Robyn Fivush

Emory University | EU · Department of Psychology

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 astonishingly rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) raises fundamental questions about human-generated narratives that express personal experiences. First-person narratives that emerge from autobiographical memory are shared frequently as a fundamental form of human activity and play a central role in maintaining relationships, guiding fut...

We articulate an intergenerational model of positive psychosocial development that centers storytelling in an ecological framework and is motivated by an orientation toward social justice. We bring together diverse literature (e.g., racial-ethnic socialization, family storytelling, narrative psychology) to argue that the intergenerational transmiss...

We articulate an intergenerational model of positive psychosocial development that centers storytelling in an ecological framework and is motivated by an orientation towards social justice. We bring together diverse literatures (e.g., racial-ethnic socialization, family storytelling, narrative psychology) to argue that the intergenerational transmi...

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...

Individuals create both personal and culturally shared meaning through narratives; however, sparse research has explored the specific ways in which individuals might use such cultural narratives in creating meaning from developmentally important experiences. In this study, we examine how emerging adults narrate positive romantic relationships, both...

Background: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context. Purpose: Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived e...

Memory is essential for everyday life. The understanding and study of memory has continued to grow over the years, thanks to well controlled laboratory studies and theory development. However, major challenges arise when attempting to apply theories of memory function to practical problems in society. A theory might be robust in explaining experime...

First-year college students in the 2019-2020 academic year are at risk of having their mental health, identity work, and college careers derailed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess emerging and evolving impacts of the pandemic on mental health/well-being, identity development, and academic resilience, we collected data from a racially,...

Autobiographical memories are never isolated episodes; they are embedded in a network that is continually updated and prediction driven. We present autobiographical memory as a meaning‐driven process that includes both veridical traces and reconstructive schemas. Our developmental approach delineates how autobiographical memory develops across chil...

First-year college students in the 2019-2020 academic year are at risk of having their mentalhealth, identity work, and college careers derailed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess emerging and evolving impacts of the pandemic on mental health/well-being, identity development, and academic resilience, we collected data from a racially,...

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened lives and livelihoods, imperiled families and communities, and disrupted developmental milestones globally. Among the critical developmental disruptions experienced is the transition to college, which is common and foundational for personal and social exploration. During college shutdowns (Spring 2020), we recru...

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened lives and livelihoods, imperiled families and communities, and disrupted developmental milestones globally. Among the critical developmental disruptions experienced is the transition to college, which is common and foundational for personal and social exploration. During college shutdowns (Spring 2020), we recru...

The coherence of autobiographical narratives is thought to be reflective of individuals’ psychological adjustment. However, results are not always replicable, the longitudinal nature of the relation has remained largely unaddressed, and there is limited research on mechanisms that may explain the relation between coherence and mental health. Theref...

Both gender and narrative are foundational to the ways in which humans engage in meaning-making. Arguing from evolutionary, psychological and feminist theoretical perspectives, we posit that narratives and gender are culturally mediated mutually constituted meaning-making systems: Narratives are defined through gender and gender is defined through...

We studied direct and indirect associations of attachment, trait hope, and motivations in narrative identity (agency and communion) with measures of well-being during emerging adulthood. Our aim was to determine whether hope and expressed motivations serve as mechanisms between attachment and well-being. We focused on emerging adults, for whom atta...

How narrative identity and well-being are intertwined as emerging adults process their lived experiences remains a critical theoretical and empirical question. We studied narrative identity among US emerging adults in a multiphase study. We aimed to test a) if and how narrative identity themes (i.e., coherence, agency, growth) change rapidly across...

The coherence of autobiographical narratives is suggested to be reflective of individuals' mental health. However, inconsistencies in results are regularly observed. Therefore, in this study, the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme (NaCCS) by was deconstructed and every dimension of coherence was recoded into singular constituting subcomponents. Our...

This project tested the ways mean expressions of narrative identity and variability in expressions of narrative identity informed young adults' well-being. We collected three narratives about past life challenges and coded narratives for themes of growth, agency, communion, and coherence. We tested whether a) mean scores and b) a variability index...

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memories are vital for our sense of self and well-being, and culture shapes how we integrate these personal memories into our personal identity. Intergenerational narratives from one’s family, such as the stories adolescents know and tell about their parents’ childhoods, also contribute to identity developm...

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 well...

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...

Families preserve and rewrite history in ways that pass on to the next generation a sense of family history based on what is known and what cannot be told. In this paper, we analyze New Zealand European adolescents’ stories about their parents’ childhood, exploring how these young people tell and do not tell family stories shrouded in secrecy. We i...

Sociocultural theories of development privilege the role of parent-child conversation as a critical interpersonal context for cognitive and socioemotional development. Research on maternal reminiscing suggests that mothers differ on the elaborative nature of their reminiscing style. Individual differences in maternal elaborative style are thought t...

Autobiographical memory defines who we are in relationship to others in the world. In addition to providing critical information to direct our behavior in adaptive ways, autobiographical memory functions to create a coherent and continuous sense of self and relationships over time, and thus autobiographical memory includes multiple temporal horizon...

Humans construct coherence and meaning in their lives through reminiscing with and about others. The four articles in this Social Development Quartet focus on how reminiscing about emotionally and morally challenging personal experiences is a critical mechanism for integration and differentiation across development, both within the individual and w...

Narrative forms are a tool for organizing lived experience, reflecting both the structure of the experience in the world, and the individual’s reactions to that experience; Labov (1972) termed these as referential and evaluative dimensions. We investigated how four individuals narratively structure their stories across these formal narrative compon...

In this article, we expand on aspects of autobiographical memory initially laid out in our earlier exposition of the sociocultural developmental model. We present a developmental account of the integration of an extended subjective perspective within an extended narrative framework both of which are mediated through language and shared cultural nar...

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...

Objective: Narrative theories of personality assume that individual differences in coherence reflect consistent and stable differences in narrative style rather than situational and event specific differences (e.g., McAdams & McLean, 2013). However, this assumption has received only modest empirical attention. Therefore, we present two studies tes...

The sociocultural developmental model of autobiographical memory development has been a highly generative theoretical framework over the past thirty years, garnering both a great deal of empirical attention and support. In this article, the author details the theoretical framework and reviews the empirical evidence that indicates that individual di...

Family stories help shape identity and provide a foundation for navigating life events during adolescence and early adulthood. However, little research examines the types of stories passed onto adolescents and emerging adults, the extent to which these stories are retained and accessible, and the potentially influential parental‐ and self‐identity...

In this study, we considered connections between the content of immediate trauma narratives and longitudinal trajectories of negative symptoms, to address questions about the timing and predictive value of collected trauma narratives. Participants (N = 68) who were admitted to the emergency department of a metropolitan hospital provided narrative r...

This study examined the underlying factor structure of 15 narrative meaning-making indices for narratives of stressful events, and explored the incremental validity of the narrative factor solution over and above general personality traits in predicting various indices of psychological well-being. Two-hundred and twenty four undergraduates (Mage =...

The functional use of episodic memories to claim epistemic truth must be placed within sociocultural contexts in which certain truths are privileged. Episodic memories are shared, evaluated, and understood within sociocultural interactions, creating both individual and group identities. These negotiated identities provide the foundation from which...

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...

Autobiographical memory is a complex blend of memories of single, recurring, and extended events integrated into a coherent story of self that is created and evaluated through sociocultural practices. Autobiographical memory is distinct from episodic memory in that (1) it relies on autobiographical consciousness, which emerges by the end of the pre...

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...

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 o...

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...

Adolescents’ intergenerational narratives—the stories they tell about their mothers’ and fathers’ early experiences—are an important component of their identities (Fivush & Merrill, 2016; Merrill & Fivush, 2016). This study explored adolescents’ intergenerational narratives across cultures. Adolescents aged 12 to 21 from 3 cultural groups in New Ze...

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 i...

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...

Poster form of Accepted Symposium talk

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. Of the many ways to characterize “the self,” we argue that narrative practice is a necessary component. Our identity is critically defined by the narratives we create about ourselves, and this narrative self affords a sense of emotional coherence and continuity in life, that is, a sense that one is the sa...

Sense of self and autobiographical memory are inextricably intertwined. In this chapter, we use a feminist lens to review the literature on autobiographical memory focusing on gender as conceptualized and assessed in three simultaneously embedded contexts, the local context, the developmental context, and the cultural context. A personal narrative...

Gender differences emerge regularly in autobiographical memory research. We suggest that gender differences in phenomenological self-report measures of autobiographical memory are rooted in gender identity rather than categorical gender. Reminiscing about the past is perceived as a female-typical activity, and therefore, gender-typical individuals...

We propose an ecological systems approach to family narratives that describes three dynamically interacting systems of family narratives: shared family narratives, communicative family narratives, and family history. We review developmental research on family storytelling within each of these levels and describe how they interact to create individu...

The recollective qualities of autobiographical memory are thought to develop over the course of the first two decades of life. We used a 9-year follow-up test of recall of a devastating tornado and of non-tornado-related events from before and after the storm, to compare the recollective qualities of adolescents’ (n = 20, ages 11 years, 11 months t...

Understanding how people turn episodes in time into subjectively meaningful narratives can shed light on adaptive meaning-making processes. Bridging attachment theory and narrative meaning making may elucidate how individuals distinctively narrate highly stressful and traumatic memories and whether such expression matters for psychological health....

Gender differences in autobiographical memory emerge in some data collection paradigms and not others. The present study included an extensive analysis of gender differences in autobiographical narratives. Data were collected from 196 participants, evenly split by gender and by age group (emerging adults, ages 18-29, and young adults, ages 30-40)....

Gender differences in the emotional intensity and content of autobiographical memory (AM) are inconsistent across studies, and may be influenced as much by gender identity as by categorical gender. To explore this question, data were collected from 196 participants (age 18–40), split evenly between men and women. Participants narrated four memories...

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...

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...

As readers of Applied Cognitive Psychology, we are all familiar with the controversies of the ‘memory wars’ of the late 20th century (see, e.g., Davies & Dalgleish 2001; Ost 2013; Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld & Loftus 2014; and Read & Lindsay 1997, for reviews). While some of us believe firmly that this controversy was resolutely resolved others...

Remembering is a social cultural activity. Contributors to this Special Issue were asked to address how conversations about personally experienced past events might or might not influence subsequent memory, especially in light of current controversies regarding historical memories of sexual abuse. For many years, the study of human memory focused o...

Self-event connections in autobiographical narratives help integrate specific episodes from memory into the life story, which has implications for identity and well-being. Previous research has distinguished differential relations between positive and negative self-event connections to psychological well-being but less research has examined identit...

Birth stories are a crucial autobiographical narrative for anchoring the life story. Yet they are not personally recalled, but received knowledge, and are therefore unique in that they occupy an intermediary role between family history and stories of self. Despite this theoretical significance, they have remained largely unexamined, especially from...

The attachment relationship is a critical bond between infant and caregiver that, when secure, facilitates physical and psychological well-being. Cutting-edge research integrating attachment theory with cognitive theories of event representations indicates that both generalized event representations, or scripts, and specific autobiographical narrat...

Poster Presentation

This chapter develops a sociocultural and feminist theoretical framework for exploring the process of constructing a gendered narrative identity within family reminiscing from preschool through adolescence. Families that engage in more elaborated and emotionally expressive reminiscing have children who provide more elaborated and emotionally expres...

Family dinnertime conversations are key settings where children learn behavior regulation, narrative skills, and knowledge about the world. In this context, parents may also model and socialize gender differences in language. The present study quantitatively examines gendered language use across a family dinnertime recorded with 37 broadly middle-c...

The hypothesis that the ability to construct a coherent account of personal experience is reflective, or predictive, of psychological adjustment cuts across numerous domains of psychological science. It has been argued that coherent accounts of identity are especially adaptive. We tested these hypotheses by examining relations between narrative coh...

Though it is generally acknowledged that parents are directly implicated in how and what their children learn about right and wrong, little is known about how the process of moral socialization proceeds in the context of family life, and how it gets played out in actual parent-child conversations. This volume brings together psychological research...

Autobiographical memories are thought to serve three basic functions: self-definition, social connection, and directing future behavior. Previous research suggests that the function a memory comes to serve may differ by the type of event recalled (e.g., single unique events vs. repeated or recurring events). In two studies, we compared memories for...

Using sociocultural and feminist theories as frames, I argue that parentally guided reminiscing about past emotional experiences is a critical site for the socialization of children's developing emotional voice. Moreover, this process is gendered. Research on parent-child reminiscing about the emotional past indicates that mothers are more elaborat...

This chapter presents a sociocultural model of the development of autobiographical memory. Specifically, autobiographical memories are memories of the self engaging in past activities and, as such, provide a sense of self continuity and coherence across time. The chapter focuses on the ways in which children are drawn into this kind of personal rem...

In this chapter, the authors argue that reminiscing is a gendered activity. Thus, the authors explicate our conceptualization of gender as a set of skilled practices, and argue that reminiscing is a stereotypically female activity that leads females to both engage in reminiscing and to value reminiscing more than do males. The authors define autobi...