emotional tone, coherence and life script events

Abstract

Research has shown that identity in adolescence takes the shape of a coherent life story that integrates the past with the present self and provides meaning and purpose in the person's life. One stable feature of narrative identity identified in adults is emotional tone. Here, the development of emotional tone in life stories was investigated across childhood and adolescence. A total of 142 adolescents aged 10 to 14 years wrote about their past weekend, their past and future life stories and generated a cultural life script. Across age groups, adolescents told past life stories that were overall mixed (both positive and negative) or moderately positive in emotional tone, and future life stories that were positive or highly positive. In relation to life story development, we replicated findings on age-related development of life story coherence in both past and future life stories in 10-14-year-olds. Lastly, the study highlights the link between life story coherence and cultural life script abilities. Cultural life script typicality was linked to life story coherence for both past and future life stories and across all age groups, and a majority of events mentioned in future life stories overlapped with cultural life script events.

Self-Defining Future Projections Throughout Adulthood

“…We found that affective responses to SDFPs were very positive regardless of age, consistent with previous studies (D 'Argembeau et al, 2012;Raffard et al, 2020). These findings suggest that, through their future projections, individuals try to maintain a positive identity whatever their age, as well in adolescence (e.g., Ramsgaard & Bohn, 2021) as in ageing (e.g Sedikides & Gregg, 2008). Future projections allow a positive self to be enhanced (Grysman et al, 2013).…”

Phenomenological experience of mental time travel with a counterpart self

“…In the present study, we demonstrate that this bias is present when one imagines events with a counterpart self. This may indicate that the bias is independent from the associations with the self and that it may be related to generating positive events that are likely to be experienced in a culture, as had been previously proposed in the literature (Ramsgaard & Bohn, 2021).…”

Beliefs About Transitional Events: The Effect of Experience and Life-Script Consistency

“…Certainly, there is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that life scripts of the sort defined by Berntsen and Rubin ( 2004 ) can be found in every culture (Erdogan et al, 2008 ; Rubin et al, 2009 ; Zaragoza Scherman, 2013 ; Janssen et al, 2014 ; Zaragoza Scherman et al, 2017 ; Janssen and Haque, 2018 ). It also appears to be true that the life scripts are used in plotting out and assessing life trajectories, i.e., remembering one's past and predicting one's future (Hareven and Masoka, 1988 ; Greene, 1990 ; Greene et al, 1992 ; Schrauf and Rubin, 2001 ; Collins et al, 2007 ; Habermas, 2007 ; Berntsen and Jacobsen, 2008 ; Bohn and Berntsen, 2008 , 2011 , 2013 ; Thomsen and Berntsen, 2008 ; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010 ; Thomsen et al, 2011 ; Grysman et al, 2015 ; Enz et al, 2016 ; Ramsgaard and Bohn, 2021 ). There is also evidence that people experience distress when they fail to meet the milestones established by life scripts (Kuwabara et al, 2007 ; Rubin et al, 2009 ; Shanahan and Busseri, 2016 ; Dunlop et al, 2017 ).…”