Cultural Life Script Research Articles

The reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory and for public events: A comparison across different cueing methods

The reminiscence bump has been found for both autobiographical memories and memories of public events. However, there have been few comparisons of the bump across each type of event. In the current study, therefore, we compared the bump for autobiographical memories versus the bump for memories of public events. We did so between-subjects, through two cueing methods administered within-subjects, the cue word method and the important memories method. For word-cued memories, we found a similar bump from ages 5 to 19 for both types of memories. However, the bump was more pronounced for autobiographical memories. For most important memories, we found a bump from ages 20 to 29 in autobiographical memory, but little discernible age pattern for public events. Rather, specific public events (e.g., the Fall of the Berlin Wall) dominated recall, producing a chronological distribution characterised by spikes in citations according to the years these events occurred. Follow-up analyses suggested that the bump in most important autobiographical memories was a function of the cultural life script. Our findings did not yield support for any of the dominant existing accounts of the bump as underlying the bump in word-cued memories.

There may Not be a Cultural Life Script for Public Events, But there is a Youth Bias: Response to Janssen (2014)

SummaryJanssen asserts that, in a recent paper, we introduced the concept of a cultural life script for public events, in the form of the youth bias. Moreover, he contends that we claimed to have found evidence for such a life script. Correspondingly, he frames his own failure to find evidence for a life script for public events as a rebuttal of our paper. We demonstrate, however, that the youth bias is in fact conceptually and methodologically distinct from life scripts. We conclude that we therefore deserve no credit for the concept of a cultural life script for public events and that Janssen's critique of our paper rests on a misinterpretation of our central concept. Lastly, we argue that, although Janssen may not have found evidence for a life script for public events, his study serves as a confirmation and extension of the youth bias. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Is There a Cultural Life Script for Public Events?

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.

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

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.

Does Everything Happen when you are Young? Introducing the Youth Bias

The reminiscence bump refers to the disproportionate number of individuals' autobiographical memories that date from young adulthood. A similar bump is found in cultural life scripts: When people are asked to nominate and date major transitional events in a typical life course in their culture, a disproportionate number of the events cited are likewise expected to occur in young adulthood. Across two online studies, we tested whether these effects reflect a broader tendency to ascribe most important events to young adulthood. Specifically, we probed, in adult USA samples, for when individuals expect the most important public event of a typical person's life to take place. Although the occurrence of such public events should be randomly distributed across the lifespan, we found a bump in young adulthood. We found this bump in both subjective (Study 1; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the public event that a typical person considers to be the most important of their lifetime) and objective (Study 2; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the objectively most important public event of a typical person's lifetime) conditions. We term this set of cultural expectations the youth bias and discuss its implications for human cognition.

Examining the Life Script of African‐Americans: A Test of the Cultural Life Script

SummaryLife scripts are expectations of the timings of important events in the normative life and are considered to represent an idealized lifecourse. However, whether they always represent an idealized lifecourse has not yet been tested in groups that may experience an increased prevalence of negative emotional events, such as historically unfairly treated minorities. In the present study, 255 African‐American adults completed a test of the life script. To ascertain the existence of a unique, African‐American life script, half nominated events likely to happen in the prospective life of a typical infant and half nominated those events for a prototypical infant of their race. Whereas some novel events specifically relevant to African‐Americans were mentioned in the current study, and a larger proportion of infrequently mentioned events were present compared with previous studies, overall, the findings support the expectations of the life script, as described by Rubin and Berntsen. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Historical Research on Cultural Life Scripts. An Exploration of Opportunities and Future Prospects

People live their lives guided by images and assumptions based on dominant representations of an idealized life that are shared with others in the community. They view the representation of an idealized life as a life script. The cultural life script provides a conceptual link between individual and society. Such cultural life scripts are not fixed but change in the face of new ideas and in response to changing social en economic structures and conditions. For that reason, scientific research based on cultural life scripts is not only a challenge for sociologists, social psychologists and anthropologists, but also for cultural historians, social historians and historical demographers. Seven contributions of the Nijmegen based research group Self, Script and Society have been selected to show the wide variety of research possibilities of cultural life scripts within the domain of historical research and to place cultural life scripts more firmly on the future agenda of historians.

The influence of popular beliefs about childbirth on fertility patterns in mid-twentieth-century Netherlands

«Der Volksglauben uber Geburten als Einflussfaktor auf Fruchtbarkeitsmuster in den Niederlanden Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts». Ever since the Princeton European Fertility Project on the decline of fertility, the question of how (changes in) cultural beliefs have influenced the historical fertility transition has been in the forefront of historical demographic research. Previous research has however mostly assessed the influence of religious denomination and has not examined the impact of wider beliefs or 'cultural life scripts'. On the basis of a folklore questionnaire, this article examines the occurrence, content, and geographical patterning of popular beliefs about childbearing in relation to fertility patterns in 1,022 rural Dutch communities during the nineteen forties. Beliefs in isolation and churching of women existed in almost half of all communities, particularly among Catholic populations, while fear of enchantment of infants was still alive in about a fifth of all municipalities. To be sure, such popular beliefs were rapidly vanishing and remnants were still found in isolated and strongly religious areas. A multivariate analysis shows that in communities where beliefs in churching and witchcraft still existed, birth rates were significantly higher. The study shows the salience of including popular beliefs in studies of fertility behavior and fertility decline. Moreover, it extends the concept of cultural life scripts beyond that of age norms to include prescriptions on social contexts, conducts, and practices surrounding important life passages

Lovely little angels in heaven? The influence of religiously determined cultural life scripts on infant survival in the Netherlands, 1880-1920

The way small infants are cared for, in the past as much as today, is partly determined by cultural scripts which may vary between places and times. In the past some of the cultural scripts involved in infant care were shaped by religious rules and traditions. These scripts could sometimes be life-saving, as was the case with the orthodox Jewish care of infants, or they could be lethal, given the circumstances. In Dutch historiography, the Catholic community has been held responsible for the rather high level of infant mortality during the later parts of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. From this perspective Catholics are either seen as having been averse to the introduction of modern medicine and hygiene, or as followers of a strict clerical campaign of prudishness enforcing the binding of female breasts and prohibiting the bearing of breasts in public. As a result Catholic mothers did not or could not suckle their infants, thereby creating life threatening situations for their little ones. In this study we first explore the likelihood that Catholic mothers were not breastfeeding their infants; secondly, we test the role of religion as the most important exogenous determinant of infant mortality in the period 1880-1920.

The cultural life script as cognitive schema: How the life script shapes memory for fictional life stories

We tested, across three studies, the effect of the cultural life script on memory and its phenomenological properties. We focused in particular on the mnemonic effects of both schema-consistency and frequency in the life script. In addition to testing recognition (in Study 1) and recall (in Studies 2 and 3), we also collected remember/know judgements for remembered events (in Studies 1 and 2) and memory for their emotional valence (in Study 2). Our primary finding was that, across all three studies, higher-frequency events were more memorable than lower-frequency events, as measured through either recognition or recall. We also attained three additional, complementary effects: First, schema-inconsistent events received remember ratings more often than schema-consistent events (in Study 2, with a trend to this effect in Study 1); second, where an event's emotional valence was inconsistent with the life script, memory for its valence was reconstructed to fit the script (in Study 2); and, third, intrusions in recall were disproportionately for life script events (in Study 3), although that was not the case in recognition (in Study 1). We conclude that the life script serves as a cognitive schema in how it shapes memory and its phenomenological properties.

The future is bright and predictable: The development of prospective life stories across childhood and adolescence.

When do children develop the ability to imagine their future lives in terms of a coherent prospective life story? We investigated whether this ability develops in parallel with the ability to construct a life story for the past and narratives about single autobiographical events in the past and future. Four groups of school children aged 9 to 15 years imagined their future lives and produced past life stories, as well as a cultural life script (i.e., culturally shared assumptions as to the order and timing of important life events). They also produced narratives about single autobiographical events to take place in the near future or recent past. Past and prospective life story coherences developed in parallel across ages, that is, older children told more coherent life stories than younger children, irrespective of temporal direction. However, children produced more coherent stories about single events in the past than in the future. Across age groups, prospective life stories were shorter, contained more life script events and were more positive than past life stories. Life script normativity increased with age and predicted the coherence of prospective, but not of past, life stories. The findings indicate that the ability to tell coherent life stories for the past and future develops in parallel and relies on similar processes. Life script abilities might be a major factor in the development of past and prospective life story coherences but not for the development of single event story coherences.

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

When asked to recall memories from their personal lives in response to word cues, adults older than 40 years report a significantly greater amount of memories from the time when they were 15–30 years old. This phenomenon is called the reminiscence bump. Cultural life story theory is a cultural explanation of the reminiscence bump. According to this account, the reminiscence bump is heavily influenced by the cultural life script – that is, shared expectations about the order and timing of life events in an ordinary life course. Life scripts locate a high proportion of major transitional life events in the second and third decades of life. The main purpose of this article was to review the empirical evidence and validity for the cultural life script theory. First, I describe the reminiscence bump and briefly mention the theories that attempt to explain why it occurs. Second, I describe the cultural life script theory and how the theory is related to autobiographical memories via life story events. Third, I describe the methodology that has been used to test the cultural life script theory. Finally, I provide a reanalysis of seven studies, based on the cultural life script theory conducted in four countries: Denmark, the USA, Turkey, and the Netherlands. As a part of this reanalysis, I examine the degree to which cultural life scripts guide recall of autobiographical memories by comparing the temporal distribution of life events obtained from the cultural life script (the cultural life script bump) and personal life story events (the reminiscence bump). Results of this reanalysis show that all life scripts across cultures have a lifespan distribution resembling the reminiscence bump. Furthermore, the distribution of the events of the life script generated by a group of old Danes in one of the studies resembles the distribution of their own life story events, suggesting that they used the information contained in the life script to retrieve personal memories.

Personal life stories: Common deviations from the cultural life script

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.

The time travelling self: Comparing self and other in narratives of past and future events

Mental time travel research emphasizes the connection between past and future thinking, whereas autobiographical memory research emphasizes the interrelationship of self and memory. This study explored the relationship between self and memory when thinking about both past and future events. Participants reported events from the near and distant past and future, for themselves, a close friend, or an acquaintance. Past events were rated higher in phenomenological quality than future events, and near self events were rated higher in quality than those about friends. Although future events were more positive than past events, only valence ratings for self and close friend showed a linear increase in positivity from distant past to future. Content analysis showed that this increase in positivity could not be ascribed to choosing events from the cultural life script. These findings provide evidence for the role of personal goals in imagining the future.

The cultural life script of Qatar and across cultures: Effects of gender and religion

Cultural life scripts (CLS) are culturally shared cognitive representations of the expected order and timing of important life events in a prototypical life. Through three studies data from Qatar were analysed and compared to previously collected data from Denmark, Turkey, and the US. In Study 1 we examined the CLS of Qatar in order to determine whether the clear segregation of men and women as well as the centrality of religion in this society would influence the CLS. A total of 55 Qatari undergraduates completed the standard CLS task, imaging a Qatari infant of their own as well as the opposite gender. In Study 2 important personal life story events were collected from 83 Qatari undergraduates in order to explore the overlap between remembered life events and CLS events. Study 3 was a reanalysis of CLS data from Denmark, Turkey, and the US. There was a considerable overlap of events across cultures, but we also found that the Qatari CLS showed more gender differences and contained more religious and positive events compared to the other three countries.

Life scripts across age groups: A comparison of adolescents, young adults, and older adults

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate cultural life scripts across three age groups. Adolescents, young adults, and older adults were asked to list the seven most important events that a typical newborn would experience in a lifetime. They also provided estimates of emotional valence and age for the life script events they listed. Results showed that there was substantial overlap in the script events listed by three groups. The adolescent and young adult scripts were more similar to each other than they were to the older adult script. Older adult scripts also differed from that of the other two groups in that they (a) were more typical, and (b) showed a stronger bump for positive events corresponding to young adulthood. The bump for positive script events emerged for events not experienced by the participants as well.

Identity Formation and Autobiographical Memory: Two Interrelated Concepts of Development

� Abstract—The aim of the present paper is to investigate the interdependency among ego-identity status, autobiographical memory and cultural life story schema. The study shows considerable differences between autobiographical memory characteristics and family which is typical for participants (adolescents, M age years = 17.84, SD = 1.18, N = 58), with different ego-identity statuses. Participants with diffused ego-identity status recalled fewer autobiographical memories. Additionally, this group of participants recalled fewer events from their parents' life. Participants with moratorium ego-identity status dated their first recollections to a later age than others, and recalled fewer memories relating to their childhood. Participants with achieved identity status recalled more self-defining memories and events from their parents' life. They used more functions from the autobiographical memory. There weren't any significant differences between the foreclosed identity status group and the others. These findings support the idea of a bidirectional relation between culture, memory and self. Keywords—Autobiographical memory, autobiographical narrative, cultural life script, ego-identity I. INTRODUCTION

Interruptions to Cultural Life Scripts

Age serves as a basis for assigning status and regulating social interaction across all societies. Members of the cultural group socialize new members into the rules and roles that are associated with different chronological ages and age categories. These socially constructed age norms result in cultural life scripts. The events expected to occur reflect a positive bias, resulting in an idealized life script. Serious illnesses serve as an interruption to the idealized life script creating a tension between this ideal and the real of the lived experience. This study explores the nature of interrupted life narratives by analyzing comments related to aging made by people diagnosed with cancer and their spousal caregivers. Their comments reveal the ways in which aging expectations, chronological age, and health are intertwined. Because a serious illness is typically expected in very old age, when it occurs at a younger age both the individual with cancer and his or her caregiver struggle to make sense of this interruption to their anticipated life narratives. Poor health status leads to age relativism; that is, perceptions that the individual is not acting his or her chronological age. For married couples, adapting to illness as a couple operates in similar ways as it does for the individual. Their identity as a couple is challenged by the illness, and they struggle to redefine their relationship to each other and to their social world.

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

Disturbed identity is one of the defining characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder manifested in a broad spectrum of dysfunctions related to the self, including disturbances in meaning-generating self-narratives. Autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that provide crucial building-blocks in our construction of a life-story, self-concept, and a meaning-generating narrative identity. The cultural life script represents culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture. It is used to organize one's autobiographical memories. Here, 17 BPD-patients, 14 OCD-patients, and 23 non-clinical controls generated three important autobiographical memories and their conceptions of the cultural life script. BPD-patients reported substantially more negative memories, fewer of their memories were of prototypical life script events, their memory narratives were less coherent and more disoriented, and the overall typicality of their life scripts was lower as compared with the other two groups.

Life story chapters, specific memories and the reminiscence bump

Theories of autobiographical memory posit that extended time periods (here termed chapters) and memories are organised hierarchically. If chapters organise memories and guide their recall, then chapters and memories should show similar temporal distributions over the life course. Previous research demonstrates that positive but not negative memories show a reminiscence bump and that memories cluster at the beginning of extended time periods. The current study tested the hypotheses that (1) ages marking the beginning of positive but not negative chapters produce a bump, and that (2) specific memories are over-represented at the beginning of chapters. Potential connections between chapters and the cultural life script are also examined. Adult participants first divided their life story into chapters and identified their most positive and most negative chapter. They then recalled a specific memory from both their most positive and most negative chapter. As predicted, the beginning age of positive but not negative chapters produced a bump and specific memories tended to cluster at chapter beginnings. The results support the idea that chapters guide the search for specific memories and that the cultural life script contributes to the search process.