Narrative identity and meaning making across the adult lifespan: an introduction.
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Adolescent↗
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Psychosocial stages and the accessibility of autobiographical memories across the life cycle.
Older adults recalled memories from each decade of life. Memories were classified in terms of the psychosocial stages to which their content corresponded. For the majority of memories it was found that age at encoding corresponded to when specific psychosocial stages would have been most likely to have occurred. In a second experiment older adults recalled memories to cues drawn from psychosocial stages and the same pattern of findings was observed. These findings demonstrate that the goals of the self play a major role in both the encoding and accessibility of autobiographical memories, and they also provide support for Erikson's psychosocial theory of development (1950, 1997).
Aged↗
Four dimensions of self-defining memories (specificity, meaning, content, and affect) and their relationships to self-restraint, distress, and repressive defensiveness.
This study examines four dimensions of self-defining memory (specificity, meaning, content, and affect) and their relationship to self-restraint, distress, and defensiveness. The development and validation of a protocol for measuring specificity, meaning, and affect in self-defining memories is discussed. Specificity is operationalized as the temporal and detailed specificity of the narrative. Meaning refers to the participant's stepping back from the narrative to derive higher personal meaning or a life lesson. Affect reflects subjective emotion upon recall. Agreement between two raters scoring 1040 memories was kappa=.83 for specificity and kappa=.72 for meaning. The protocol is compatible with Thorne and McLean's scoring system for content (the types of events in memories). The current study compared individual differences in the four dimensions of 10 self-defining memories collected from 103 undergraduates to scores of self-restraint, distress, and repressive defensiveness, as measured by the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory. Memory specificity was inversely related to repressive defensiveness, while greater memory meaning was linked to moderate and high levels of self-restraint. Memory content and affect predicted individuals' degree of subjective distress. Based on these findings, the authors discuss the place of self-defining memories in Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self-Memory System model of autobiographical memory and personality, more generally.
Adolescent↗
Making things better and learning a lesson: experiencing wisdom across the lifespan.
Autobiographical memory narratives concerning times in which individuals said, thought, or did something wise were collected from adolescents and young and old adults. This "wisdom of experience" procedure is shown to be a valid means of studying experienced wisdom in everyday lives across the life span. Results show that all age groups use experienced wisdom to transform negative to positive life situations and are equally likely to link these experienced wisdom events to larger temporal life periods. Young and older adults also relate wisdom experiences to the life story by explaining how they are connected to later life consequences or to the direction that their life has taken. Unlike adolescents, older and, especially, young adults report having learned lessons about themselves or having gained a life philosophy from the wisdom-related event. Thus, the wisdom-of-experience procedure highlights both similarities and differences in the life span manifestation of experienced wisdom.
Adolescent↗
The stories we keep: autobiographical memory in American and Chinese middle-aged adults.
One hundred and eight European American and Chinese adults, aged between 38 and 60, participated in this questionnaire study. They each recalled 20 memories from any period of their lives. Memory content was analyzed as a function of culture (U.S. and China), life period (childhood, youth, early midlife, and peak midlife), and gender (female and male). Across the four life periods, Americans provided more memories of individual experiences and unique, one-time events and focused on their own roles and emotions. In contrast, Chinese were more inclined to recall memories of social and historical events and placed a great emphasis on social interactions and significant others in their memory narratives. Chinese also more frequently drew upon past events to convey moral messages than did Americans. In addition, memory content evidenced age-related increases in both autonomous and social orientations. Findings are discussed in light of the self-definitional and directive functions of Autobiographical memory in the context of culture.
Adult↗
Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory.
Current conceptualizations of childhood amnesia assume that there is a "barrier" to remembering early experiences that must be overcome in order for one to begin to accumulate autobiographical memories. In contrast, we present a social-cultural-developmental perspective on the emergence of autobiographical memory. We first demonstrate the gradual emergence of autobiographical memories across the preschool years and then relate this developmental process to specific developments in language, narrative, and understanding of self and other that vary among individuals, as well as by culture and gender.
Autobiographies as Topic↗
The role of motivation in the age-related positivity effect in autobiographical memory.
This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.
Age Factors↗
Life history: a qualitative method of research.
The life-history method of qualitative research is an alternative to empirical methods for identifying and documenting health patterns of individuals and groups. It allows the nurse researcher to explore a person's microhistorical (individual) experiences within a macrohistorical (history of the time) framework. Life-history information challenges the nurse to understand an individual's current attitudes and behaviours and how they may have been influenced by initial decisions made at another time and in another place. This paper describes a new direction in nursing research and identifies specific steps for using the life-history approach.
Autobiographies as Topic↗
Life story work in health and social care: systematic literature review.
AIM: The aim of this paper is to review the literature on life story work in health and social care practice. BACKGROUND: Life story work as an intervention has been used with a number of health and social care clients, such as children people with learning disabilities, older people on medical wards and with older people who have dementia. It may help challenge ageist attitudes and assumptions, be used as a basis for individualized care, improve assessment, assist in transitions between different care environments, and help to develop improved relationships between care staff and family carers. However, to date there has been no attempt to collate the findings from published accounts. METHODS: A systematic search of the literature on life story work was conducted in February 2004, using nursing, medical and social science databases and a combination of thesaurus and free text search terms. This revealed over 1000 publications; the use of carefully constructed inclusion and exclusion criteria identified 51 relevant items. Fourteen were subsequently selected and reviewed using a set of reflective critical appraisal questions. FINDINGS: A range of methodological approaches has been adopted to explore the use of life story work with no one specific methodology prevailing. The work has been most frequently used with older people and people with a learning disability and life story books are the most common approach. Staff perceptions of life story work have been explored, but patient and carer views are less frequently reported. The findings of the studies are discussed in broad themes, offering some tentative recommendations for using life story work in practice. CONCLUSION: Evidence on the use of life story work is immature, leading to the recommendation for more research. Although appraising literature from a range of approaches is complex, there are some potentially far-reaching benefits of life story work in health and social care practice.
Aged↗
Clinical caring--the diary of a nurse.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to explore the content of individual acts of nursing care and to discuss how these context-specific acts relate to the concept of caring. DESIGN AND METHODS: The point of departure was a diary kept by a nurse on an oncology ward over a period of six months. Hermeneutic interpretation, including content analysis of verb phrases, was carried out to inspire reflection and discussion rather than to generalize. RESULTS: The verbs that occurred in the diary text represented three categories of acts: physical care, speech and reflection. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION: The diary text expresses the carer's acts as situated in a specific space and time through her presence, communication and reflection. The absence of bodies in this text points to the discourse of nursing as subjected to dualism and to the medical rules of knowledge. Caring emerges as experience-near action that through history is connected to situated knowledges, actual discourse and universal human condition. Relevance to clinical practice. This study demonstrated that caring acts are situated and conditioned and that they should therefore be researched in relation to the carers' acts and thoughts. This confirms the need for cooperation between researchers and clinical nurses in the quest of deepening our understanding of caring.
Adaptation, Psychological↗
Making sense of the stories that people with Alzheimer's tell: a journey with my mother.
Confabulation or pseudo-reminiscence of the sort produced by people with Alzheimer's is reconsidered by applying existing theories about the structure of narrative and work on reminiscence, and the construction of a life story to the stories told by the author's mother. This approach provides the basis for going beyond a negative estimate of confabulatory stories based on their apparent confusion of past and present, truth and fantasy, to a more positive estimate of them as complying with the norms of narrative, and as being functional for their teller as a means both of interaction and of reconstructing an identity. It also allows for identification of certain predominant themes, which may help one to grasp the general sense of such stories.
Alzheimer Disease↗
Vietnam memories: Australian army nurses, the Vietnam war, and oral history.
This paper is about women nurse veterans from the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps (RAANC) who served in Vietnam. I aim to develop an understanding about these nurses that might place their experiences into a wider context. My conclusions provide starting points for future studies on myth, remembering and oral history.
Australia↗
Introduction to "the case of brew".
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Autobiographies as Topic↗
The case of Brew.
The author, a personality and social psychologist, attempts a candid life history for his colleagues in psychology.
Autobiographies as Topic↗
Continuity and change in the life story: a longitudinal study of autobiographical memories in emerging adulthood.
If a person's internalized and evolving life story (narrative identity) is to be considered an integral feature of personality itself, then aspects of that story should manifest some continuity over time while also providing evidence regarding important personality change. Accordingly, college freshmen and seniors provided detailed written accounts of 10 key scenes in their life stories, and they repeated the same procedure 3 months and then 3 years later. The accounts were content analyzed for reliable narrative indices employed in previous studies of life stories: emotional tone, motivational themes (agency, communion, personal growth), and narrative complexity. The results showed substantial continuity over time for narrative complexity and positive (vs. negative) emotional tone and moderate but still significant continuity for themes of agency and growth. In addition, emerging adults (1) constructed more emotionally positive stories and showed (2) greater levels of emotional nuance and self-differentiation and (3) greater understanding of their own personal development in the 4th year of the study compared to the 1st year. The study is the first to demonstrate both temporal continuity and developmental change in narrative identity over time in a broad sampling of personally meaningful life-story scenes.
Adolescent↗
Changes in reality monitoring and episodic memory in early childhood.
The purposes of this research were to examine the developmental relation between reality monitoring and episodic memory, to link reality monitoring to autobiographical memory by using extended naturalistic events, and to examine prefrontal functioning as a potential contributor to development in reality monitoring and episodic memory. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were worse than 6- or 8-year-olds at reality monitoring after a week delay, despite the fact that they remembered more about real than imagined events and remembered different aspects of each. In Experiments 2 and 3, reality monitoring and episodic memory were evaluated for 4- and 6-year-olds immediately after the events occurred and, in Experiment 3, again after a week delay. Reality monitoring was at higher levels for both age groups, but age differences remained. These data suggest that preschoolers' difficulties with reality monitoring result from a combination of episodic memory deficits and strategic differences. In addition, correlation analyses more directly linked preschoolers' reality monitoring to episodic memory and supported the hypothesis that episodic memory development is related to prefrontal functioning.
Age Factors↗
"If it happened, I would remember it": strategic use of event memorability in the rejection of false autobiographical events.
The present research investigated the link between perceived event memorability and false-event rejection. In 2 studies, event salience, plausibility, and recency were manipulated. Study 1 showed that high-salience events elicited higher memorability ratings than low-salience events for 5-, 7-, 9-year-olds and adults. Plausibility and recency affected only 9-year-olds' and adults' judgments. Study 2 demonstrated that younger versus older children and adults were less likely to reject false events, and that older children and adults were more likely to reject false events based on salience than were younger children. High-recency false events were more likely to be rejected than low-recency false events. Consistent with prediction, recency moderated the effect of salience. The development of metamemorial awareness and rejection strategies is discussed.
Autobiographies as Topic↗
Elaborating on elaborations: role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development.
Initial research on maternal reminiscing style established clear and consistent individual differences that vary along a dimension of maternal elaboration and that are related to children's developing autobiographical skills. More recent research has linked maternal elaborative reminiscing to strategic memory development, language and literacy skills, developing attachment relationships, and understanding of self, other, and mind. In this review, this research is placed in theoretical context by arguing for the critical role of reminiscing in developmental process and outcome.
Affect↗