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How emotional content of memories changes in narrating
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the link between autobiographical memories and personal narratives and to assess whether the emotions present in memories are maintained or transformed when memories are narrated. In a Memory Fluency Task a total of 72 Italian undergraduates (35 males and 37 females) were asked to recall memories from their last period of life (from adolescence to present), to select one of them and to choose the emotions connected to this memory from an eleven-item list. Then, they were requested to write this memory in detail and again to select the emotions connected to the narrative from the same list of emotions. The emotions were distinguished as simple positive, simple negative, simple neutral, and complex (positive and negative). The results showed, on the whole, that participants expressed more emotions and a greater number of complex emotions in narratives than in memories. The authors interpret these results using a Vygotskyan frame of reference and considering the narratives as a form of external speech that makes memories more explicit.
... Following a test-retest design, participants again had to freely recall autobiographical memories in the Memory Fluency Task and to allocate to them an emotional tone. Results demonstrated that after the narrative, young adults are prone to allocate to past life memories more emotions, changing them from a positive or negative emotional tone to a mixed one (Fioretti and Smorti 2015). ...
... Then, participants were randomly divided into three groups: members of the CG had to carefully think about the recalled memory for about 15 min. In terms of the two experimental conditions, the time interval was decided by researchers due to the calculations of the mean duration obtained by the spontaneous narratives collected from university students in previous studies (Fioretti and Smorti 2015). Each participant of the two experimental groups was requested to individually move to a second room of the laboratory where the "listener" (an unknown peer) was waiting for them. ...
Many scholars stressed the role of social interactions in the construction of autobiographical memories, especially in late adolescence and emerging adulthood. This paper aims to assess the impact of the listener attitude on narrator’s emotional valence of past life events concerning the end of a close relationship. 157 emerging adults have been asked to recall a memory and to randomly narrate it to a listener previously trained to be distracted and detached (DL group) versus attentive and empathic (AL group). A control group (CG) had only to reflect internally on the recalled memory. Participants had to allocate one or more emotions to their memory from a 12-item list in a recall task, a narrative/reflection task and a 15-day recall follow-up. The percentages of negative, positive and neutral emotions were assessed and changes among the three emotional allocations were measured. Results showed that participants of the AL group after the narrative task increased the positive emotional engagement of memories and decreased the negative emotions in comparison to DL participants and the CG ones. The authors interpret the results suggesting that narrating autobiographical memories to attentive peers is a way to co-construct their emotional meaning and discuss findings in the light of the knowledge on the lifespan period of emerging adulthood.
... Such findings showcase the way that gendered expectations about emotional experience and expression-when, where, and for whom such expression is appropriate-shape whether people include more or less interpretive content in their narratives. As a result, interpretations may be more vulnerable to conversational silencing (Fioretti & Smorti, 2015Fivush, 2010) or conversational invitations and thus more likely to change via SS-RIF or reconsolidation than facts. ...
This review examines cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying social influence on autobiographical memory. We aim for this review to serve as a bridge between researchers who focus on veridicality (e.g., eyewitness memory) and those who give primacy to meaning, especially given the elusive nature of measuring veridicality in uncontrolled personal experiences. We assess whether mechanisms are similar for three aspects of memories, namely facts, interpretations, and autobiographical reasoning. We present a model ofmemory change in facts and interpretations that is incidental and time-bound, in contrast to change in autobiographical reasoning that is more deliberate and open to influence. We emphasize the empirical challenges of studying memory that is truly autobiographical alongside the compromise to experimental control required to answer certain questions. We finally argue that autobiographical memory represents a naturalistic domain where memory processes, reasoning processes, and conversational influences collide, with potential implications for applied research on veridicality.
... Initially, the results revealed that adolescents were more likely to report their experiences in a negative light. This finding is not a surprise since it was already known in the literature that negative narratives are longer and more consistent since they reflect the individual's need to process more profoundly traumatic and chaotic experiences to make sense of them [33]. The negative aspects highlighted focused on the limitation of autonomy and the difficulty in expressing and discovering one's new identity. ...
Over the past two years, the consequences of the severe restrictions imposed by the rapid spread of COVID-19 among the global population have been a central focus of scientific research. The pandemic has been a singular and unexpected event that found people unprepared and vulnerable in responding to its emergence, resulting in substantial psychological distress. Scientific evidence has highlighted that adolescents and emerging adults have been among those populations at greatest risk of adverse psychological outcomes, even in the long term. In particular, more than one-third of young adults reported high levels of loneliness, and nearly half of 18-to 24-year-olds felt lonely during the pandemic, experiencing both psychological and emotional distress. The lockdown, the consequent suspension of face-to-face academic activities and the severe restriction of social life have disrupted the daily routines of students already involved in coping with developmental tasks related to identity formation and the relational experience. Under such conditions, emotions and emotional regulation skills are crucial in adapting behavior to reach academic goals and face mounting levels of distress. Therefore, several studies have investigated resilience mechanisms and coping strategies of emerging adults during the pandemic. The present study focuses on university students and explores the impact of resilience and emotional regulation on adverse psychological outcomes related to persistent distress conditions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were administered a self-report assessment battery through an online platform at the beginning (T0) and the end of the lockdown (T1). A structural equation model (SEM) was used to explore the relationship between resilience, emotional regulation difficulties and psychological distress (depression, anxiety and stress). The findings indicate that psychological resilience and emotion regulation are protective factors that buffer the extent of possible distress resulting from an adverse condition such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
... In autobiographical memories, a crucial role must be attributed to emotions, and, therefore, to the emotional content of memories, of which one can acquire awareness through the narrative form [47]. An important tradition of research on memory and narration suggests that memories, after being narrated, do not maintain the same characteristics as when they are simply retrieved without a linguistic aid [45,48]; thus, narrated emotional memories are significantly more complex than the untold ones [49]. Not only does autobiographical narration allow for a richer and more complex emotional expression, but this expression seems to have beneficial effects on physical and emotional health [50][51][52]. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic produced several ethical challenges for nurses, impacting their mental health and moral distress. In the moral distress model the categories of events related to moral distress are: constraint, dilemma, uncertainty, conflict, and tension, each one related to different emotions. This study explored moral events’ memories and emotions in narratives of a sample of 43 Italian nurses who worked during the COVID-19 pandemic. We constructed an ad-hoc narrative interview asking nurses to narrate the memory, and the associated emotion, of an event in which they felt they could not do the right thing for the patient. We conducted a theory-driven analysis, using the categories proposed by the literature, identifying the main emotion for each category. Results show that 36 memories of events are representative of moral distress; among these, 7 are representative of none of the categories considered, and we categorized them as moral compromise. The main emotional trajectories are powerlessness, worthlessness, anger, sadness, guilt, and helplessness. From a clinical psychological point of view, our findings highlight the narration of the memories of moral events as a tool to use in the ethical sense-making of critical experiences, in order to promote well-being and moral resilience among nurses in emergency situations.
... Inicio, medio y fin señalan una secuencia comprensible, cronológica y causal como estructura básica de la trama emocional (Fioretti y Smorti, 2015;Du Toit, 2014;Kleres, 2010;Snaevarr, 2010;Bruner, 1991), que recupera la memoria de los actores narrativos, los cuales se mueven entre pasado, presente y futuro (Uitto et àl., 2018, Kleres, 2010Beatty, 2010). Mientras que para Nussbaum (2008, p. 206) las emociones evolucionan según la dinámica de los relatos y "el modo de relacionarse con los objetos valiosos", para De tienda (2011) se modifican con el transcurrir de las historias a medida que los actores incorporan en ellas diversas cargas emocionales. ...
Objetivo general: Revisar las contribuciones del enfoque narrativo para las prácticas de investigación-formación de emociones de actores educativos. Metodología: Revisión narrativa revisión narrativa de carácter selectivo, con el fin de comparar, contrastar y relacionar aspectos claves del tópico investigativo, delimitada por aspectos temporales (2000-2019), tipológicos (investigaciones con diseños cuali y cuantitativos) y de publicaciones (artículos y tesis en sistemas y bases: Dialnet, Ebsco, Proquest, Science Direct, Scopus). Resultados: El enfoque narrativo contribuye con la estructuración de las emociones para abarcar dimensiones y aspectos que intervienen en su desarrollo, con la formación de los actores investigativos en términos de comprensión y refiguración de sus episodios emocionales, con la reconfiguración, tanto del objeto como de los modos de analizar y socializar los resultados de las experiencias emocionales. Conclusiones: El desarrollo de habilidades socioemocionales es una necesidad para los ámbitos laboral y educativo y un desafío para las prácticas de educación emocional. Investigaciones prácticas evidencian aportes significativos del enfoque narrativo para abordar las emociones, frente a enfoques estereotipados y paralelos a la investigación tradicional que se reducen a datos y números que no permiten la comprensión de estas experiencias vividas
... According to Faccio, Turco and Iudici (2019), writing a diary corresponds to selfwriting where the writer becomes at the same time the film director and the protagonist of her own story. This is a privileged condition for suffering people who are unable to change their own narration: the patient's diary could be seen as a self-portrait written under the psychotherapist's gaze (Fioretti & Smorti, 2015). Diaries are widely used as a method in stress studies, both as a tool for data collection and for stress regulation (Alford, Malouff & Osland, 2005). ...
The article presents the preliminary analysis of Italian children’s diaries during the COVID-19 lockdown. The outbreak of the disease has posed great challenges to people’s daily lives and often children’s perspectives have been overlooked. We conducted a diary study with 28 pre-adolescents in the North–East of Italy to grasp their first-person perspective on this extraordinary event. We considered a number of relevant examples that are representative of their ideas, opinions and thoughts on the pandemic phases, family life, and education. Diaries are used as ecocultural qualitative methods able to illustrate the dynamics of children’s experiences and their sense-making, and to provide useful insights for educators.
... This special condition seems to be crucial for people who suffer from the inability to change their own story. Metaphorically speaking, in the clinical story presented here, the patient's diary could be seen as a self-portrait (Smorti, 2007;Smorti & Fioretti, 2015) painted under the psychotherapist's gaze. The identity positions associated with the patient's problem are not as real as in an objective picture; instead, they take the shape the painter lends them. ...
There is an abundance of literature investigating the relationship between self-writing and well-being in cases of trauma or life-changing events, but no such research has assessed the value of keeping a daily diary in promoting small changes, describing an individual’s identity in its slow, but realistic evolution. This study examined how the use of diary as a narration tool contributed to improving a patient’s awareness of his personal emotions and feelings during a course of psychotherapy. It investigated the changes occurring in the prevailing writing style of a 200-page diary written by a patient suffering from hypochondria over a period of two and a half years. Sentences relating to the need for change, to the self, to suffering and to the function attributed to the self-writing activity were analyzed on the basis of specific criteria deriving from dialogical self theory, which conceptualizes ways to adopt new identity positions during the course of change. Respondent validation identified a good correspondence between the findings of the textual analysis and the writer’s own point of view. Results showed an improvement in awareness of moods and feelings. Identity positions became more integrated and writing more enjoyable. These findings demonstrate the potential of innovative use of diary writing as a longitudinal tool for consolidating strategies for change and as an additional means for assessing psychotherapy efficacy. Writing a diary proved effective both in supporting the patient’s personal reflections and changes and in making it easier for him to share his thoughts with the therapist.
... Experience of verbal narratives, rather than moving image ones, may supply models for the social presentation of the self through autobiographical narrative (Labov and Waletzky, 1967;Habermas and Paha, 2001;Rubin et al., 2011;Jobson et al., 2014). Fioretti and Smorti (2015) compared autobiographical reminiscences with narratives of those memories. The narratives included more emotion and emotional complexity than the reminiscences, especially in relation to surprise, recalling Bauman's account of narration of stories creating more suspense when performed orally to unfamiliar audiences (Bauman, 1986). ...
Reading fiction for pleasure is robustly correlated with improved cognitive attainment and other benefits. It is also in decline among young people in developed nations, in part because of competition from moving image fiction. We review existing research on the differences between reading or hearing verbal fiction and watching moving image fiction, as well as looking more broadly at research on image or text interactions and visual versus verbal processing. We conclude that verbal narrative generates more diverse responses than moving image narrative. We note that reading and viewing narrative are different tasks, with different cognitive loads. Viewing moving image narrative mostly involves visual processing with some working memory engagement, whereas reading narrative involves verbal processing, visual imagery, and personal memory (Xu et al., 2005). Attempts to compare the two by creating equivalent stimuli and task demands face a number of challenges. We discuss the difficulties of such comparative approaches. We then investigate the possibility of identifying lower level processing mechanisms that might distinguish cognition of the two media and propose internal scene construction and working memory as foci for future research. Although many of the sources we draw on concentrate on English-speaking participants in European or North American settings, we also cover material relating to speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew, and Japanese in their respective countries, and studies of a remote Turkish mountain community.
... The previous studies (Fioretti & Smorti, 2015Fioretti, Pascuzzi & Smorti, 2017) have highlighted that narration has an impact on narrators in terms of how they evaluate the emotional content of their memories. The emotional evaluation of narrated memories is, in turn, influenced by the quality of listening (Pascuzzi, Fioretti & Smorti, 2016;Fioretti et al., 2017). ...
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of narrating and listening conditions in autobiographical memory of a staged event. Eighty young adults were recruited for the present research. First, they were interviewed on current issues (staged event). Second, they were asked to complete a memory questionnaire about the content of the interview. Then, they were assigned to three retrieval conditions: narration to an empathic listener, narration to a detached listener and retrieving thinking silently about the event. Finally, one week later, the participants were asked to complete the memory questionnaire again to assess the influence of narration and listening conditions on memory. The results show that the experimental conditions significantly influenced the memory trend for a staged event. The emphatic listening condition promoted memory significantly more than did the other two conditions. The authors interpret these results in terms of the theory of narrativization.
... When significant memories are enumerated through short sentences they are poorer and simpler then when they are deepened through narration. Fioretti and Smorti (2015) asked undergraduates to recall as many memories as they could and write down only one or two sentences for each memory in a limited time of three minutes. After this memory fluency task, participants were requested to locate their memories in time and space and to label each of them with one or more emotions from eleven selected ones (one positive: happiness; eight negative: anger, fear, envy, shame, sadness, disgust, guilt, and jealousy; two neutral: surprise and pride). ...
This paper discusses the problem of the role of language in autobiographical memory, that is barely considered in studies on autobiographical memories and narratives. As a matter of fact, most of the current studies on autobiographical memory confounded memory and narrative together. The present paper focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it debates how narratives contribute to the construction of autobiographical memories through self-other communication. Secondly, it reflects on how language and communication should be manipulated in studies about autobiographical memory. This paper is made of three sections: the first section discusses the role of language, particularly in the form of narrative, as a social tool by which autobiographical memories can be organised in a life story; the second section examines previous methods of investigation used in the study of autobiographical memories; finally, the third section proposes different methodological alternatives to overcome the problems emerging from our analysis of literature.
... Fundamentally, narratives can help to establish meaning (Sandelowski 1991). They can encourage emotional expression, which in turn can generate a deep understanding and further conceptualization of participants' experiences (Fioretti & Smorti 2015;Romano & Cuenca 2013). Furthermore, there is also a growing use of narratives to generate lived experience perspectives and recovery models for people with mental illness and their families (Tondora et al. 2014). ...
Children who have lived with parental mental illness experience long-standing reduced health and social outcomes, alongside ongoing personal distress. While there has been some dialogue regarding interventions to support children who are living with parental mental illness, there remains a paucity of knowledge regarding adult children's experiences and potential needs. Given this, the aim of the present study was to establish parenting narratives of adult children who had experienced childhood parental mental illness. This included their experiences of being parented alongside their own subsequent parenting roles. Three men and 10 women, ranging from 30 to 78 years old, met individually with a researcher to tell their stories. Narratives were thematically analysed to establish themes. The findings of the study demonstrated that individuals who have lived with childhood parental mental illness dehumanized their parent with mental illness. The authors argue that all mental health services should be underpinned with a whole of family assessment and care philosophy. There is also a need for all mental health services to consider how policies and procedures might inadvertently dehumanize clients who are parents, which could contribute to familial dehumanization. This could prevent the dehumanization of parents who experience mental illness to preserve parental and child relationships.
... Starting from the copious scientific literature on the topic, researchers should find a common methodology and a shared procedure which will give the opportunity to replicate the study in other contexts and with patients suffering from different diseases. [32][33][34][35] In 2014 in Rome, a committee of international experts in the field participated in a Consensus Conference on recommendations for the implementation of Narrative Medicine in clinical practice. 36 The committee declared to define Narrative Medicine as a methodology of clinical intervention based on a specific communicative competence. ...
Come realizzare una ricerca nell'ambito della Medicina Basata sulla Narrazione? Esiste una prassi condivisibile? È possibile discutere a proposito di una prassi metodologica attingendo dalle ricerche già condotte e da ambiti di studio e di ricerca differenti? Il volume cercherà di rispondere a tali quesiti in ottica multidisciplinare, ed è rivolto a tutti i professionisti che operano nel campo della salute intenzionati ad approfondire cosa significa pianificare e realizzare un intervento di Medicina Basata sulla Narrazione. Rappresenta un punto di partenza atto a stimolare il dibattito nazionale attorno al tema della metodologia della ricerca nell'ambito della Narrative Based Medicine.
... The act of storytelling is at the same time a way to manipulate the antecedents and a response focused strategy, because through narrative we look for persuasive antecedents of the events and we modulate our emotions by narrating these events to others. Although it has not been used the specific construct of emotion regulation, some new interesting studies demonstrated that autobiographical narrative can be an effective instrument to modify emotions connected to memories (Fioretti & Smorti, 2016;Smorti & Fioretti, 2015). So, narrating can promote emotion regulation, especially if this event is remembered and narrated several times; storytelling enables an individual to provide meaning to life events and, therefore, to reorganize the emotions experienced by increasing individual well-being. ...
Few studies have examined the relationships between emotion regulation, autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative despite evidence that suggests that these constructs are linked. The lack of research is likely ascribed to the specificity of the construct of emotion regulation. The present review examines this area of investigation and indicates two directions for the research: first, emotion regulation is considered to be an effect of autobiographical narratives; thus, individuals engage in the construction of a life story to regulate emotions. Second, emotion regulation is an ability that improves the processes of encoding and retrieving memories. The results of this research are presented, and the potential developments are discussed in terms of the relations among these three constructs.
... However, during the young adult phase, people pay more attention to general health status although they may have difficulties overcoming false beliefs or misrepresentations about their general health that they had previously acquired. Furthermore, studies in developmental psychology pointed out the important changes people experience across emerging adulthood (Arnett, 1997): in this specific phase of life, young adults confront the definition of their identity, increasing their ability to reflect and elaborate on their past life experiences (Fioretti and Smorti, 2015). The current study took an in-depth look at this particular period of life using a cognitive perspective to analyse health-compromising behaviour. ...
Optimistic bias defines the tendency for human beings to underrate risk when it pertains to themselves compared with their view of risk pertaining to other people in the same conditions. The aim of this work is to investigate the optimistic bias in risk perception and health-related behaviours for three specific conditions in a young adult sample: cancer, respiratory disorders and cardiovascular diseases. Young adults showed an optimistic bias related to cancer, and to cardiovascular diseases. Our findings suggest that optimistic bias is linked to specific behavioural patterns, largely widespread in young adults, such as tobacco cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption.
... Starting from the copious scientific literature on the topic, researchers should find a common methodology and a shared procedure which will give the opportunity to replicate the study in other contexts and with patients suffering from different diseases. [32][33][34][35] In 2014 in Rome, a committee of international experts in the field participated in a Consensus Conference on recommendations for the implementation of Narrative Medicine in clinical practice. 36 The committee declared to define Narrative Medicine as a methodology of clinical intervention based on a specific communicative competence. ...
Objective
Since its birth about 30 years ago, Narrative Medicine approach has increased in popularity in the medical context as well as in other disciplines. This paper aims to review Narrative Medicine research studies on patients' and their caregivers' illness experience.
Setting and participants
MEDLINE, Psycinfo, EBSCO Psychological and Behavioural Science, The Cochrane Library and CINAHL databases were searched to identify all the research studies which focused on the Narrative Medicine approach reported in the title, in the abstract and in the keywords the words ‘Narrative Medicine’ or ‘Narrative-based Medicine’. Primary and secondary outcome measures: number of participants, type of disease, race and age of participants, type of study, dependent variables, intervention methods, assessment.
Results
Of the 325 titles screened, we identified 10 research articles fitting the inclusion criteria. Our systematic review showed that research on Narrative Medicine has no common specific methodology: narrative in Medicine is used as an intervention protocol as well as an assessment tool. Patients' characteristics, types of disease and data analysis procedures differ among the screened studies.
Conclusions
Narrative Medicine research in medical practice needs to find clear and specific protocols to deepen the impact of narrative on medical practice and on patients' lives.
... To explore autobiographical memory retrieval, participants were engaged in a timed Memory Fluency Task (MFT) described and employed in previous research (Fioretti & Smorti, 2015;Peterson et al., 2010). The tasks on memory fluency are amply used in literature to study the ease of autobiographical memory generation (Rathbone & Moulin, 2014). ...
Psychoncological studies have recognised a reduced autobiographical memory in cancer patients, furthermore cognitive studies have found that narrative is an effective instrument to re-elaborate memories. However, it is still unclear whether narrating positive versus negative events can have a different impact on autobiographical memory. The present study aims to explore the emotional experience of autobiographical memory before and after having narrated negative or positive events related to the illness. Of 63 oncological patients, 35 were selected for the present study. Participants completed a Memory Fluency Task twice, before and after having selected and narrated a positive (PN group) or a negative (NN group) memory of illness. They also had to attribute one or more emotions to each memory and to the narrative. The number of emotions and the percentage of emotional tones in both narrated and non-narrated memories were assessed. Narrated memories were more emotionally re-elaborated than non-narrated ones. Negative group participants, more than positive group ones, decreased negative emotions and increased complex ones. Authors discuss these results claiming that narrating works as a rehearsal of autobiographical memories in oncological patients and narrating negative memories eases the emotional re-elaboration of illness.
... While across adolescence kids are prone to monitor their identity status and to research their sense of Self (Erikson, 1959;Kroger and Marcia, 2011), emerging adults experience a sort of consolidation of their identity attempting to define who they are and which is their place in the world (Arnett, 2000). Furthermore, across the transition between adolescence and emerging adulthood some important cognitive processes develop (Habermas and Bluck, 2000;Fioretti and Smorti, 2015), improving young adults' ability to reflect on and elaborate past life experiences. ...
Scholars underline the pivotal role of tobacco cigarette smoking in carcinogenesis process for blood tumors. A controversial debate is represented by the diffusion of tobacco use in young cancer survivors that had a previous diagnosis of blood tumor during the childhood. Compared with their peers, scientific evidence highlights that pediatric survivors have more difficult to give-up cigarette smoking. Furthermore, tobacco-smoking is frequently linked with others risk behaviors as drinking or substance abuse. In reviewing the main knowledge on this topic, authors affirm the need for increasing research on blood cancer survivors in order to depict psychological characteristics of pediatric blood cancer survivors. Improving health decision-making skills in young survivors could reduce the risk to adopt un-healthy behaviors and increase psychological wellbeing. Furthermore, authors propose tailored antismoking interventions based on the knowledge of the psychological and cognitive factors that support smoking during the transition toward emerging-adulthood.
... Cognitive processes and neurologic disorders have been studied extensively in several disease contexts (Lucchiari et al., 2010;Oliveri et al., 2012;Smorti and Fioretti, 2015;Fioretti and Smorti, 2015). In the field of coagulation disorders, neuropsychological deficits have not been studied extensively, although they represent a frequent occurrence when the diseases involve the central nervous system (CNS) (Riva et al., 2014b(Riva et al., , 2015a. ...
Coagulation disorders concern a deficiency of the body's functional ability to regulate blood clotting (Peyvandi and Mannucci, 1999). Disorders in thisarea, which may be genetic or acquired, will result in hemostasis-related problems, including different clinical syndromes from easy bleeding or bruising (so-called “hemophilia”) to inappropriate thrombosis (so-called “thrombophilia”; Weisberg, 1996).
Cognitive processes and neurologic disorders have been studied extensively in several disease contexts (Lucchiari et al., 2010; Oliveri et al., 2012; Smorti and Fioretti, 2015; Fioretti and Smorti, 2015). In the field of coagulation disorders, neuropsychological deficits have not been studied extensively, although they represent a frequent occurrence when the diseases involve the central nervous system (CNS) (Riva et al., 2014b, 2015a,b).
In two previous published works of the first author, we studied the neuropsychological deficits in two cohorts of patients affected by rare coagulation disorders with significant impairments, especially in the domain of attention. The two disorders were hemophilia and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP).
... The desire for order and consistency can lead us to build our lives in a narrative form (Cohler 1982). The autobiographical narrative draws on autobiographical memory, which is outsourced through the narrative in a very particular way: the use of language, the narrative format, and the setting radically transform autobiographical memory from the story it was before being told (Smorti 2011;Fioretti and Smorti 2015;Smorti and Fioretti 2015). ...
In health services patient-centred practices are usually built on the needs of patients and are focused as much as possible on an individualized perspective. However these procedures, often, are not based on recent theoretical constructs and empirical evidences deriving from an important area of research and practice such as Narrative Based Medicine. This paper aims to study the role of patient-physician communication and in particular what each partner of this delicate relationship requests from the other, in the light of current research in cognitive studies about autobiographical memory and narrative. In fact, narratives are the result of a co-construction and sharing process between a storyteller and a listener, the patient and the physician, who work together on the anamnesis of the story. This paper stresses the need for a robust and careful connection among medical patient-centred practices and theoretical constructs of narrative. Through an analysis of current evidence on doctor-patient communication and on narrative of illness, a model will be proposed based on recent theories on social development of the autobiographical memory and narrative.
... In a Memory Fluency Task, Fioretti and Smorti (2015a) asked participants to remember as many memories they could in a short period of time (about 3 min). After that, they had to associate to each memory with major emotions chosen from a list. ...
This paper aims to reflect on the relation between autobiographical memory (ME) and autobiographical narrative (NA), examining studies on the effects of narrating on the narrator and showing how studying these relations can make more comprehensible both memory's and narrating's way of working. Studies that address explicitly on ME and NA are scarce and touch this issue indirectly. Authors consider different trends of studies of ME and NA: congruency vs incongruency hypotheses on retrieving, the way of organizing memories according to gist or verbatim format and their role in organizing positive and negative emotional experiences, the social roots of ME and NA, the rules of conversation based on narrating. Analysis of investigations leads the Authors to point out three basic results of their research. Firstly, NA transforms ME because it narrativizes memories according to a narrative format. This means that memories, when are narrated, are transformed in stories (verbal language) and socialised. Secondly, the narrativization process is determined by the act of telling something within a communicative situation. Thus, relational situation of narrating act, by modifying the story, modifies also memories. The Authors propose the RE.NA.ME model (RElation, NArration, MEmory) to understand and study ME and NA. Finally, this study claims that ME and NA refer to two different types of processes having a wide area of overlapping. This is due to common social, developmental and cultural roots that make NA to include part of ME (narrative of memory) and ME to include part of NA (memory of personal events that have been narrated).
... To explore autobiographical memory retrieval, participants were engaged in a timed Memory Fluency Task (MFT) described and employed in previous research (Fioretti & Smorti, 2015;Peterson et al., 2010). The tasks on memory fluency are amply used in literature to study the ease of autobiographical memory generation (Rathbone & Moulin, 2014). ...
Memoria e narrazione autobiografica sono due processi distinti, ma strettamente connessi: soprattutto nel caso di una rottura biografica seria nella vita dell'individuo, come è la malattia oncologica, la narrazione può aiutare la rielaborazione del ricordo, donando ad esso una struttura linguistica e proprietà narrative. Inoltre, evidenze scientifiche sottolineano che i pazienti oncologici hanno una fluidità di memoria ridotta rispetto ai gruppi di controllo, rendendo ancora più importante l'esigenza di rielaborare il vissuto autobiografico. Il presente studio ha l'obiettivo di indagare se la narrazione di eventi positivi e negativi di malattia possa determinare cambiamenti sulla fluidità di tali ricordi autobiografici e sul loro coinvolgimento emotivo. Sessantatré pazienti oncologici hanno completato un test di fluidità di memoria autobiografica prima e dopo aver narrato un ricordo di malattia secondo due condizioni sperimentali: nella prima i partecipanti dovevano focalizzarsi su un ricordo negativo, nella seconda la narrazione riguardava un evento positivo. Le narrazioni di entrambi i gruppi sono state poi analizzate per verificare differenze linguistiche. I risultati evidenziano che narrare un ricordo di malattia ne favorisce l'accessibilità mnestica e la ricchezza emotiva. Inoltre, narrare un evento negativo diminuisce le emozioni negative ed aumenta la compresenza di vissuti positivi e negativi. Le narrazioni negative risultano essere più coerenti e strutturate e volte alla rielaborazione dell'evento passato.
The early exposure to Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), puts children's socio-emotional development in jeopardy and can entail long term deleterious aftermaths on their bio-psycho-social health. Although being able to integrate emotions coherently into personal narratives facilitates the elaboration of the experience and helps well-being, the prerequi-sites for narrative emotion regulation are compromised in adverse situations where the interactions with the caregivers are dysfunctional or dangerous. The current paper will address the developmental issues in narrative emotion regulation encountered by children reared in adverse environments and it will illustrate how scaffolding children to coherently integrate emotional evaluations and further perspectives in their personal narratives might help them to cope with the potentially traumatic aftermaths of ACEs.
This study provides a culturally sensitive quantitative investigation aimed at assessing the post-traumatic symptomatology, post-migratory difficulties, and resilience of 36 Nigerian male asylum seekers hosted in the province of Caserta, South Italy. A survey composed by the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire-Revised (HTQ-R), the Post-Migratory Checklist (PLMD), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) was administered to participants. Descriptive and correlation analyses were made in order to describe the mental health risk and protective factors and understand the relation between these. A linear regression analysis was used to evaluate the influence of post-migratory difficulties and resilience on PTSD. Stratified bivariate analyses were also computed to detect PTSD group and no-PTSD group differences about post-migration difficulties and resilience levels. Regression analysis showed that PMLD numbers significantly increased the risk of having PTSD. No significant effect emerged for the level of resilience. Statistically significant differences between the PTSD group and non-PTSD group in relation to post-migratory difficulties were also found. No differences in the resilience factors emerged. The results offer a glimpse into a specific ethnic group of asylum seekers and its mental health risks and protective factors, taking into consideration the specificities of their past and current life-story experiences. Clinical implications for professionals working in the field of forced migration will be outlined.
Background
The birth of the first child represents a challenging event in the new-parents' life. Although literature highlighted that this period is experienced in a different way by the new mothers and new fathers, little is known about the broader evolutionary challenge that the transition to parenthood entails, also due to the difficulty of starting to think for three.
Objective
The present study aims to explore the new-parents' autobiographical narratives after childbirth, to examine the meaning they construct of this event, and investigate the differences between the experience of new mothers and new fathers.
Methods
Thirteen couples were recruited for the study. After childbirth, an individual open interview was conducted in order to collect information of the personal experience of becoming a parent. All interviews, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, were analyzed by T-Lab software in order to explore similarities and differences between them, using thematic analysis to perform unsupervised clustering of narrations to highlight the emerging themes, and we evaluated the elementary contexts of the narratives. A subsequent in-depth analysis regarding the process of delivery was conducted through the LIWC
Results
Similar but not overlapping themes emerged from narratives. Overall, parents have to face three crucial issues: giving a meaning to the childbirth experience, reorganizing family life, and managing the newborn. However, new-mothers and new-fathers live this period not only with different roles, but also referring to different contexts and seem to house two different spaces: one mental and one physical. Fathers more than mothers highlighted the social aspects of childbirth.
Conclusion
Results highlight that childbirth represents an important turning point, which implies the transition from thinking for two to thinking for three. In this process, the two parents play, narratively, two different roles. Limitations, strengths, and implications are discussed.
Introduction
Despite a growing interest in the field, scarce narrative studies have delved into adolescents’ psychological experiences related to global emergencies caused by infective diseases. The present study aims to investigate adolescents’ narratives on positive and negative experiences related to COVID-19.
Methods
Italian adolescents, 2,758 (females = 74.8%, mean age = 16.64, SD = 1.43), completed two narrative tasks on their most negative and positive experiences during the COVID-19 emergency. Data were analyzed by modeling an analysis of emergent themes.
Results
“Staying home as a limitation of autonomy,” “School as an educational, not relational environment,” the impact of a “new life routine,” and experiencing “anguish and loss” are the four emergent themes for negative experiences. As for positive experiences, the four themes were “Being part of an extraordinary experience,” “Discovering oneself,” “Re-discovering family,” and “Sharing life at a distance.”
Conclusion
Authors discuss the impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ developmental tasks, such as identity processes and autonomy acquisition.
The final transformation of autobiographical memory into autobiographical narrative marks the definitive transformation from a thought for oneself to a thought for others. The story the person tells is therefore deeply influenced by the listener. But not only the story, because once transformed into a narrative this narrative in turn exerts a profound transformation on the memory because the memory of the event will be added by integrating the memory of the narrative of the event. In short, the relationship between memory and narration can be considered to be a process that takes place in two cycles. A first cycle is when memory is narrated. The memory is then externalized in the narrative. In a second cycle, after the memory has been narrated, it becomes an object of internationalization and returns to being a memory. But when a person has to recall this memory, it will no longer be the same, because it has gone through the first cycle in which it was told and the second in which it was internalized. These two cycle process has an enormous impact on the narrator’s awareness. The effort to translate an inner thought into an outer language requires the development of a new awareness because it obliges the narrator to overcome those physical and social constraints that we have mentioned. But with the translation of the narration into memory, the narrator becomes able to look at his/her memories from different points of view precisely because they have been told to a narratee, who, even just by listening to him/her, induces him/her to consider his/her memories with new points of view that have emerged in that specific relational situation.
The purpose of this article was to evaluate the contribution to the social and emotional well-being of rural women of a 3-day songwriting workshop. Six participants wrote songs and performed these locally and at the Women of the World Festival. Guided by narrative inquiry and transformative learning theory, this case study included data from reflective journals, one-on-one interviews, and written songs. Vignettes of the women’s key life moments were constructed and analyzed thematically. Four themes were identified: the importance and influence of personal experiences on songwriting, learning from process and one another, intrapersonal benefits, and interpersonal benefits. The article argued songwriting workshops provide opportunities for participants to reflect on experiences and to transform their worldviews. That is, songs and the songwriting process can help participants to restory their lives and enhance their sense of social and emotional well-being.
Emotions have a life beyond the immediate eliciting situation, as they tend to be shared with others by putting the experience in narrative form. Narrating emotions helps us to express, understand, and share them: the way we tell stories influences how others react to our emotions, and impacts how we cope with emotions ourselves. In Emotion and Narrative, Habermas introduces the forms of oral narratives of personal experiences, and highlights a narrative's capacity to integrate various personal and temporal perspectives. Via theoretical proposals richly illustrated with oral narratives from clinical and non-clinical samples, he demonstrates how the form and variety of perspectives represented in stories strongly, yet unnoticeably, influence the emotional reactions of listeners. For instance, narrators defend themselves against negativity and undesired views of themselves by excluding perspectives from narratives. Habermas shows how parents can help children, and psychotherapists can assist patients, to enrich their narratives with additional perspectives.
Table of contents:
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/32132/toc/9781107032132_toc.pdf
The present paper aims to describe, from a theoretical and application point of view, the contribution of the Narrative Medicine (NM) (Charon, 2006; Greenhalgh, 2003) to the care of elderly patients. With reference to healthcare research, NM is finding a breeding ground for its application with elderly patients. In fact, as Cenci recently stated (2016), NM might provide useful tools in order to better plan the elderly patients' pathway of care, more centered on the person and less on the health condition alone. Among all available tools for collecting and using the illness stories, one is privileged for elderly patients: the Time-Slips intervention (Basting, 2009). This intervention consists of inviting the person to improvise a story on the basis of a stimulus, such as an image or a drawing, in order to activate imagination and creativity, thus shifting the elderly patients' attention from the request to remember past events or facts, which is often the case of some task. Throughout their stories, elderly patients might help healthcare professionals to focus on their current experiences (hic et nunc), past experiences (life stories), and related to their future, so to enrich their clinical chart with much more information about their illness experience, thus facilitating the personalization of their pathway of care. This is worth both in a context of care that finishes in the brief period (hospitalization for a routine checkup), and in a long-term care facility.
Research demonstrated a strong influence of personal narratives on emotions linked to memories. However, few studies considered shared narratives and the role of listener’s behavior, especially in adolescence and emerging adulthood. This paper aims to explore the impact of listening attitude on emotions related to memories in adolescents and emerging adults. A total of 157 participants were asked to choose a memory: in the experimental conditions (Attentive Listening, AL vs. Detached Listening, DL), they narrated it to a listener, in the Control Group, they internally reflected about it. Emotions linked to memory at the first time, to narrative/reflection, and to memory after 15 days were measured, as well as the perception of listener’s behavior. Results showed that participants perceived the differences of the listening, although adolescents perceived less listener’s detached stance. Moreover, among adolescents, positive emotions increased after narrative for both experimental conditions, instead, among emerging adults, only AL condition participants increased their positive emotions. Moreover, adults maintained the positive effects of narrative also after 15 days. Authors discussed the role of an empathic context and the adolescent egocentrism in shared narratives about personal memories.
This paper aims to reflect on the relation between autobiographical memory (ME) and autobiographical narrative (NA), examining studies on the effects of narrating on the narrator and showing how studying these relations can make more comprehensible both memory's and narrating's way of working. Studies that address explicitly on ME and NA are scarce and touch this issue indirectly. Authors consider different trends of studies of ME and NA: congruency vs incongruency hypotheses on retrieving, the way of organizing memories according to gist or verbatim format and their role in organizing positive and negative emotional experiences, the social roots of ME and NA, the rules of conversation based on narrating. Analysis of investigations leads the Authors to point out three basic results of their research. Firstly, NA transforms ME because it narrativizes memories according to a narrative format. This means that memories, when are narrated, are transformed in stories (verbal language) and socialised. Secondly, the narrativization process is determined by the act of telling something within a communicative situation. Thus, relational situation of narrating act, by modifying the story, modifies also memories. The Authors propose the RE.NA.ME model (RElation, NArration, MEmory) to understand and study ME and NA. Finally, this study claims that ME and NA refer to two different types of processes having a wide area of overlapping. This is due to common social, developmental and cultural roots that make NA to include part of ME (narrative of memory) and ME to include part of NA (memory of personal events that have been narrated).
In the life story, autobiographical remembering and self-understanding are combined to create a coherent account of one's past. A gap is demonstrated between developmental research on the story-organization of autobiographical remembering of events in childhood and of life narratives in adulthood. This gap is bridged by substantiating D. P. McAdams's (1985) claim that the life story develops in adolescence. Two manifestations of the life story, life narratives and autobiographical reasoning, are delineated in terms of 4 types of global coherence (temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic). A review of research shows that the cognitive tools necessary for constrtlcting global coherence in a life story and the social-motivational demands to construct a life story develop during adolescence. The authors delineate the implications of the life story framework for other research areas such as coping, attachment, psychotherapeutic process, and the organization of autobiographical memory. DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.748
The purpose of this study was to explore the link between friendship quality and content and structure of autobiographical narratives about friends. Gender differences were investigated as well. A total of 93 Italian undergraduates (51 males and 42 females) were asked to recall memories about their friends. Then, they were requested to write in detail one of their recalled memories. The Network of Relationships Inventory was used to measure the participants' friendship dimensions. The results showed that males and females express their memories differently depending on the degree to which their friendship relationships are positive or negative. Authors interpret these results in terms of a mirror metaphor because linguistic characteristics of narratives about friends reflect qualitative features of their friendships. Memories of the events of our lives are more than a reflection of the various experiences that we have had, and they also are important contributors to our identity and our understanding of our lives. McAdams (2006; McAdams et al., 2006), one of the architects of the life story model of identity, proposes that people integrate memories into a
In this article we argue that social discourse can affect the structure and content of autobiographical memory. In making this argument, we review literature documenting the impact of social factors, including culture, social roles, and social disclosure frequency, on aspects of autobiographical memory. We also describe several social norms that govern social discourse and speculate about the effect that such norms might have on autobiographical memory. In addition, we review the mental structures and processes that might serve to mediate the relation between social discourse and autobiographical memory and offer suggestions about how both social and cognitive factors might be integrated into a common model accounting for autobiographical memory.
A modified version of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self Memory System (SMS) account of autobiographical memory and the self is introduced. Modifications include discussion of a fundamental tension between adaptive correspondence (experience-near sensory-perceptual records of goal activity) and self-coherence (a more abstracted and conceptually-rich long-term store of conceptual and remembered knowledge). This tension is examined in relation to each SMS component - the episodic memory system, long-term self, and the working self. The long-term self, a new aspect of the model, consists of the interaction of the autobiographical knowledge base and the conceptual self. The working self, depending on goal activity status, mediates between episodic memory and the long-term self. Applications of the SMS to personality and clinical psychology are provided through analysis of self-defining memories and adult attachment categories, as well as case histories of traumatic memory. The SMS's role in imagination is examined through a brief discussion of Wordsworth's poetry.
We examined how 67 parent-child dyads talked about 2 emotionally laden events: an injury resulting in emergency room treatment and an individually nominated, positively valenced experience. Group differences were found in parental reminiscing between positive and negative events such that parents asked a higher proportion of open-ended memory questions in conversations about negative experiences and a higher proportion of yes-no questions in conversations about positive experiences. Also, parents focused more on emotion when discussing positive experiences with their children and more on causal explanations during the negative conversations. However, individual parents were consistent across event types in both reminiscing style and content. Finally, parental reminiscing style was correlated with children's recall for both types of events such that parents with an elaborative style had children who reported more new information during the conversations. Implications for children coping with stressful experiences as well as future research are discussed.
In 4 longitudinal studies, the authors explicated how storytelling about relationships biases subsequent impressions in the direction of the story told. In Study 1, storytelling about a relationship conflict vignette biased impressions of blame 2 weeks later, even with memory bias neutralized. Study 2 tracked 2 distinct and variable influences on blame,—storytelling heuristic and memory mediated mechanisms—over a 40-week period. Heuristic but not memory mediated effects depended on story quality. In Study 3, the need for structure moderated use of the storytelling heuristic. In Study 4, storytelling biased impressions of real-life relationship conflicts 8 weeks later. In light of past research indicating that storytelling and idealization characterize satisfied relationships, the present results suggest that the cognitive side effects of storytelling may help cause idealization and satisfaction in relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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 of friends (n = 21 pairs) encountered a computer game. One friend played the game while the other observed; subsequently, both were asked to jointly tell a third party about their experience with the game. The resulting conversations were coded for narrative and other contributions, and discourse elements were examined in rela-tion to pre-and postparticipation perceptions of expertise at the game. Players pro-duced more narrative contributions than observers but only when observers had low self-perceived expertise prior to the game. Observers' narrative contributions were linked to changes in the players' self-perceptions of game expertise from prior to postconversation. These findings show that self-perceptions of expertise both shape, and are shaped by, discourse behavior. The notion that selves are constructed in discourse is not especially new (Davies & Harre, 1990; Harré, 1983; Harrienger, 1998; Van Langenhove & Harré, 1993), but this idea is often pursued in ways that do not connect to the mainstream psycholog-ical literature on the self, whether social psychological or developmental (Thorne, in press). We aim to link these two areas by positing that conversing about experi-ences is a process by which people and their audiences jointly construct beliefs and perceptions about the self (McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, XXXX; Pasupathi, 2001). In this article, we present a small-scale study that examines how discourse is influ-DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 43(1), 55–77 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Reminiscence, a naturally occurring process of recalling personally experienced events from our past, has been investigated primarily from a clinical, gerontological perspective. A total of 268 participants (100 male, 168 female) ranging in age from 17 to 88 years (M age = 40.02, SD = 20.32) completed the Reminiscence Functions Scale (RFS), the Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness (MUNSH), and a single-item question assessing the perceived importance of shared family memories. Results indicated neither age nor gender differences on the total RFS score, indicating that men and women of all ages reminisce equally frequently. However, there were gender and age differences on specific dimensions of reminiscence. Specifically, women scored higher on the RFS factor of Identity (Idn) and lower on Bitterness Revival (BiR). Younger adults tended to score higher on the RFS factors of Boredom Reduction (BoR), BiR, Problem-Solving (PS), and Idn compared to older adults. In contrast, older adults tended to score higher on the RFS factors of Teach/Inform (T/I) and Death Preparation (DP). BoR, BiR, and PS correlated negatively with happiness, whereas Conversation (C) and T/I correlated positively with happiness. Finally, T/I, Intimacy Maintenance (IM), Idn, and C all correlated positively with the measure of the perceived importance of shared family memories. The results replicate earlier work with the RFS and suggest that examining reminiscence from a contextual, lifespan perspective is an important research area.
The authors evaluated the role parent-child relationship quality has on two types of memories, those of parents and those of friends. Participants were 198 Italian university students who recalled memories during 4 separate timed memory-fluency tasks about their preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school and university years. Half were instructed to recall memories involving parents and the remainder memories involving friends. Moreover, parent-child relationships were assessed by the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; W. Furman & D. Buhrmester, 1985) and Adolescents' Report of Parental Monitoring (D. M. Capaldi & G. R. Patterson, 1989). Results showed that men with positive parent-son relationships had more memories of parents and more affectively positive memories of friends, supporting a consistency model positing similarity between parent-child relationships and memories of friends. Women with positive parental relationship quality had more affectively positive memories of parents but for friends, positive relationship quality only predicted positive memories when young. At older ages, especially middle school-aged children, negative parent-daughter relationships predicted more positive memories of friends, supporting a compensatory model. The gender of parent also mattered, with fathers having a more influential role on affect for memories of friends.
Autobiographical memory is a uniquely human system that integrates memories of past experiences into an overarching life narrative. In this review, I extend social-cultural models of autobiographical memory development and present theory and research that demonstrates that (a) autobiographical memory is a gradually developing system across childhood and adolescence that depends on the development of a sense of subjective self as continuous in time; (b) autobiographical memory develops within specific social and cultural contexts that relate to individual, gendered, and cultural differences in adults' autobiographical memories, and, more specifically, (c) mothers who reminisce with their young children in elaborated and evaluative ways have children who develop more detailed, coherent, and evaluative autobiographical memories.
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 interpretive information is defined as information that articulates the desires, emotions, beliefs, and thoughts of the participant and other individuals who experience an event. Developmental research suggests that the latter type of information should become particularly prevalent in later adolescence, while the former should be abundantly evident by age 8. Across 2 studies, we found evidence for strong increases in interpretive information during adolescence, but not before. These increases were evident across different types of events, and across different subtypes of interpretive content. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of autobiographical memory in childhood and adolescence.
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 computer game, and their subsequent memories were also less consistent with their initial conversational recall. Differences in subsequent memory across initial listener condition appeared likely to be mediated by differences in the initial conversations elicited by responsive and unresponsive listeners. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the social shaping of memory and identity.
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 talking to others about
an activity experience is one means by which individuals evaluate how interesting that activity is. In Study 1 college students
completed questionnaires that asked about real life experiences where working on an activity was more interesting because
they worked with others. They described experiences that occurred first in any domain, and then that occurred specifically
in the school domain. Results suggested that the more students talked with others about the activity after it happened the more they reported greater interest in the activity after the conversations. In the school domain, this was
especially true for Latinos and for individuals who scored higher on the Relational Self-Construal scale. Study 2 employed
a lab paradigm to control for the task that individuals talked to others about and to examine whether the nature of listeners’
reactions influenced the speaker’s interest even after the study was ostensibly over. First, replicating Pasupathi and Rich
(2005, ‘Inattentive listening undermines self-verification in personal storytelling’, Journal of Personality 73, pp. 1051–1086)
college students who talked to a distracted friend about a computer game during the lab session reported a significant drop
in interest relative to those who talked to attentive friends, regardless of whether the attentive listeners agreed or disagreed
with participants. Importantly, interest ratings at a 4–6 week follow-up were affected by the perceived responsiveness of
listeners during spontaneous conversational retellings outside the lab, controlling for interest levels at the end of the
lab session. Taken together, results suggest that social interaction plays an important role in regulating activity interest
even beyond the immediate activity experience.
When people retell events, they take different perspectives for different audiences and purposes. In four experiments, we examined the effects of this postevent reorganization of events on memory for the original events. In each experiment, participants read a story, wrote a biased letter about one of the story characters, and later remembered the original story. Participants' letters contained more story details and more elaborations relevant to the purpose of their retellings. More importantly, the letter perspective affected the amount of information recalled (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) and the direction of the errors in recall (Experiments 1 and 3) and recognition (Experiment 2). Selective rehearsal plays an important role in these bias effects: retelling involves selectively retrieving and using story information, with consequent differences in memory. However, biased memory occurred even when the biased letters contained little, if any, specific information (Experiment 4) or contained the same amount and kinds of story information as a neutral control condition (Experiment 3). Biased memory is a consequence of the reorganizing schema guiding the retelling perspective, in addition to the effects of rehearsing specific information in retelling.
The authors describe a model of autobiographical memory in which memories are transitory mental constructions within a self-memory system (SMS). The SMS contains an autobiographical knowledge base and current goals of the working self. Within the SMS, control processes modulate access to the knowledge base by successively shaping cues used to activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories. The relation of the knowledge base to active goals is reciprocal, and the knowledge base "grounds" the goals of the working self. It is shown how this model can be used to draw together a wide range of diverse data from cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical, and neuropsychological autobiographical memory research.
In the life story, autobiographical remembering and self-understanding are combined to create a coherent account of one's past. A gap is demonstrated between developmental research on the story-organization of autobiographical remembering of events in childhood and of life narratives in adulthood. This gap is bridged by substantiating D.P. McAdams's (1985) claim that the life story develops in adolescence. Two manifestations of the life story, life narratives and autobiographical reasoning, are delineated in terms of 4 types of global coherence (temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic). A review of research shows that the cognitive tools necessary for constructing global coherence in a life story and the social-motivational demands to construct a life story develop during adolescence. The authors delineate the implications of the life story framework for other research areas such as coping, attachment, psychotherapeutic process, and the organization of autobiographical memory.
For a test longitudinal test of the model see:
Köber, C., Schmiedek, F., & Habermas, T. (2015). Characterizing lifespan development of three aspects of coherence in life narratives: A cohort-sequential study. Developmental Psychology, 51, 260-275. 10.1037/a0038668
Köber, C., & Habermas, T. (2017). The development of temporal macrostructure in life narratives across the lifespan. Discourse Processes. Online publication. 10.1080/0163853X.2015.1105619
For a more recent review see:
Habermas, T., & Reese, E. (2015). Getting a life takes time: The development of the life story in adolescence and its precursors. Human Development, 58, 172-202. 10.1159/000437245
Previous research conducted in laboratory settings has shown reliable gender differences in autobiographical memory. However, these studies have primarily focused on structural or emotional aspects of memory narratives told to an unfamiliar experimenter. The present study extends this literature by investigating gender differences in social references and interpersonal themes in parent-child narratives about the past. Participants were 17 white, middle-class children and their mothers and fathers, who were interviewed when children were 40 and 70 months of age. Parent-child narratives about shared activities in the past, as well as narratives about parents' own childhood, were examined. Results indicated that when discussing shared events, both parents talked in similar ways across children, although fathers referred to self more than mothers. However both parents referred to their girls more than their boys. Regarding event themes, parents discussed more social events with girls than with boys. Children themselves showed different gendered patterns; girls mentioned self and others, and relationships more than boys did, and children mentioned self and others more often when talking with fathers than with mothers. With respect to narratives about parents' childhood experiences, however, no gender differences were observed, save that parents referred to others more often in retrospective narratives told to girls than to boys. These findings suggest that gendered behaviours are best understood within the specific contexts and purposes of relational interactions.
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 influences of speakers and contexts on conversational reconstructions of past events) and consistency (the influence of a conversational reconstruction on subsequent memory). Operating together, the principles provide an account for how autobiographical memory is socially constructed. In addition, the principles may illuminate how conversations about the past can influence the development of identity in adulthood.
Preface PART 1: TWO NATURAL KINDS 1. Approaching the Literary 2. Two Modes of Thought 3. Possible Castles PART 2: LANGUAGE AND REALITY 4. The Transactional Self 5. The Inspiration of Vygotsky 6. Psychological Reality 7. Nelson Goodman's Worlds 8. Thought and Emotion PART 3: ACTING IN CONSTRUCTED WORLDS 9. The Language of Education 10. Developmental Theory as Culture Afterword Appendix: A Reader's Retelling of "Clay" by James Joyce Notes Credits Index
Review of book: Recovered Memories and False Memories by Martin A. Conway, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 301 pp. Reviewed by C. Brooks Brenneis.
Drawing from the author's psychological research on especially generative (that is, caring and productive) midlife American adults and on a reading of American cultural history and literature, this book identifies a prototypical story of the good life that many Americans employ to make sense of who they are, who they have been, and who they will be in the future. The central theme in this story is redemption - the deliverance from suffering to a positive status or outcome. Empirical research suggests that highly generative American adults are much more likely than their less generative counterparts to construe their lives as tales of redemption. Redemptive life stories promote psychological well-being, physical health, and the adult's commitment to making a positive contribution to society. But stories of redemption are as much cultural texts as they are individual psychological constructions. From the spiritual autobiographies composed by the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to the most recent episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, common scripts for the redemptive self may be found in religious accounts of conversion and atonement, the rags-to-riches stories of the American dream, and canonical cultural narratives about personal liberation, freedom, and recovery. The book examines the psychological and cultural dynamics of redemptive life narratives, including the role of American religion and self-help as sources for the construction of life stories and the broad similarities, as well as the striking differences in how African-American and Euro-American adults construct redemptive stories of the self. For all their psychological and cultural power, redemptive life stories sometimes reveal important limitations in American identity. For example, some versions of the redemptive self underscore the naïve expectation that suffering will always be overcome and the arrogance of seeing one's own life as the living out of a personal manifest destiny.
In 1932, Cambridge University Press published Remembering, by psychologist, Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema which informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, he had subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and had them retell the tale later. Because their background was so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details in the story that they could not understand. Based on observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this construction is in important ways a social act. His concerns about the social psychology of memory and the cultural context of remembering were long neglected but are finding an interested and responsive audience today. Now reissued in paperback, Remembering has a new Introduction by Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Review of book: Recovered Memories and False Memories by Martin A. Conway, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 301 pp. Reviewed by C. Brooks Brenneis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments were conducted to determine the psychometric properties of language in dyadic interactions. Using text-analysis, it was possible to assess the degree to which people coordinate their word use in natural conversations. In Experiments 1 (n = 130) and 2 (n = 32), college students interacted in dyadic conversations in laboratory-based private Internet chat rooms. Experiment 3 analyzed the official transcripts of the Watergate tapes involving the dyadic interactions between President Richard Nixon and his aids H. R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, & John Dean. The results of the three studies offer substantial evidence that individuals in dyadic interactions exhibit linguistic style matching (LSM) on both the conversation level as well as on a turn-by-turn level. Furthermore, LSM is unrelated to ratings of the quality of the interaction by both participants and judges. We propose that a coordination-engagement hypothesis is a better description of linguistic behaviors than the coordination-rapport hypothesis that has been proposed in the nonverbal literature.
For the past decade, an increasing number of studies have demonstrated that when individuals write about emotional experiences, significant physical and mental health improvements follow. The basic paradigm and findings are summarized along with some boundary conditions. Although a reduction in inhibition may contribute to the disclosure phenomenon, changes in basic cognitive and linguistic processes during writing predict better health. Implications for theory and treatment are discussed.
In contrast to laboratory free recall (which emphasizes detailed and accurate remembering), conversational retellings depend upon the speaker's goals, the audience, and the social context more generally. Because memories are frequently retrieved in social contexts, retellings of events are often incomplete or distorted, with consequences for later memory. Selective rehearsal contributes to the memory effects, as does the schema activated during retelling. Retellings can be linked to memory errors observed in domains such as eyewitness testimony and flashbulb memories; in all of these situations, people retell events rather than engage in verbatim remembering.
Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest among theorists and researchers in autobiographical recollections, life stories, and narrative approaches to understanding human behavior and experience. An important development in this context is D. P. McAdams's life story model of identity (1985; see also records
1993-97296-000 and
1996-06098-001), which asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self. The idea that identity is a life story resonates with a number of important themes in developmental, cognitive, personality, and cultural psychology. This article reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self-understanding, autobiographical memory, personality structure and change, and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It is hypothesized that people possess implicit theories regarding the inherent consistency of their attributes, as well as a set of principles concerning the conditions that are likely to promote personal change or stability. The nature of these theories is discussed in the context of a study of beliefs about life-span development. It is then suggested that people use their implicit theories of self to construct their personal histories. This formulation is used to interpret the results of a wide-ranging set of studies of memory of personal attributes. It is concluded that implicit theories of stability and change can lead to biases in recall. The extent and practical implications of these biases are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Much of the history of psychological research on human memory has been a search for accuracy. How does individual recall match to some objective external record of what occurred? Stemming from an Ebbinghaus tradition (1885), this body of work has provided a great many answers to enduring questions about hu-man memory. An equally fundamental issue concerning memory is the search for meaning. Whereas Bartlett (1932) is best remembered for his contributions about the reconstructive nature of memory, less attention has been paid to his quest for the way in which individuals strive to make sense of their worlds. With the increas-ing interest in autobiographical memory over the past 2 decades (e.g., Conway, 1990; Rubin, 1996), the question of meaning making has reemerged (Bruner, 1990; Fivush, 1993a; Neisser, 1982; Nelson, 2003). The search for meaning is es-pecially relevant for memories of stressful and traumatic events. In these cases, the individual must try to make sense of what may seem senseless. In this special issue of Journal of Cognition and Development, we bring together a group of research studies that are grappling with this question developmentally: How do children make meaning of their real-world emotional experiences? And how might this pro-cess differ as a function of age, gender, social context, and culture? We must emphasize that we do not view the search for accuracy and the search for meaning as antagonistic or even mutually exclusive. Accuracy and meaning are
This study investigated gender-specific relationships between autobiographical memory (AM) performance and two social skills, namely empathy and assertiveness. One hundred and fourteen male and female students were tested with a questionnaire on AM and two test scales for empathy and assertiveness. The results revealed positive correlations between AM performance and both social skills, thus underscoring the social function of AM. In addition we found several gender differences. Women showed superior AM performance and also scored higher in empathy, while men scored higher in assertiveness. We propose that AM, empathy, and assertiveness develop in gender-specific mutual dependencies reflecting parental socialization. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
After an initial consideration of psychological experimentation, the author describes a long series of experiments in the fields of perception, imagination, and remembering, using material which approximated that found in everyday life. The work on perceiving utilized chiefly geometrical diagrams; and that on imagination, ink-blots. The results in these two cases revealed the influence of the subjects' attitudes and indicated their tendency to introduce previously learned material. In the experiments on remembering two methods were used, one the method of repeated reproduction by a given subject and the other the method of serial reproduction where the material reproduced by one subject became the learning material for a second subject whose recall constituted the learning material for a third subject, etc. This latter series of experiments showed that proper names and titles are very unstable in recall, that there is a bias toward the concrete, that individualizing aspects of the material (stories) tend to be lost, and that abbreviations and rationalizations occur. Throughout the book emphasis is placed on the social determinants of the manner and matter of recall, a point of view which is supported in the anthropological material cited. "Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Memory for complex everyday events involving vision, hearing, smell, emotion, narrative, and language cannot be understood without considering the properties of the separate systems that process and store each of these forms of information. Using this premise as a starting point, my colleagues and I found that visual memory plays a central role in autobiographical memory: The strength of recollection of an event is predicted best by the vividness of its visual imagery, and a loss of visual memory causes a general amnesia. Examination of autobiographical memories in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggests that the lack of coherence often noted in memories of traumatic events is not due to a lack of coherence either of the memory itself or of the narrative that integrates the memory into the life story. Rather, making the traumatic memory central to the life story correlates positively with increased PTSD symptoms. The basic-systems approach has yielded insights into autobiographical memory's phenomenology, neuropsychology, clinical disorders, and neural basis.
IntroductionThe Characteristics That Distinguish Basic EmotionsDoes Any One Characteristic Distinguish the Basic Emotions?The Value of the Basic Emotions PositionAcknowledgementsReferences
Women's memories of emotional events differing by both valence and intensity were examined for differences in narrative content and structure, as well as subjective memory ratings. Emotional valence was related to the content of the women's narratives, and emotional intensity was related to the subjective ratings of the memories. Negative narratives contained more negative emotion, cognitive processing words, and passive sentences than positive narratives, and positive narratives contained more positive emotion words and were more complex than negative narratives. Intensely negative narratives were the longest and the least complex, and intensely positive narratives were the most coherent. Women rated both intensely negative and intensely positive events, in general, as more frequently talked/thought about, significant, unique, emotional, and vivid than moderately emotional events, and negative events were rated as more emotional than positive narratives. There was little relation between the objective content of the narratives and the women's subjective ratings of their memory experiences. Finally, researcher-defined traumatic events did not differ from other intensely negative events. The results of this study have important implications for narrative research in general, methodological issues such as the validity of text analysis programs and subjective memory ratings, and the quality of traumatic memories. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this longitudinal investigation, we examined the emotional content of 17 white middle-class parents' conversations about past events with their children at 40 and 70 months of age. Parents' use of emotion language did not differ depending upon parent gender, but strong differences were found in parents' use of emotion terms depending upon child gender. Parents' references to emotion were more frequent and varied with daughters than with sons. They also mentioned sadness and disliking more often with daughters than with sons. While no differences were found between girls and boys at 40 months of age, by 70 months, girls mentioned more unique emotion terms than did boys. Children more frequently used emotion terms with their fathers than with their mothers. Age-related changes in parents' and children's use of emotion language were also documented. The role of conversations about the past in the differential emotion socialization of girls and boys is discussed.
The Self-Memory System (SMS) is a conceptual framework that emphasizes the interconnectedness of self and memory. Within this framework memory is viewed as the data base of the self. The self is conceived as a complex set of active goals and associated self-images, collectively referred to as the working self. The relationship between the working self and long-term memory is a reciprocal one in which autobiographical knowledge constrains what the self is, has been, and can be, whereas the working self-modulates access to long-term knowledge. Specific proposals concerning the role of episodic memories and autobiographical knowledge in the SMS, their function in defining the self, the neuroanatomical basis of the system, its development, relation to consciousness, and possible evolutionary history are considered with reference to current and new findings as well as to findings from the study of impaired autobiographical remembering.
Since it was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1962, Lev Vygotsky's Thought and Language has become recognized as a classic foundational work of cognitive science. Its 1962 English translation must certainly be considered one of the most important and influential books ever published by the MIT Press. In this highly original exploration of human mental development, Vygotsky analyzes the relationship between words and consciousness, arguing that speech is social in its origins and that only as children develop does it become internalized verbal thought. In 1986, the MIT Press published a new edition of the original translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, edited by Vygotsky scholar Alex Kozulin, that restored the work's complete text and added materials to help readers better understand Vygotsky's thought. Kozulin also contributed an introductory essay that offered new insight into Vygotsky's life, intellectual milieu, and research methods. This expanded edition offers Vygotsky's text, Kozulin's essay, a subject index, and a new foreword by Kozulin that maps the ever-growing influence of Vygotsky's ideas.
Memories that were easily accessible (i.e., quickly retrieved in a memory-fluency task) of Italian university students were assessed. They were from four periods of life: preschool, elementary school, middle school, and high school/university. Half of the participants were instructed to recall only memories involving parents, and the other half memories involving friends. Across age at the time of remembered events, only memories of friends increased in frequency. For parental memories (but not friend memories), the proportion with negative affect increased over age, especially for males. There were also differences related to whether memories were episodic or generic. It was concluded that memories of different periods of childhood and adolescence can serve as a reflective mirror for developmental changes in parent-child and friendship relationships.
The relation of attachment status to autobiographical memory was assessed in 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds. Of specific interest was the relation between attachment status and the emotional content of parent-child memory conversations. Forty-six mother-child dyads discussed four events designed to elicit positive and negative emotional themes. Both attachment status and gender moderated the emotional content of this memory talk. Mother-daughter dyads with insecurely attached girls engaged in relatively more negative memory talk than mother-daughter dyads with securely attached girls. However, the dyads of secure girls elaborated more often on both positive and negative emotional themes than did the dyads of insecure girls who primarily elaborated on positive themes. The relations between attachment status and emotion talk for mother-son dyads were inconsistent. Findings were discussed in terms of the role of attachment in the social construction of autobiographical memories.
Almost 100 years ago, Freud identified infantile or childhood amnesia, the difficulty that most adults have remembering events from their first years of life. Recent research in cognitive psychology has in fact demonstrated a paucity of verbal memories of early life experiences. Although Freud believed that childhood memories are repressed, modern explanations for childhood amnesia focus instead on cognitive and social developmental advances of the early preschool years. According to the social interaction hypothesis, a narrative sense of self emerges as a result of parent-child conversations about the past. Implications of autobiographical memory research for models of adult attachment and psychotherapy are discussed.
Writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as little as 15 minutes over the course of three days brings about improvements in mental and physical health. This finding has been replicated across age, gender, culture, social class, and personality type. Using a text-analysis computer program, it was discovered that those who benefit maximally from writing tend to use a high number of positive-emotion words, a moderate amount of negative-emotion words, and increase their use of cognitive words over the days of writing. These findings suggest that the formation of a narrative is critical and is an indicator of good mental and physical health. Ongoing studies suggest that writing serves the function of organizing complex emotional experiences. Implications for these findings for psychotherapy are briefly discussed.