Cultural life script theory and the reminiscence bump: A reanalysis of seven studies across cultures

Probing life scripts for important life events in a multi-ethnic society

SummaryThe reminiscence bump is the higher prevalence of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood. The reminiscence bump has also been found in the memory for public events, which could, as recently has been suggested, be explained by cultural life scripts. Life scripts are culturally shared knowledge about the order and timing of life events in an idealized life course. They are examined by categorizing which events are expected to occur in a prototypical person's life and when these events are supposed to occur. The present study found, however, no support for cultural life scripts as an explanation for the reminiscence bump in the memory for public events. Most public events were expected to occur before the reminiscence bump period. Although there was some agreement about which public events are likely to happen in a prototypical person's life, there was little agreement about when these events are supposed to occur. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Autobiographical memories are typically thought of as people's memories for personal life events. Yet, life stories do not exist in isolation; they are shaped by the shared social norms and prescriptions of one's culture as to the order and timing of important transitional events: a cultural life script. An individual's knowledge of their culture's standard life script does not arise from compiled individual life events, but is learned detached from particular personal experiences. When probed, many people's most important personal life events do not match the cultural life script exactly. We note that even some commonly experienced life story events do not match the life script and that their qualitative differences have not been systematically investigated. Why are some common life story events in the cultural life script whereas others are not? To begin exploring these differences, we examined what distinguishes two main types of commonly nominated events within people's personal life stories: events that do overlap with what they conceive of as their culture's life script and events that do not. We offer a secondary data analysis of the Rubin, Berntsen, and Hutson's (2009) life story data, exploring American life story data using the proposed categories of events, the various ratings the authors previously collected, and unused demographic information of interest. Given that this is simply a first step in characterizing the nature of common important life story events, we also provide some speculation for future avenues of investigation and the broader relevance of this work.

Identity-related autobiographical memories and cultural life scripts in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder

Reminiscence bump (RB) is the enhanced recollection of autobiographical memories (AMs) from adolescence and young adulthood (approximately 10–30 years of age) by people over 30 years. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain the bump, the most prominent of which are the narrative/identity account, the cultural life script (CLS) account, and the life story account. This doctoral project examined the relative plausibility of those accounts on senior Pakistani nationals and young Malaysian participants. According to the narrative/identity account, the events occurring during adolescence and early adulthood are vital to the development of an individual’s adult identity. Experiences acquired during this period are integrated into an individual’s lifelong narratives, therefore, better recalled later in life. The CLS account emerged to explain some novel findings that there is a bump for positive events but no bump for negative events, which the narrative/identity account could not readily explain. According to this account, every society holds common expectations about the order and timing of important life events that are highly positive but not for those that are highly negative. As society expects that many highly positive events should occur during adolescence and young adulthood, the recollection of AMs is influenced by this expectation, hence, forming the RB. The life story account, which combined the core concepts of the other accounts, suggests that events occurring during adolescence and early adulthood are more novel, distinctive, important, self-relevant, positive, and transitional, therefore, better recalled later in life. Three studies were designed to test the objectives; two studies on Pakistani older adults and one study on Malaysian young adults. Overall, it was concluded that the narrative/identity account seemed to better explain the results of Study 1. RB for both positive and negative life experiences, as observed in Study 2, challenged the core ideas of CLS account. While examining the relative plausibility of the three accounts in Study 3, the narrative/identity account appeared to be a better explanation of the bump than the CLS account and the life story account. However, as the CLS account and the life story account have also received partial support in Study 3, hence, it is suggested that all the three accounts have merits in explaining the bump. The findings can be used to design individualized therapeutic programs for depression, PTSD, autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, alcohol dependence syndrome, memory disorders, and schizophrenia.

In this study, we examined cultural life scripts in two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The cultural life script is semantic knowledge about culturally shared expectations regarding the order and timing of important life events during an idealised life course. For many decades, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one country: Czechoslovakia. After a regime change in 1989 and the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, their two cultures have been evolving and changing independently from one another, making these countries interesting for examining life scripts. We found that the cultural life scripts provided by Slovak and Czech participants shared 25 event categories, representing 89.3% of event categories in the Czech sample and 80.6% of event categories in the Slovak sample (including the category Other). However, participants also reported unique event categories to each culture (10.7% of unique event categories in the Czech sample and 19.4% in the Slovak sample), reflecting the specific cultural characteristics of these two separate countries. Reported events were listed in the same order they are expected to happen during the life span, were mostly positive, and showed a lifespan distribution consistent with the reminiscence bump. Participants showed higher agreement in the age estimates of positive events, compared to neutral and negative ones. Events were mostly social, in contrast to biological events. All these findings are consistent with the life script literature.

Cultural life scripts refer to the shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture or subculture. Immigration is a significant transition that often implies a change in cultural context, which may change people's views about a normative life. However, research on cultural life scripts in the context of immigration has been limited. We addressed this gap by examining the cultural life scripts of 33 young second-generation Turkish immigrants and 33 young Danes in Denmark, pairwise-matched on age, gender, and education, along with their subjective well-being and acculturation level. Both groups reported mostly positive life script events expected to occur in early adulthood and their individual life scripts generally had a positive outlook. In contrast to earlier studies, we found no evidence of lower subjective well-being or greater normativity of the cultural life script in the immigrant group. Moreover, the acculturation level of the Turkish group correlated positively with their subjective well-being, suggesting that adapting at least to some degree to the daily life of the host country is associated with well-being of second-generation immigrants.

The cultural life scripts are shared semantic knowledge of the expected life course in a given culture characterised by a bump for positive events in the second and third life decades, but none for negative events [Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2004). Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 32, 427-442. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195836]. We investigated the stability of Nigerian young adults' life scripts and life stories across religion and gender. One-hundred-and-seventy-four participants completed the life script and life story tasks, and the revised religious orientation scale. We found that the life scripts and life stories consisted of mainly positive events with a reminiscence bump located in the 10s and 20s; however, we also found a small bump for negative events. There was a high mention rate of religion-specific events in both the life scripts and life stories of participants across religion and gender. The level of religiosity had effects on the importance ratings of the life scripts and life stories. In sum, despite minor variations, the life scripts and life stories were consistent across religion and gender.

Cultural life scripts organize culturally shared expectations regarding order and timing of life events during a prototypical life course. Prior research sustained that the semantic knowledge of cultural life scripts is relatively stable across decades and between age groups, even though this notion had only been investigated in relatively stable societies, and in mostly female samples. Therefore, this study obtained the newborn and elderly Emirati life scripts in an equal number of younger and older women and men. As expected, the Emirati newborn life script displays current Emirati lifestyle and customs. The elderly life script mirrors the traditional Emirati lifestyle; however, much less in the younger than in the older participants. Furthermore, we found differences in the temporal distribution and emotional valence of events between newborn and elderly life scripts. This study implies that cultural life scripts change with cultural transformation, but that adapting life script knowledge may necessitate experience.

The reminiscence bump is a well-documented autobiographical memory phenomenon characterized by middle-aged and older adults reporting a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence and early adulthood (Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). It is typically assessed through either cue word or important memory techniques. The Life History Mail Survey (LHMS) in the Health and Retirement Study affords unique data to investigate this phenomenon among a representative US sample of older adults. At the beginning of the LHMS, participants (N=3088, M age=70, range 50-107) completed a calendar noting the important things that happened to them in seven life decades, starting with ages 0-9 and ending by ages 70-79 (or their actual age). For each life period, we coded the number of events respondents reported. We observed significantly more memories reported for the age decade 20-29, compared with other life periods (80% vs 47-66%). Our results are consistent with previous findings in the autobiographical memory literature. Follow-up analyses evaluated existing theoretical accounts of the bump, such as cultural life script theory which suggests that life events occur in a specific order and are characterized by a prototypical life course. For example, we determined whether respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics, such as age cohort, gender, marital and educational histories (information available in LHMS) influenced the size and temporal location of the reminiscence bump. We also analyzed the content of reported important life events to investigate whether types of events included in each decade of life are consistent with the cultural life script account of the phenomenon.

Research has shown that identity in adolescence takes the shape of a coherent life story that integrates the past with the present self and provides meaning and purpose in the person's life. One stable feature of narrative identity identified in adults is emotional tone. Here, the development of emotional tone in life stories was investigated across childhood and adolescence. A total of 142 adolescents aged 10 to 14years wrote about their past weekend, their past and future life stories and generated a cultural life script. Across age groups, adolescents told past life stories that were overall mixed (both positive and negative) or moderately positive in emotional tone, and future life stories that were positive or highly positive. In relation to life story development, we replicated findings on age-related development of life story coherence in both past and future life stories in 10-14-year-olds. Lastly, the study highlights the link between life story coherence and cultural life script abilities. Cultural life script typicality was linked to life story coherence for both past and future life stories and across all age groups, and a majority of events mentioned in future life stories overlapped with cultural life script events.

Autobiographical reasoning is closely related to the development of normative ideas about life as measured by the cultural life script. The acquisition of a life script is an important prerequisite for autobiographical reasoning because children learn through the life script which events are expected to go into their life story, and when to expect certain events in life. Thus, the cultural life script not only helps organize autobiographical memories, but it also guides expectations for our future life stories. Therefore, the cultural life script should be considered the overarching principle of organizing autobiographical memories across the lifespan.

When older adults are asked to recall personal events that occurred at any point in their lives, memories from late adolescence and early adulthood are overrepresented, forming a reminiscence bump. Thematic analyses have indicated that the bump memories that emerge in response to such prompts frequently represent milestone events that are consistent with cultural life scripts. This study employed a novel method that explicitly targeted only memories of events occurring during late adolescence and early adulthood, allowing in-depth exploration of the contents and potential organising principles associated with these memories. Older adults (N = 197) completed an on-line survey in which they described 7 memories of personal events that had occurred at any time between the ages of 19 and 34. Content analyses indicated that memories frequently portrayed landmark events, consistent with cultural life script theory. After completing the memory task, participants who had been married or had their first child between ages 19 and 34 provided their age at the time of these events. Temporal distributions of memory ages centred on participants’ ages at the time of their first marriage or childbirth also were consistent with the life script explanation for the reminiscence bump.

Autobiographical remembering develops in childhood. A late-developing cognitive tool is the cultural life script. The present study aimed at exploring the beginnings of its acquisition and at replicating its acquisition in early adolescence in a Southern-European culture. Study 1 established the Portuguese normative adult cultural life script, against which the cultural life scripts provided by 6- to 16-year-olds could be compared in Study 2. The acquisition of the cultural life script in early to mid-adolescence was confirmed with multiple indicators. In 6- to 8-year olds, life script knowledge was only rudimentary. However, children still agreed highly on a set of mostly non-normative life events which they named as typical for a normal life that are not part of the adult life script. We conclude that children’s non-normative concept of life is less helpful for remembering, narrating, and planning a life than is the adult cultural life script with normative events.

Life Script Events and Autobiographical Memories of Important Life Story Events in Mexico, Greenland, China, and Denmark