Monisha Pasupathi

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Utah

The COVID-19 pandemic has defined the college career for this generation of learners, threatening mental health, identity development, and college functioning. We began tracking the impacts of this pandemic for 633 first-year college students from four U.S. universities (Mage = 18.8 years) in Spring 2020 and followed students to Spring 2023. Studen...

The COVID-19 pandemic has defined the college career for this generation of learners, threatening mental health, identity development, and college functioning. We began tracking the impacts of this pandemic for 633 first-year college students from four US universities (M age = 18.8 years) in Spring 2020 and followed students to Spring 2023. Student...

The development of narrative identity is a critical task for emerging adults—one shaped by parents and peers. However, how diverse audiences might jointly shape narrative identity remains underexamined. The present study addresses this gap, examining how emerging adults perceive diverse audiences for their narratives and tailor those narratives. In...

This paper introduces key concepts for studying intraindividual variability in narratives (Narrative IIV). Narrative IIV is conceptualized in terms of sources of within person variation (events and audiences), and dimensions of variation (structural and motivational/affective dimensions of narratives). Possible implications of narrative IIV for wel...

This commentary reflects on papers assembled for a special issue about the impact of Bruner’s idea of “beyond the information given.” The assembled papers are examined in relation to three cross-cutting issues that they illustrate: 1) processes of reflection in autobiographical recollection; 2) links between meaning and emotion; and 3) the idea of...

As they respond to children's emotions, mothers socialize children's emerging emotion regulation. Mothers' own autobiographical narratives likely reflect in part habitual ways of expressing and managing emotions – ways that may in turn influence the way mothers respond to their children's emotions. We examined features of mothers' narratives about...

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of 8 life stories obtained from 4 individuals, on 2 occasions 5 years apart. We sought to identify the ways in which life story interviews are tuned for the interviewer and the ways they reflect the individuals’ internalized audiences. Our findings suggested that even standardized interviews convey extensiv...

The development of narrative identity is a critical task for emerging adults – one shaped by parents and peers. However, how diverse audiences might jointly shape narrative identity remains underexamined. The present study addresses this gap, examining how emerging adults perceive diverse audiences for their narratives, and tailor those narratives....

Current empirical work suggests that early social experiences could have a substantial impact on the areas of the brain responsible for representation of the body. In this context, one aspect of functioning that may be particularly susceptible to social experiences is interoception. Interoceptive functioning has been linked to several areas of the...

Building on calls to examine intra-individual variability in personality, we examined such variability in narrative. In Study 1, participants (n = 553) provided three narratives (either self-defining, turning point, transgression, low point, or trauma memories; n = 1659 narratives). Narratives were coded for coherence, autobiographical reasoning, r...

A robust empirical literature suggests that individual differences in the thematic and structural aspects of life narratives are associated with and predictive of psychological well-being. However, one limitation of the current field is the multitude of ways of capturing these narrative features, with little attention to overarching dimensions or l...

A robust empirical literature suggests that individual differences in the thematic and structural aspects of life narratives are associated with and predictive of psychological well-being. However, 1 limitation of the current field is the multitude of ways of capturing these narrative features, with little attention to overarching dimensions or lat...

We evaluated whether narrating anger-provoking events promoted learning from those events, as compared with other responses to anger, and whether the effectiveness of narrative depended on age. In addition, we tested relations between anger reduction and learning and, in a subset of participants, between narrative quality and learning. A sample of...

This study examined children's and adolescents’ descriptions of wanting and seeking revenge in peer conflicts. A total of 100 youth divided into three age groups (7‐, 11‐, and 16‐year‐olds) were interviewed about experiences in which they wanted to get back at a peer who harmed them. Most youth recalled experiencing retaliatory desires, but typical...

In a social world, occasionally we all will harm others, as well as be harmed. Previous research has focused largely on how perpetration and victimization events are distinct rather than on how they might be integrated with one another, jointly shaping moral agency. We report on an exploratory qualitative analysis of narratives about perpetration a...

The present study examined how Bosnian refugees make sense of their experiences with everyday discrimination in the United States. Sixty Bosnian refugees in three generations—adolescents, young adults, and middle-aged adults—were asked to provide three narrative accounts about a time when (a) they were singled out negatively based on their ethnicit...

This study investigated the moral socialization strategies that mothers use in conversations about their children's experiences of harming their siblings as compared to their friends. The sample included 101 mothers and their 7‐, 11‐, or 16‐year‐old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) harmed a younger sibling and (b) harmed a fr...

The study’s goals were twofold: (a) to examine the effectiveness of narrating an angry experience, compared with relying on distraction or mere reexposure to the experience, for anger reduction across childhood and adolescence, and (b) to identify the features of narratives that are associated with more and less anger reduction for younger and olde...

In this chapter we explore how master narratives have ethical and moral implications, and how master narratives can provide a way for researchers to look at the intersections of culture, ethics, morality, and individual development. We make this case by advancing three propositions about the relation among master narratives, ethics, and morality: 1...

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...

In this article, we explore two different perspectives on what narratives reveal about differences in moral agency construction across contexts. We focus on contexts that vary in violence exposure because such exposure has implications for the way youth develop a sense of moral agency. We elicited narratives about harm-doing from three samples of y...

This paper provides a primer for researchers seeking an introduction to quantitative narrative research methods. It represents a consensus document of most common practices used by the co-authors. Key elements of conducting narrative research (e.g., asking narrative questions, designing narrative prompts, collecting narratives, coding narratives) a...

This paper provides a primer for researchers seeking an introduction to quantitative narrative research methods. It represents a consensus document of most common practices used by the co-authors. Key elements of conducting narrative research (e.g., asking narrative questions, designing narrative prompts, collecting narratives, coding narratives) a...

Building on calls to examine intra-individual variability in personality, we examined such variability in narrative. In Study 1, participants (n = 553) provided three narratives (either self-defining, turning point, transgression, low point, or trauma memories; n = 1659 narratives). Narratives were coded for coherence, autobiographical reasoning, r...

Children’s and adolescents’ narratives of interpersonal experiences can inform our understanding of developmental shifts in the use of personhood concepts. We present results from two studies (ns = 90, 112) with children aged five to 16 years. In the first study, children were asked to describe one positive and another negative experience with a fr...

Admonitions to tell one's story in order to feel better reflect the belief that narrative is an effective emotion regulation tool. The present studies evaluate the effectiveness of narrative for regulating sadness and anger, and provide quantitative comparisons of narrative with distraction, reappraisal, and reexposure. The results for sadness (n =...

Objectives: This commentary had 3 main objectives: to introduce the idea of intersecting narratives in the context of violence; to outline some research-based considerations about how narratives might play a role in the aftermath of violence; and to do so using a format that reflects intersecting narratives. Method: We review findings from research...

The fact that people talk about most of their emotional experiences with others is well established, as are the influences of listeners on the nature of such talk. Established effects of variability in that talk-such as those due to the listener's attentiveness-could also influence later memory, but the evidence directly testing such influences is...

This study examined how narration of harm experiences can regulate self and emotions in ways relevant to well-being. Participants (n = 88, 65% female) were asked to provide 6 narratives about instances when they were victims of harm and 6 narratives about instances when they were perpetrators of harm. Narratives were coded for extent of exploration...

We tested whether narrating growth from transgressions was associated with increased well-being, self-compassion, and forgiveness. Study 1 was cross-sectional (N = 118). Studies 2 and 3 were short-term longitudinal (N’s = 77 and 88). Study 1 revealed positive associations between narrating growth and well-being. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and growt...

Developing the ideas proposed by Dunlop requires further thinking about the nature and sources of variability, and a more complete investigation of social desirability within and outside the laboratory. We propose some initial thoughts about these issues and suggest that considerations of the adaptive value of variability across contexts in goals a...

In this article, we review our own and others’ work on how listeners shape the selves of speakers through narrative processes. We begin with an overview of narrative work on self that illustrates features of narratives that are conceptually and empirically related to selves, including self and identity judgments, story content, story structure, and...

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more referen...

This commentary places the article by Feenstra and colleagues (in press) within the frameworks and findings of normative identity development research. Points of overlap between the way identity is conceptualized by Feenstra and colleagues and the way identity is conceptualized in normative work are outlined. In addition, areas where juxtaposing ps...

Previous research shows a somewhat inconsistent relationship between symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and disclosing combat events to others. The current work details the results of two studies of combat event disclosure in veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In the first study, an Intern...

This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate c...

This study investigated differences in children's and adolescents' experiences of harming their siblings and friends. Participants (N = 101; 7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds) provided accounts of events when they hurt a younger sibling and a friend. Harm against friends was described as unusual, unforeseeable, and circumstantial. By contrast, harm against...

The development of narrative identity occurs within storytelling contexts, and the present study examined the role of listener behaviors in this process. Methodology developed within studies of mother-child conversations was used to examine how listener behaviors are associated with the meanings that individuals make of their personal stories in co...

The authors' goal is to provide a review of the evidence on developmental trajectories and adaptive functions of self, personality, and social cognition across adulthood. They adapt a dual-component model originating from the study of intellectual life-span development that distinguished between the mechanics and the pragmatics of the mind and has...

Social influences (e.g., by teachers, parents and peers) on students’ experience of interest are typically described in terms of affecting students’ initial choice of and/or completion of specific educational activities. When considered within the framework of the Self-Regulation of Motivation (SRM) model, however, other people may influence the in...

Narrative identity work can offer fruitful insights into how individuals explore ethnic identity and develop a sense of ethnic pride. This study examined links between status and narrative approaches to ethnic identity development in a small sample of ethnically diverse college students. Findings revealed few differences in narratives about ethnici...

Erikson's seminal work on identity development focused on the question, Who Am I? Despite theoretical overlap between identity theorists, current research has primarily taken different paths. Those focused on identity statuses have primarily assessed current conceptions of exploration that presumably lead to future commitments. In contrast, narrati...

Self-integration, critical to identity, is the process of connecting experiences to the self and often occurs as individuals narrate events. Elaboration (Fivush & Nelson, 2006; King & Raspin, 2004; Smyth & Pennebaker, 2008) and listener responsiveness (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005) correlate with better self-integration, but these variables are seldom di...

The authors outline the concept of self-event relations and propose that adolescents accomplish narrative identity construction in part by building relations between self and experience as they tell stories about their lives. They outline different types of self-event relations and consider how they contribute to building a sense of identity. They...

Research on narrative identity has traditionally focused on how narrative characteristics are related to personality and well-being in adults. The present pair of studies with college students (Study 1, n= 62; Study 2, n= 68 couples) examined the dynamic conversational processes that might be part of constructing that identity. We examined the char...

Self-integration, critical to identity, is the process of connecting experiences to the self and often occurs as individuals narrate events. Elaboration (Fivush & Nelson, 2006; King & Raspin, 2004; Smyth & Pennebaker, 2008) and listener responsiveness (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005) correlate with better self-integration, but, these variables are seldom d...

This article examines age differences from childhood through middle adolescence in the extent to which children include factual and interpretive information in constructing autobiographical memory narratives. Factual information is defined as observable or perceptible information available to all individuals who experience a given event, while inte...

Abstract— Researchers have studied the effects of exposure to long-term political violence on children largely in terms of adverse mental health outcomes, typically measured in relation to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This study argues that for children, the important aftereffects of exposure to political violence extend beyond emoti...

This paper poses the following question: When, in spite of knowing that it is wrong, people go on to hurt others, what does this mean for the development of moral agency? We begin by defining moral agency and briefly sketching relations between moral agency and other concepts. We then outline what three extant literatures suggest about this questio...

A broad array of research findings suggest that older adults, as compared with younger adults, have a more positive sense of self and possibly a clearer and more consistent sense of self. Further, older adults report lower motivation to construct or maintain a sense of self. In the present study, we examined whether such differences in self-views w...

The disclosure of emotional events to various social intimates (disclosure targets) was measured in 2 samples (soldiers and first responders) at risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as a comparison sample of college students. These 3 groups completed survey measures of disclosure, and at risk groups also completed measures of PTSD...

This special issue of Memory focuses on silence and its implications for memory, and also on the implications of silences that extend beyond memory, to the functioning of individuals, groups, and societies. Silence can represent things taken for granted, and also things unsayable. The memory implications of silencing are complex. In terms of tradit...

The present study focused on how distracted listening affects subsequent memory for narrated events. Undergraduate students experienced a computer game in the lab and talked about it with either a responsive or distracted friend. One month later, those who initially spoke with distracted listeners showed lower retention of information about the com...

The need to establish a narrative self reaches an important peak during adolescence as teens work to understand life events and establish their self-identity. The first book to examine narrative development during adolescence in depth, Narrative Development in Adolescence: Creating the Storied Self, focuses on both stable and at-risk youth as they...

Recently, while testing the feasibility of a laboratory procedure for studying adolescent conversational storytelling, we recorded a series of adolescent conversations in our laboratory. Adolescents were asked to choose recent events like an important decision, a recent self-contradictory experience, or a recent self-typical experience. They discus...

Research on narrative identity in late adolescence and early adulthood has not extensively examined how conversational storytelling affects the development of narrative identity. This is a major gap, given the importance of this age period for narrative identity development and the clear importance of parent-child conversations in the development o...

Drawing from a narrative identity framework, we present the results of three studies examining the nature of what people do and do not disclose about their life experiences. Across three studies, our findings indicate that (1) the major difference in what people do and do not disclose concerns the emotionality of the events and whether or not the e...

The content of traumatic event-focused blogs was analysed for linguistic content associated with recovery from trauma. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program was used to identify changes in cognitive, affective, and self- focused word use over the course of entries in thirty public access blogs. Although blogging per se did not result...

This study examines how conversing with passengers in a vehicle differs from conversing on a cell phone while driving. We compared how well drivers were able to deal with the demands of driving when conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and when driving without any distraction. In the conversation conditions, participants were in...

The present study frames the patterning of factual, schematic inference, and interpretive information overtime in conversational storytelling using dynamic systems theory. This approach is consistent with current conceptualizations of remembering, as well as with psycholinguistic approaches to storytelling in discourse but goes beyond extant work b...

This article is focused on the growing empirical emphasis on connections between narrative and self-development. The authors propose a process model of self-development in which storytelling is at the heart of both stability and change in the self. Specifically, we focus on how situated stories help develop and maintain the self with reciprocal imp...

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In this paper, we consider how the life story develops through the creation of self-event connections in narrating experiences. We first outline the ways in which such connections have been implied by existing work on the life story, and then consider the varieties of such connections that we see in our own work. That work suggests that self-event...

Prior work suggests that disclosing experiences may provide people with more distance, more positive emotion, greater cognitive elaboration, and greater certainty regarding those experiences. Two studies (n=58 undergraduates and n=123 community-living adults) examined linguistic indicators of such differences between previously disclosed and previo...

The Self-Regulation of Motivation Model suggests that the experience of interest is an important source of human motivation and that people often strategically regulate the experience of interest. Previous work based on this model suggests that the social context may influence this process at multiple points. The present research focuses on whether...

Discourse and self-perceptions are likely to be related in bidirectional ways. That is, people's self-perceptions are likely to shape their discourse behavior, but their (and their partners') discourse behavior in turn will shape their subsequent self-percep-tions. To provide empirical evidence for this proposal, we conducted a study in which pairs...

We propose that collaborative narration is a process in which narrative identity develops, and we examine individual differences in extraversion in such narration. Two studies are presented: retrospective and experience sampling episodes of collaborative narration, the first with self-defining memories, the second with everyday narration. Across bo...

In this article, the authors present a view of remembering as a major process through which adult development takes place. They begin by reviewing functional and conversational approaches to remembering. They then introduce their model briefly and apply it to two contexts of central developmental interest: developmental tasks specific to later life...

Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal experiences. In Study 1 (n=63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to the speaker's sense of self, that is, to...

This chapter examines self-construction in reflective modes that sometimes, although not very often, entails explicit construction of the self. The author begins this chapter with two questions: (a) How do people construct a sense of self in personal storytelling about everyday events' and (b) How is this construction of selves in storytelling a jo...

Two studies explore the narrative construction of self-perceptions in conversational storytelling among pairs of same-sex friends. Specifically, the studies examined how listener behavior can support or undermine attempts to self-verify in personal storytelling. In two studies (n=100 dyads), speakers told attentive, distracted, or disagreeable (Stu...

A topic ignored in mainstream scientific inquiry for decades, wisdom is beginning to return to the place of reverence that it held in ancient schools of intellectual study. A Handbook of Wisdom, first published in 2005, explores wisdom's promise for helping scholars and lay people to understand the apex of human thought and behavior. At a time when...

In the present article, the authors examined age differences in the emotional experiences involved in talking about past events. In Study 1, 129 adults in an experience-sampling study reported whether they were engaged in mutual reminiscing and their concurrent experience of positive and negative emotion. Their experiences of positive and negative...

Intraindividual variability in self-descriptions was examined among adults ranging from 18 to 94 years old. Participants (N = 182) identified six trait dimensions central to their self-concept and, over the course of a week in an experience-sampling study, rated themselves along these dimensions at 35 randomly selected times. They also reported the...

Across time and cultures, wisdom has been nominated as the ideal endpoint of development. Evidence suggests that the beginnings of wisdom are observed in adolescence. But are the correlates of wisdom-related performance in adolescence different from those in adulthood because of differences in developmental status? To answer this question, heteroge...

This paper examines emotion regulation as a function of autobiographical remembering in social contexts. Two studies (n = 38 and 123, respectively) are presented that provide evidence that autobiographical remembering in social settings can result in changes in the emotions associated with an experience. However, the results also suggest that wheth...

Research has shown that age and ethnicity are associated with individuals' motivations for emotional regulation and social interaction. The authors proposed that these age and ethnicity-related motives would be reflected in storytelling. Women representing 2 age and 2 ethnic groups (young adulthood, oldage, African American, European American) told...

Research has shown that age and ethnicity are associated with individuals' motivations for emotional regulation and social interaction. The authors proposed that these age and ethnicity-related motives would be reflected in storytelling. Women representing 2 age and 2 ethnic groups (young adulthood, old age, African American, European American) tol...

We divided children (N = 719, grades 3–6) into five control types based on the degree to which they reported employing prosocial (indirect, cooperative) and coercive (direct, hostile) strategies of control (prosocial controllers, coercive controllers, bistrategic controllers, noncontrollers, and typicals). We tested for differences across the five...

This study examines functions of remembering specific past events in conversation using a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Transcripts of long-married couples' conversations about conflicts and pleasant events were examined for references to specific past events. We evaluated the functions events appeared to serve and examine...

The story-recall performance of older and younger women was examined within an oral story-retelling context with two listener conditions. Forty-eight older women (M age = 67.81 years; SD = 2.62) and 47 younger women (M age = 20.47 years; SD = 1.53) were asked to learn one of two stories with the goal to retell the story from memory either to an exp...

This article examines conversational recounting about experiences as a potential mechanism by which people socially construct themselves and their worlds over the life span and the resulting implications for understanding adult development. Two principles governing conversational recounting of past events are proposed: coconstruction (the joint inf...

Wisdom and morality are both discussed as developmental ideals. They are often associated in theoretical contexts but the nature of their empirical relation is still an open question. We hypothesised that moral reasoning (one facet of morality), would be related to wisdom-related knowledge and judgement, but that the two represent different facets...

The present study examined adolescents' wisdom-related knowledge and judgment with a heterogeneous sample of 146 adolescents (ages 14-20 years) and a comparison sample of 58 young adults (ages 21-37 years). Participants responded to difficult and ill-defined life dilemmas; expert raters evaluated these responses along 5 wisdom criteria. Our finding...

The present study examined adolescents' wisdom-related knowledge and judgment with a heterogeneous sample of 146 adolescents (ages 14-20 years) and a comparison sample of 58 young adults (ages 21-37 years). Participants responded to difficult and ill-defined life dilemmas; expert raters evaluated these responses along 5 wisdom criteria. Our finding...

Age differences in emotional experience over the adult life span were explored, focusing on the frequency, intensity, complexity, and consistency of emotional experience in everyday life. One hundred eighty-four people, age 18 to 94 years, participated in an experience-sampling procedure in which emotions were recorded across a 1-week period. Age w...

Age differences in emotional experience over the adult life span were explored, focusing on the frequency, intensity, complexity, and consistency of emotional experience in everyday life. One hundred eighty-four people, age 18 to 94 years, participated in an experience-sampling procedure in which emotions were recorded across a 1-week period. Age w...

Most theories of social influence do not consider adult development. Theoretical and empirical work in life span developmental psychology, however, suggests that age may reduce susceptibility to social influence. The present study examined age differences in social conformity for 2 classes of stimuli: judgments of geometric shapes and emotional fac...

Positive and responsive listening behavior benefits marital satisfaction, but previous reports have examined emotionally positive behavior confounded with responsive behavior, and focused primarily on younger marriages. Psycholinguistic views of listening suggest that responsive listening is distinct from emotionally positive listening. The former...

Telling others about past events can be viewed as rehearsing one's memory for a set of events, and a recollection on one occasion might exert long‐term influences on event memory. Because variations in the social context of recollection affect how we tell others about events, such variations can also come to influence long‐term memory. In our study...