Personal and Intergenerational Narratives of Transgression and Pride in Emerging Adulthood: Links to Gender and Well‐Being

Abstract

Intergenerational narratives, stories parents share with children about their own youthful experiences, may facilitate the understanding of challenging life experiences and be related to psychological well-being; yet, little research has examined what young people know of their parents' self-challenging and self-enhancing experiences and how they interpret them. Research examining intergenerational narratives has observed relations between adolescents' narratives and their psychological well-being, but these relations may depend upon gender and narrative type. In the current study, 94 college students provided intergenerational and personal narratives of transgression and pride experiences. Narratives were coded for emotional, cognitive, and evaluative content. Results show that transgression and pride narratives differed in content, and that women provided more interpretative content than men. Stories about mothers contained more interpretative content than fathers, but this pattern varied by participant gender. Finally, relations to well-being were observed, especially for cognitive content in stories of participants' same-gender parent.

Vicarious family stories of Turkish young, middle-aged, and older adults: Are family stories related to well-being?

“…For example, Fivush and Zaman (2011) found that female adolescents who told vicarious family stories in which they drew identity links between their mothers and themselves, and narrated their mothers’ perspectives, had higher levels of well-being. Consistent with Fivush and Zaman (2011)’s study, Merrill, Srinivas, and Fivush (2017) revealed that emerging adults who used more cognitive words when narrating their same-sex parents’ experiences displayed better well-being. Similar to these studies, we also aimed to examine the link to well-being from the use of subjective perspective terms including emotional and cognitive words and affective evaluations in same-sex Turkish parents’ stories.…”

Functions of personal and vicarious life stories: identity and empathy

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How I Remember My Mother’s Story: A Cross-National Investigation of Vicarious Family Stories in Turkey and New Zealand

“…Please write this story in the most detailed way possible ” (adapted from the study by Reese, Fivush, et al, 2017). All vicarious family stories were elicited via a paper–pen technique, which is a valid method extensively used in the literature to collect memories (Merrill et al, 2017; Thomsen & Pillemer, 2017). There were also follow-up questions regarding the stories such as when the stories took place, the affective tone of the stories, and the reasons that the narrators believe why their mothers told them the stories.…”