Abstracting and extracting: Causal coherence and the development of the life story

Abstract

This study compared episodic memories of emerging adults (age 18-22) and early adolescents (age 13-15) for life story events and other memories, in an attempt to distinguish characteristics of the life story. Participants were also asked to describe the connection between the stories told. Stories were analyzed for three measures of causal coherence: 1) meaning making, 2) narrative complexity, and 3) the use of causal terms; and one measure of thematic coherence. Results show an impact of age in three measures (meaning making, narrative complexity, and thematic coherence) and of story type (life story vs. non-life story) in all measures. Effects of age show that young adults' narratives showed more evidence of self-related abstract thinking and the ability to see multiple dimensions. Effects of story type indicated that turning point narratives and event connections narratives contained more self-related lessons and insights, displayed greater recognition of complexity, and employed more causal terms. Descriptions of peak experiences and low points did not differ significantly from other episodic memories on iii these measures of coherence. As well, connections between narratives were more abstract and self-related in the older group and in the life story condition. Findings show that two important narrative characteristics, narrative complexity and reference to self-related lessons and insights develop in adolescence, and are more prevalent in turning point narratives.iv Acknowledgement

Getting a Life Takes Time: The Development of the Life Story in Adolescence, Its Precursors and Consequences

“…' Blagov and Singer [2004] coded whether memory narratives referred to other, distant parts of life [argument A6; cf. similarly Bluck & Glück, 2004;Grysman & Hudson, 2010]. We believe that some autobiographical arguments are more effective in integrating an event into the life story than others.…”

“…Three cross-sectional studies collected high, low and turning point narratives from adolescents, demonstrating age-related increases in the use of autobiographical arguments across adolescence. Grysman and Hudson [2010] compared 14-and 18-year-olds on meaning making (A1subj, A3subj); McLean, Breen, and Fournier [2010] compared adolescent boys between ages 11 and 18 on meaning making (A1subj, A3subj) and the arguments ''event explains personality'' (A1obj) and ''personality explains event'' (B2obj); and Chen and colleagues [Chen, 2011;Chen et al, 2012] ity (rating scale). In all cases, the turning point narratives had the highest frequency of and the steepest age-related increases in the use of autobiographical arguments.…”

The influence of gender and gender typicality on autobiographical memory across event types and age groups

“…Within narrativebased analyses, researchers can ask for any event that occurred within a specified time period (e.g., Grysman, Prabhakar, Anglin, & Hudson, 2013;Kanten & Teigen, 2008), which has the advantage of imposing limited bias on the memory search process, but may elicit mundane memories rather than personally significant events. Other studies explicitly solicit a specific type of event, often a highly emotional event (a high or low point: e.g., Grysman & Hudson, 2010; or a traumatic memory: e.g., Sales, Fivush, Parker, & Bahrick, 2005) or a self-defining memory (Singer & Salovey, 1993;see, e.g., Liao, Bluck, & Cheng, 2015). Thus in this study, we solicited narratives (1) through an open-ended time frame using a nonemotional cue for recall; (2) through both high-and low-point events, to explicitly elicit emotions but not explicitly prime identity; and (3) through a self-defining memory, to explicitly elicit narratives that connect events to identity.…”

The self in autobiographical memory: Effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

“…In reporting turning-point events, participants displayed greater use of evaluations and first-person pronouns, and fewer actions and orienting statements, focusing their narratives more on the self and on the meaning of events in the narrative. As has been previously found on analysing turning-point narratives (Grysman & Hudson, 2010), the narratives of these memories reflect the process of establishing coherence in one's self-relevant memories instead of focusing on the who, where, when, and what of the event, which was more characteristic of episode memory reports. The questionnaire used to prime the sense of self demonstrated similar effects.…”

“…To further test for effects of the self-prime manipulation, all participants were asked to report a second memory, this time of a turning-point in their lives. Turning-point memories have been found to display greater coherence and greater emphasis on the self than other memories (Grysman & Hudson, 2010), and their inclusion will provide a basis for comparison with the narratives of other memories. In other words, turning-point memories can be considered the paradigmatic self-related memories.…”