Age and gender effects in the cultural life script of Japanese adults

Abstract

Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the timing and order of life events in an idealised life course. To examine whether cultural life scripts are semantic knowledge about expectations of life events or personal memories of those life events, Japanese young, middle-aged and older adults imagined an ordinary infant with the same gender and cultural background as themselves and named the seven most important events that are likely to take place in the life of this prototypical child. The content and temporal distributions of the reported events were examined for age and gender effects. As expected, there were no differences in the content and temporal distribution of the life script events, suggesting that life scripts are indeed semantic knowledge. The results were also compared to the results of a previous study with Dutch participants. Only differences in the content of the life scripts were found between the two cultures.