Ongoing Narrative Meaning-Making Within Events and Across the Life Span

Abstract

Individuals create meaning from the events in their lives, and the ways in which they do this has important implications for identity and well-being. We argue that this is a deeply developmental process. Narrative meaning-making consists of a set of developmentally acquired skills and abilities such that individuals are capable of different forms of meaning creation at different developmental periods. Further, narrative meaning-making emerges differentially across days, weeks, months, and years after an experience, and this event processing takes place within ongoing developmental change. Narrating life experiences both reflects and creates modes of meaningmaking in a complex, reciprocal system. Keywords narratives, meaning-making, development Our selves are at least partly defined by our memories. A long history of cognitive research has tracked the amount, accuracy, and durability of autobiographical memory (see Baddeley, 2004 for a review), but it is only in the past two decades that autobiographical narratives have been examined as a form of identity (McAdams, 1993; McAdams & McLean, 2013). For narrative identity,

An Investigation of the Coherence of Oral Narratives: Associations With Mental Health, Social Support and the Coherence of Written Narratives

“…Indeed, comparing the moderate correlation between thematic oral and total written narrative coherence over a 4-month time period that was observed in the current study, r = 0.33, to an earlier observed correlation of two oral narrative coherence measurements over a 5-month time period, r = 0.48, (Vanaken et al, unpublished), suggests that there are in fact also event- and modality-specific aspects in addition to the stable narrative style that can impact coherence to some extent. This is in line with earlier work ( Fivush et al, 2017 ; McLean et al, 2017 ; Adler et al, 2018 ; Waters et al, 2019 ; Pasupathi et al, 2020 ). Future research is nonetheless needed to investigate the extent to which each aspect adds to the equation and can explain parts of the variance in coherence, by comparing narratives across time, event, modality, etc.…”

Patterns in autobiographical reminiscing among early adults: Implications for forgiveness and self‐compassion

“…In future work, it will be important to examine the relations of demographic, relationship, and social context variables with patterns of autobiographical reminiscing, as well as their potential moderating effects on associations of these patterns with outcomes. Various social roles, individual differences in personality and motivation, and cultural values inform and guide autobiographical reminiscing during different stages of the lifespan (Fivush et al, ). Further, specific social experiences change in prevalence across adult development while continuing to bring reminiscing to the forefront: chances to reflect privately on past conflict and reconciliation in a romantic relationship; opportunities to use personal life stories to share lessons and insights with children; and attempts at bonding over old family stories.…”

“…Early adulthood is an important developmental period for examining autobiographical reminiscing. By early adulthood, acts of reminiscing are efficient and many of the skills relevant for organizing and drawing personal meaning from personal memories show marked improvement compared with childhood and adolescence (see Fivush, Booker, & Graci, ; Labouvie‐Vief, ). Early adults have a well‐integrated set of autobiographical memories and are able to draw on various events to understand their current lives and respond to the highs and lows of life (McAdams, ).…”

“I Feel More Luxembourgish, but Portuguese Too” Cultural Identities in a Multicultural Society

“…Indeed, a quantitative approach allows us to have a more general view over global tendencies and patterns of individuals at a fixed moment in time similar to a static 'snapshot'. However, (cultural) identity is, amongst others, defined by memories of past experiences, facts, stories, persons, encounters embedded in a certain socio-cultural context that will be narrated in a specific way allowing a meaning-making process of these recalled memories (Bruner, 1990;Carless & Douglass, 2013;Fivush, Booker, & Graci, 2017). Through our participants' individual narratives, we therefore try to go beyond the numbers into the deeper assessment, understanding and unravelling of living within two different cultural frames from their own vantage point to further interpret and explain the quantitative findings.…”