Life Happens When You Are Young: Reminiscence Bump in Cultural Life Scripts Regardless of Number of Events Elicited

Abstract

Cultural life scripts are representations of a prototypical life course within a culture, consisting of a shared understanding of culturally important transitional events and their timing. Cultural life scripts contain a “bump” for events in adolescence and early adulthood, mirroring the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory. However, the bump in the cultural life script might be due to the typical methodology used, namely generating only the seven most important events in a prototypical life, thus prioritizing early events. Here, we tested whether expanding the number of events would level the bump in the cultural life script. Four groups of 100 participants each generated a cultural life script with four, seven, 15 or 25 events. Across groups, there was a clear bump in adolescence and early adulthood, showing that the bump in cultural life scripts is highly robust and not an artefact of methodology.