Intergenerational Transmission of the Reminiscence Bump and Biographical Conflict Knowledge

Abstract

In the study reported here, we investigated intergenerational transmission of life stories in two groups of young adults: a conflict group and a nonconflict group. Only participants in the conflict group had parents who lived through violent political upheaval. All participants recalled and dated 10 important events from one of their parents' lives. There were three main findings. First, both groups produced sets of events that displayed a reminiscence bump related to the parent's estimated age at the time of the event. Second, the majority of the events in both groups were transitions that were perceived to have exerted a significant psychological and material impact on a parent's life. Third, in the conflict group, 25% of recalled events were conflict related. This finding indicates that historical conflict knowledge is passed from one generation to the next and that it is understood to have had a personally relevant, life-altering effect. Moreover, the findings suggest that transitional impact and perceived importance help determine which events children will remember from a parent's life.

Intergenerational transmission of historical memories and social-distance attitudes in post-war second-generation Croatians

“…The present study builds upon and extends the work of Svob and Brown (2012) and Svob (2014). We examine the transmitted events and attitudes of a generation whose parents lived through a terrible war but, unlike the participants' parents in the previous studies, did not immigrate.…”

“…2), suggesting that war-related events indeed impact the robustness of the upheaval bump. Hence, we may surmise that the single event of war serves as a central structural marker in the temporal distribution of a Croatian parent's life events, just as immigration did for the lives of refugee parents in Svob and Brown's (2012) study. In addition to transitions, it is also possible that other factors may be contributing to the observed bump-for example, identity formation associated with living through war, the conceptual importance of a historical event, and emotional charge and intensity.…”

“…Svob and Brown (2012) asked adult children of parents who emigrated due to violent political upheaval to list the 10 most important events in their parents' lives and to estimate the date of each while talking aloud. The LiH effect was also observed in the mnemonic distribution of a parent's life in 5 % of dating protocols (compared to approximately 23 % in Brown et al's studies).…”

Disruptive Individual Experiences Create Lifetime Periods: a Study of Autobiographical Memory in Persons with Spinal Cord Injury

“…Transition theory Svob & Brown, 2012) explains how major life transitions organize autobiographical memory and can serve as temporal landmarks. Transition theory argues that the frequent elements of a person's life (e. g., repeatedly encountered people, locations, and objects) form the 'fabric of daily life' .…”

Parallel associations and the structure of autobiographical knowledge.

“…Rubin (2006Rubin ( , 2012 considers the most scientifically precise and productive modeling of autobiographical episodic memories to be dependent on explicating the coordination of basic neural systems, and that although hierarchical models have both scientific and heuristic value, they are best viewed as metaphorical accounts. The transition theory of Brown and colleagues (Brown, Hansen, Lee, Vanderveen, & Conrad, 2012;Svob & Brown, 2012) conceptualize autobiographical memories as being organized around routines of experience and major life transitions in which several routines are changed simultaneously, which for example, would happen if one moved from one city to another. Although the SMS model and transition…”