The longitudinal influence of parenting and parents' traces on narrative identity in young adulthood.

This longitudinal follow-up studied continued effects of parental influences on narrative identity in young adulthood. Decades of research have shown the importance of parental shared reminiscing and positive parenting for the development of children's and youths' autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Yet, research on long-term influences of parenting on narrative indices in adulthood is scarce, even though parents' traces remain a part of narrative identity throughout the life span (Köber & Habermas, 2018). Therefore, in this study, 118 individuals (at time 1: Mage = 17.3 years, SD = .77, 73% female, 82% White) reported at age 17 on their perceived positive parenting. As emerging and young adults, as part of follow-ups at ages 26 and again at 32, participants provided life story interviews. First, it was tested whether earlier positive parenting longitudinally predicted parents' traces in later life stories. Second, we studied the joint long-term prediction of parenting and parents' traces to several narrative features of these young adults' life stories, including emotional tone, coherent positive resolution, and narrative complexity. Results replicated prior research on parents' traces and showed moreover that perceived parenting shape offspring's narrative identity well into young adulthood. These long-term findings are consistent with the notion that narrative identity in adulthood is rooted in the family, and continuously shaped by experiences with parents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Autobiographical Meaning Making Protects the Sense of Self-Continuity Past Forced Migration.

Forced migration changes people's lives and their sense of self-continuity fundamentally. One memory-based mechanism to protect the sense of self-continuity and psychological well-being is autobiographical meaning making, enabling individuals to explain change in personality and life by connecting personal experiences and other distant parts of life to the self and its development. Aiming to replicate and extend prior research, the current study investigated whether autobiographical meaning making has the potential to support the sense of self-continuity in refugees. We therefore collected life narratives from 31 refugees that were coded for autobiographical reasoning, self-event connections, and global narrative coherence. In line with prior research, results suggest that autobiographical meaning making relates to a higher sense of self-continuity and less psychological distress. Yet, if refugees experienced many continuing postdisplacement stressors in addition to their forced displacement, autobiographical meaning making was associated with higher self-discontinuity and greater psychological distress, especially with trauma-related symptoms such as memory intrusion and hyperarousal. Altogether, results indicate that autobiographical meaning making helps to compensate the effects of extreme biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity, as long as the stress caused by the biographical change is not overwhelming or too protracted.

Explaining change in content of life narratives over time.

Aiming to further the understanding of stability and change of the life story, we investigated memory age and valence of life events as possible factors influencing life narrative stability. Additionally, we examined personal memories that 145 participants ranging in age from 16 to 69 years had told four years earlier but omitted from their current life narratives. In particular, we tested the accessibility of these omitted memories and explored the reasons for omission from life narratives. Younger age of memories but not valence predicted omission. Further, omitted memories could be remembered when aided with memory prompts. Both remembering and including life events in the current life narrative appeared to be related to personal relevance at the time of telling, supporting prior research that emphasises the role of motivation, ongoing goals, and concerns for the construction of personal narratives.

A meta-analytic examination of maternal reminiscing style: Elaboration, gender, and children's cognitive development.

Sociocultural theories of development privilege the role of parent-child conversation as a critical interpersonal context for cognitive and socioemotional development. Research on maternal reminiscing suggests that mothers differ on the elaborative nature of their reminiscing style. Individual differences in maternal elaborative style are thought to contribute to children's cognitive development in at least 3 critical areas: (a) memory; (b) language; and (c) theory of mind (ToM). Further, mothers are thought to be more elaborative with daughters than sons. After more than 30 years of research on maternal reminiscing, there has yet to be a quantitative summary of the literature. As such, we conducted a series of meta-analyses to summarize the effect sizes present in the literature, focusing on the 3 domains listed above as well as the potential impact of child gender on maternal elaborative style. The mean age range for children was set to include 30-60 months; roughly the developmental onset of autobiographical memory. Given these criteria, k = 38 studies (51 independent samples) with N = 2,492 mother-child dyads were included in this meta-analysis. Results indicated that maternal elaborative style did not differ by child gender. However, elaboration was positively associated with child memory, child language ability, and ToM. Ethnicity significantly moderated maternal elaborations by child gender, such that samples with majority non-Caucasian mothers elaborated more with daughters than sons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A positive Living-in-History effect: the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Research has shown that individuals use a combination of cultural life script events and historical events when dating personal memories, providing evidence for a cultural life script effect and Living-in-History (LiH) effect on the temporal organisation of autobiographical memory. Yet, in contrast to life script events, the LiH effect has only been found for negative events such as war or natural disasters. Therefore, this study tested whether a positive historical event, here the fall of the Berlin Fall, also elicits a LiH effect and whether this effect would differ due to the subsequent changes in life. Comparing West and East Germans, we found a moderate LiH effect for the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germans but not in West Germans. Yet, the LiH effect in East Germans did not relate to the perceived change in life or the valence of the historical event. Additionally, this study replicated the finding that life script events serve as temporal landmarks when navigating through one's autobiographical timeline.