Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self: Social and Cultural Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory 2018045817, 2018047953, 9780429029158, 9781138037236, 9781138037243

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“Robyn Fivush is the world’s leading authority on autobiographical memory development. Her landmark book examines how parent-child reminiscing and family storytelling shape personal identity using multiple levels of analysis – individual, social, family, cultural, and collective. Fivush convincingly shows how qualities of personal and family narratives are linked to healthy day-to-day functioning and general well-being, and these insights increase the book’s broad practical appeal. The history of autobiographical memory research will portray Fivush as a major innovator and creator; this elegant, insightful and accessible book cements her legacy and will provide inspiration to new generations of scholars.” David B. Pillemer, Dr. Samuel E. Paul Professor of Developmental Psychology University of New Hampshire “In this authoritative and engaging volume, Robyn Fivush describes a life’s work dedicated to understanding the psychological dynamics that lie at the intersection of memory, language, culture, and the self.  Fivush blends lively interview accounts with a wide-ranging discussion of theory and research to tell the fascinating story of how we human beings learn to tell stories about ourselves, and about the worlds we inhabit.” Dan P. McAdams, The Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University, and author of The Art and Science of Personality Development “There are no easy-to-manage participant self-reports at the heart of this fascinating ten-year effort by the leading scholar of the development of children’s autobiographical narratives.  Stories in their full personal, family, and cultural complexity are analyzed in sophisticated and subtle ways to understand autobiographical memory and the concepts of self it contains.  The book bridges developmental, cognitive, and social psychology with a style and sophistication refined by forty years of wonder about narrative and how it affects everyday behavior.” David C. Rubin, Juanita M. Kreps Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University “In this volume, Professor Fivush illustrates the power of stories and the importance of listening to them and telling and retelling them. She weaves the tale of more than three decades of research into how children, dyads, and families share the stories of their lives, and how the stories in turn shape the people who tell them. The book is skillfully written, interweaving personal narratives with scholarly interpretations. Those who take a scientific perspective on the subject – and those who delve into autobiography because of their love of stories – will be equally compelled by this volume; it speaks in science, and it speaks in what it means to be human.” Patricia Bauer, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology, Emory University “This book is a beautifully told story about family stories and the effect they have on us all. It offers a panoramic landscape of the family story literature, stitching together the research on autobiographical memory and narrative across development in a theoretically rich and integrative way. The personal narratives throughout enliven the findings and ground the theory.  Robyn Fivush’s wisdom shines through on every page and will inspire a new generation of researchers to study this fascinating field.” Professor Elaine Reese, Psychology Department, University of Otago

Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self

Stories are central to our world. We form our families, our communities, and our nations through stories. It is through stories of our everyday experiences that each of us constructs an autobiographical self, a narrative identity, that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives. In this volume, Robyn Fivush describes how this deeply personal autobiographical self is socially and culturally constructed. Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self demonstrates that, through participating in family reminiscing, in which adults help children learn the forms and functions of talking about the past, young children come to understand and evaluate their experiences, and create a sense of self defined through individual and family stories that provide an anchor for understanding self, others, and the world. Fivush draws on three decades of research, from her own lab and from others, to demonstrate the critical role that family stories and family storytelling play in child development and outcome. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in psychology, human development, and family studies. Robyn Fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University. She has conducted foundational research on the sociocultural construction of autobiographical memory.

Essays in Developmental Psychology North American Editors: Henry Wellman University of Michigan at Ann Arbor UK Editors: Claire Hughes University of Cambridge Michelle Ellefson University of Cambridge

Essays in Developmental Psychology is designed to meet the need for rapid publication of brief volumes in developmental psychology. The series defines developmental psychology in its broadest terms and covers such topics as social development, cognitive development, developmental neuropsychology and neuro­science, language development, learning difficulties, developmental psychopathology and applied issues. Each volume in the series will make a conceptual contribution to the topic by reviewing and synthesizing the existing research literature, by advancing theory in the area, or by some combination of these missions. The principal aim is that authors will provide an overview of their own highly successful research program in an area. It is also expected that volumes will, to some extent, include an assessment of current knowledge and identification of possible future trends in research. Each book will be a self-­ contained unit supplying the advanced reader with a well-­structured review of the work described and evaluated. Published

Garton: Social Interaction and the Development of Language and Cognition Bryant & Goswami: Phonological Skills and Learning to Read Collins & Goodnow: Development According to Parents For updated information about published and forthcoming titles in the Essays in Developmental Psychology series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/SE0532

Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self Social and Cultural Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory

Robyn Fivush

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Robyn Fivush to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Names: Fivush, Robyn, author. Title: Family narratives and the development of an autobiographical self : social and cultural perspectives on autobiographical memory / Robyn Fivush. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Essays in developmental psychology Identifiers: LCCN 2018045817 (print) | LCCN 2018047953 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429029158 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781138037236 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138037243 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Autobiographical memory. | Reminiscing. | Self. Classification: LCC BF378.A87 (ebook) | LCC BF378.A87 F58 2019 (print) | DDC 153.1/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045817 ISBN: 978-1-138-03723-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-03724-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02915-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

For Rodger, who taught me the value of stories.

Contents

List of Narratives Preface

xi xiv

  1 Introduction

1

  2 Autobiographical Memory: Theoretical Foundations

8

  3 The Autobiographical Self: Developmental Foundations

24

  4 Maternal Reminiscing Style: The Emergence of Individual Differences in the Autobiographical Self

39

  5 The Developing Autobiographical Self: How Gender Matters

57

  6 Why Reminiscing Matters: How Early Parent–Child Reminiscing Shapes Cognitive Outcomes

69

  7 Why Reminiscing Matters: How Early Parent–Child Reminiscing Shapes Social and Emotional Outcomes

79

  8 Family Reminiscing: How Families Share the Personal and Family Past

89

x   Contents

  9 The Life Story: Adolescence and the Emergence of an Autobiographical Voice

102

10 Beyond the Autobiographical Self: The Intergenerational Self

119

11 Beyond the Autobiographical Self: The Cultural Self

129

12 The Dark Side of Family Stories

146

13 The Autobiographical Self: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

157

References Index

161 181

Narratives

Chapter 2 Porter Mandy Tony Sally Pamela

8 11 15 18 20

Chapter 3 Rebecca Sarah

24 35

Chapter 4 Arlene Charlie Patty’s First Narrative Patty’s Second Narrative Patty’s Third Narrative Billy Tommy

39 40 45 46 48 54 55

xii  Narratives

Chapter 5 Rachel Jason Abigail Megan Paul

58 59 61 65 66

Chapter 6 Ethan Debbie

72 73

Chapter 7 Carly Zoe Barry Jennifer Anna

80 81 84 85 86

Chapter 8 Jasmine April Micah Nicholas Becca Conner

89 93 96 97 98 99

Chapter 9 Deidre Natalie John Peter Richard Ava Matthew

102 103 109 110 112 113 114

Narratives   xiii

Chapter 10 Nancy Dave Jason

121 122 123

Chapter 11 Chen Bao Michael Charlotte Sebastian

139 139 141 142 144

Chapter 12 Chad Jaxon Sean Ethan

148 149 153 155

Chapter 13 Leila

158

Preface

The story in this book was long in the making. Not only did the book take me almost 10 years to write, but its story has its beginnings in September 1978, when I became a graduate student at the City University of New York and first walked into my graduate mentor’s office. Katherine Nelson was already an established researcher, working on theoretical issues about language and thought. With trepidation, I hesitantly told her how excited I was to study with her. She told me about the new work she was embarking on, research examining autobiographical memory and young children’s entry into cultural worlds defined by shared representations of events. “Oh no,” I said, “I am not interested in that. I want to study language, not memory.” Katherine, in her wisdom, told me that was fine, and we began to plan our first project together, meeting weekly to discuss readings and ideas. By the end of that first year, I understood that autobiographical memory was the core of being human, of making meaning of our selves and our lives, and it set me on a research career that has now spanned four decades, trying to untangle the complicated and fascinating web of personal and family memories. That I am prefacing this book with a personal story is apt for many reasons. First, of course, is that my subject is the power of just these kinds of stories in creating selves and constructing lives. Second, opening with a story illustrates how compelling stories are for human understanding. We resonate to stories; they are the way we understand other people and the world. Finally, this anecdote is about Katherine Nelson, who has been my mentor, my colleague, and my friend over the years. Katherine’s influence mediates this book; her way of thinking about developmental psychology transformed the field, and certainly transformed my own thinking. As I transitioned from graduate student to professor, I was fortunate to land at Emory University, where I have spent my entire academic career. For 30

Preface   xv

years I have directed the Family Narratives Lab in Emory’s Department of Psychology. When I first arrived, Dick Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology, took me under his wing. Bringing together cognitive and developmental psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics from around the university and around the world, Dick created a vibrant interdisciplinary environment for interrogating concepts of memory, autobiography, and self. He pushed me to think more deeply, and in more interdisciplinary ways, about these issues. Marshall Duke, one of my clinical colleagues, taught me the value of really listening to family stories as a way to understand family dynamics. A fellowship at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry provided me with both the time and wonderful colleagues to broaden my thinking and delve into more humanistic approaches to narrative and self. And my students. The graduate students who led the projects, and the army of undergraduates too numerous to mention, but each and every one special. I simply cannot say enough about their role in this unfolding story. Of course, they did most of the actual work – the data collection, transcription, coding, and analysis – but so much more. They pushed me to ask new questions, challenged my assumptions, and created an exciting research lab bristling with activity. From the first students who worked on family reminiscing with me – Elaine Reese, Catherine Haden, and Janet Kuebli – through those that expanded the questions to new ages and new populations – Jessica Sales and Janine Buckner – to those who transitioned the research into adolescence and intergenerational narratives – Jennifer Bohanek, Kelly Marin, Widaad Zaman, and Natalie Merrill – to my last students, who focused me on the life story and narrative meaning-­ making – Theo Waters, Matt Graci, and Jordan Booker (Jordan being my one and only post-­doctoral scholar) – this book belongs to them. This is their story as much as my own.

1 Introduction

We talk about the past in small snippets and long soliloquies. We share the stories of our lives with others and they share their stories with us; we commiserate, rejoice, condemn, and congratulate. We tell our stories to new acquaintances, to old friends, to family and foes, over the phone and over the dinner table. As William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead; it is not even past” (1951/2011, 73). And as these stories are told over and over, to friends, to family, to ourselves, they take on new meanings and new evaluations. Through telling and retelling, the past continually evolves into the present, the story of who we are framed in the story of who we were and who we want to be, our autobiographical self. In this book I explore the process of becoming an “autobiographical self,” a self with a (hopefully) coherent sense of a past that has led to the person I am today and hope to be tomorrow. I will show how the rudimentary elements of an autobiographical self begin at birth, as infants are drawn into the cultural activities of remembering the personal past, and develop in systematic ways throughout childhood and adolescence, as individuals create a full narrative of self, or what Barnes (1998) calls the “story of me.” The autobiographical self is intimately tied to our autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is the type of memory that most people mean when they say, “I remember.” It is accessible, conscious memory of events we have experienced in our lifetime. This may include a detailed memory of having lunch with your best friend at your favorite local hangout just yesterday, or memories of going to the beach with your family when you were a young child. In contrast to other types of memory, such as knowledge of geography (e.g., I know Paris is the capital of France), or history (Paris was liberated from the Germans on August 25, 1944), autobiographical memory contains memories of the self engaging in activities that have personal meaning (e.g., I remember

2   Introduction

walking down the Champs Elysées at sunset my first day in Paris). Indeed, what makes autobiographical memories special is that they are about the self (Conway & Pleydell-­Pearce, 2000; Conway, Singer & Tagini, 2004; Fivush, 1988; 2008; McAdams, 2001). Memories of our past experiences form the core of the autobiographical self, the story of who we are over time and in relation to others. But the autobiographical self goes well beyond the facts of what we recall of our experiences to include our interpretations, our evaluations, our thoughts and emotions, as well as those of others, weaving a complex story of human drama that unfolds over time. The autobiographical self certainly depends on our ability to recall the experiences of our lives, but it integrates so much more: our hopes and dreams, our fears and nightmares, who we want to be, and who we definitely do not want to become (Markus & Nurius, 1986). In this sense, the autobiographical self is both cognitive and social; autobiographical remembering is an evolving integration of thinking and feeling involved in recalling and organizing previous past experiences in ways that allow us to communicate to ourselves and to others who we are in the world, our values and beliefs, and our motivations and our goals. The autobiographical self is also uniquely human (Donald, 2001; Fivush, 2010a; Nelson, 2003). Although as I will show in later chapters, infants and nonhuman animals are quite capable of recalling experiences and events in ways that allow them to predict and navigate their environment, only human beings create a story of who they are, linking disparate events into a coherent whole and explaining how they became the person they are today by employing frameworks that evaluate personal experiences through cultural ways of understanding what it means to be a self and to live a good life (Freeman, 2007). This is a remarkably complex accomplishment, and yet it occurs universally; although the forms and functions of an autobiographical self are culturally variable, as I will discuss at length in Chapter 11, all typically developing children in all cultures develop an autobiography, however sparse the story may be. Moreover, as I show throughout this book, the autobiographical self emerges from reminiscing that occurs in everyday social interactions, in which we naturally and spontaneously share the experiences of our lives with others. We talk about the past all the time in everyday conversation. Think about your last phone call to a parent or an old friend, your last chat over coffee with a school or work colleague, your last conversation over the dinner table with friends or family. What did you talk about? The events of your day and of theirs, personal news, and “gossip” – stories about mutual friends and acquaintances. You talked about the past – yours, theirs, and others’. In fact, stories about the past emerge every five minutes in a typical family conversation (Bohanek, Fivush, Zaman, Lepore, Merchant & Duke, 2009; Miller, 1994). These may be stories of what happened to a specific family member that day, or just as likely, stories of the shared family past, such as holidays or outings, or even family history, stories of

Introduction   3

grandparents, or crazy Uncle Joe. In Chapter 8 I delve into the frequency and complexity of family stories across a typical dinner conversation, and how and why these kinds of family stories are so important. But it is not just families that reminisce so often. Among friends, sharing past experiences is just as frequent, especially if they were even slightly emotionally tinged. Studies show that more than 90 percent of everyday emotional experiences are shared with someone else within 48 hours of their occurrence (Rime, 2007; Rime, Finkenauer, Luminet, Zech & Pilippot, 1998). Why we reminisce about our past so much is an intriguing question that I will address throughout this book; that we reminisce about the past so much is unquestionable, and it is in this sharing that we come to understand and evaluate our own experiences in new ways and construct our own story alongside the stories of others. The autobiographical self, the heart of our personal sense of who we are, is very much constructed in social interactions that modulate the story we come to tell. Especially interesting, we see substantial evidence of individual, gender, and cultural differences in how and what people remember about their lives (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Wang, 2013). Explaining these differences requires a model that takes seriously how and why we recall our past, and how and why the social contexts in which remembering our past and ourselves are important. This book provides a sociocultural model of autobiographical memory that takes as its starting point that all human activity unfolds in everyday social interactions that allow for the expression and development of culturally appropriate forms of knowledge (Nelson, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). Throughout, I document how our most personal memories, our dearest sense of self, are created and constructed within social interactions, interactions structured within family conversations embedded within social and cultural worldviews that provide models for what a self is and what a life should look like. Much of the book focuses on research conducted with broadly middle class, ethnically diverse U.S. families. Yet importantly, even within this kind of a broad cultural group, culture imbues every human interaction, influencing our language, our beliefs, and our values. This presupposition is threaded throughout the chapters, but cultural differences, per se, are only highlighted toward the end, in Chapter 11. Because the autobiographical self is intimately tied to autobiographical memory, in Chapter 2 I provide the theoretical foundations for the autobiographical self within the framework of autobiographical memory, and I raise the question of the functions of autobiographical memory. If autobiographical memory is uniquely human and reconstructive, what functions might it serve in everyday life? I focus on two: defining self and defining relationships. A consideration of these primary functions highlights the social nature of auto­ biographical remembering and how sharing our memories with others helps shape them in particular ways. I thus end the chapter with a consideration of the cultural tools that sculpt our personal memories, life scripts, and master

4   Introduction

narratives, providing both the forms and functions of personal autobiography while equipping us to create both shared and personal understandings of what it means to be a person and to live a life. With this more encompassing understanding of autobiographical memory, I turn in Chapter 3 to the specific concept of an autobiographical self and discuss the early foundations for this sense of self. I rely here on theoretical arguments first articulated by Katherine Nelson (1993; 2001; 2003), laying out the differential development of episodic and autobiographical memory and arguing for the complex set of skills that underlie true autobiographical memory, including the development of a sense of self in the present and in the past, and the link between them. I note at the outset that the autobiographical self is only one aspect of a self-­concept, with no claims that the autobiographical self is either exclusive or exhaustive of self-­definition. Rather, I agree with Neisser (1988) that the self is complex, consisting of multiple dynamically interacting aspects, including both implicit and explicit knowledge of our bodily state, of our mental state, and of our enduring goals and motivations, as well as knowledge of traits and dispositions (see also McAdams, 2015). The autobiographical self is that aspect of self defined by a temporally extended sense of one’s own experiences as creating the person one is today and will become tomorrow. In the personality literature, this self has been called “narrative identity” (McAdams & McLean, 2013), and I will return to this concept and the development of narrative identity as it relates to the concept of an autobiographical self, in Chapter 9, when I discuss issues of narrative identity that emerge in adolescence. While the first three chapters lay out the arguments, definitions, and foundations for the autobiographical self, Chapter 4 turns more directly to the main arguments of the book, examining the now substantial research documenting profound and enduring individual differences in how parents, and especially mothers, reminisce with their preschool children. Mothers vary along a spectrum of elaboration, with highly elaborative mothers engaging in frequent, richly detailed, coherent, and emotionally expressive narrative co-­construction with their children, whereas low-­elaborative mothers reminisce in sparser and more repetitive ways. Both observational longitudinal and experimental intervention research confirms the consistency and efficacy of these differing styles in predicting children’s developing skills to narrate their own personal experiences in more elaborated and coherent ways. Intriguingly, research questioning which maternal and/or child characteristics might relate to an elaborative reminiscing style has not uncovered why some mothers are more elaborative than others. One factor to emerge is the gender of the child, with mothers and fathers generally more elaborative, and especially more emotionally expressive, with daughters than with sons, and I explore the precursors and consequences of this gender difference in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 detail how elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to multiple developmental outcomes, both cognitive and socioemotional. In addition

Introduction   5

to predicting more elaborated and coherent personal narratives, higher levels of maternal elaborative reminiscing also predict higher levels of literacy skills upon entering school; better deliberate memory skills, including memory strategies, that are important for academic success; higher levels of understanding the mind of self and others; earlier understanding and better regulation of emotion; and finally, a more differentiated self-­concept and higher self-­esteem. The multiple and varied ways in which elaborative maternal reminiscing has been related to child outcome underscores the centrality of autobiographical memory as foundational for social and cognitive development. Chapter 8 expands the discussion to include ways in which family narratives extend beyond the parent–child dyad. I present an ecological model of family narratives (Fivush & Merrill, 2016) that locates individual autobiography within embedded layers of family stories, including stories of experiences shared across family members and across the generations, as well as more temporally extended family histories that inform individual autobiographies and influence one’s personal sense of self. Chapter 9 shifts from family reminiscing to the emergence of an individual life story. Drawing on Erikson’s (1968) psychosocial theories, I discuss the creation of a healthy identity as the major developmental task during adolescence, showing how multiple converging social and cognitive skills coalesce into an adolescent’s increasing abilities to create a coherent personal timeline that undergirds a more evaluative and goal-­oriented life narrative. Bringing these developments into dialogue with my previous examination of family reminiscing and the scaffolding of individual personal narratives, I show how mothers continue to play a critical role in adolescents’ emerging abilities to construct coherent and evaluative life stories and how these developments build on earlier maternal elaborative reminiscing. Chapter 10 expands the idea of the autobiographical self into the family stories in which it is embedded. More specifically, I develop the idea of an intergenerational self, a self anchored in stories we know about our parents as they were growing up, and how these stories and stories of family history provide models of the ways the world works and how lives unfold. I also show how these kinds of intergenerational narratives are linked to adolescents’ and young adults’ sense of self and well-­ being. Whereas I note throughout the book that the autobiographical self is socioculturally constructed, Chapter 11 turns explicitly to the ways in which culture influences both family reminiscing and individual life narratives. Contrasting cultural dimensions of independence and interdependence, I review research comparing European American and Asian American families, then delve a bit deeper to explore the complexities of these overly simple dichotomies. Cultures that value a more autonomous and independent notion of self encourage individuals to construct elaborated life stories that focus on individuals’ thoughts and emotions, on how their experiences make them uniquely themselves.

6   Introduction

In contrast – though in only general terms – individuals in more interdependently oriented cultures create less elaborated life stories that focus more on social communities and the common good. These differences are reflected in early maternal reminiscing styles, in that mothers in more independently oriented cultures reminisce in more elaborated and emotionally expressive ways than do mothers in interdependently oriented cultures. How culture is transmitted across the generations through family reminiscing provides a window into how individual lives are constructed in cultural contexts. As may be apparent even in this introduction, for the most part I focus on the positive aspects of family reminiscing. Chapter 12, however, turns to the dark side of family narratives. Sometimes narratives of tragedy and trauma can become uplifting and provide models of strength and resilience – but sometimes they do not. Narratives of trauma, for example, can be debilitating, whether told or untold. For children growing up in families with dark and difficult stories, or with silenced stories involving transgressions either committed by or inflicted on family members, the very lack of stories may signal distress and disquiet. This chapter spotlights the very limited research on this aspect of family storytelling, placing it in the larger context of what we know about narratives of trauma more broadly. In Chapter 13 I bring the story about stories to a close. From its early beginnings in infancy, when babies are drawn into telling and sharing stories, to the growing ability to narrate personal experiences in coherent ways, to the incorporation of personal experiences in a personal timeline that defines a life trajectory linked through time and across people, the development of the autobiographical self unfolds across a lifetime. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories told about us. Because stories are at the core of my argument, I include many narrative examples throughout the book, examples of parents and children co-­ constructing the shared past, of families telling and re-­telling stories that knit together their identity through time, and of individuals recounting significant events, experiences that define who they are and what they value. The examples come from studies that my students, colleagues, and I have been conducting in The Family Narratives Lab at Emory University since 1988. Over the last three decades we have visited hundreds of families in their homes and asked hundreds of individuals to tell us their stories, both face to face and online. All of these individuals and families have graciously given their time and their permission to use and report these narratives, although we of course use pseudonyms throughout. For our audio recordings, we employ a simple transcription system, transcribing whole words without linguistic inflections, although we do add punctuation when the prosody is clear and mark sounds of laughing and crying. We use < > to indicate overlapping talk. When we cannot make out a word, we simply transcribe it as (unintelligible). For our  written narratives, we transcribe as written, often with misspellings,

Introduction   7

nongrammatical constructions, and cross-­outs. As we have collected these narratives and worked with these families and listened to these stories, our ideas have evolved. Our research participants shared more than their stories with us; they shared their own ideas about how and why stories are important. It is that story that I hope to tell in this book.

2 Autobiographical Memory Theoretical Foundations

In the 1958 musical comedy Gigi, two old friends who once shared a romance, Honoré Lachaille and Madame Alvarez, reminisce about their time together when young, singing a duet in which a particularly romantic evening is jointly recounted. As the song goes on, Honoré recalls details of the experience, all of which Madame corrects: they dined with friends, not alone, it was in June, not April, and so on, to which Honoré responds, yes, he remembers it well! All of us resonate to this lyrical exchange; all of us reminisce about emotional and important moments in our life, elaborating and ruminating on the details, sometimes cringing at what we recall and sometimes savoring special moments. And all of us have had the experience of reminiscing with others who disagree with us on the details, perhaps providing different ones, and certainly proffering different interpretations. Yet in these negotiations we also sense a deeper understanding of our own past; as we reminisce with others, confirming, negating, and negotiating what happened, we create richer and more meaningful memories of our selves. This process begins very early in development, as this excerpt from a conversation between a mother and her 4-year-­old son, Porter, illustrates. They are discussing why they were not able to go to the local natural history museum the previous day, because Porter’s younger brother, Alan, overslept his nap: Porter’s Narrative Mother: Who was keeping you [from going to the museum]? Porter:  Alan. Mother:  Alan kinda overslept on his nap, right? Porter: Yeah.

Autobiographical Memory   9

Mother:  And by the time he got up it was late, so we didn’t have time to really get lunch before. Porter:  And I had an accident. Mother: You had an accident. You’re right. And we didn’t wanna go to [name of the museum] if you were having an accident. And do you know what else there was? Porter: What? Mother: What’d Daddy really want to do yesterday? Porter:  I don’t know. Mother: What did Daddy do all afternoon? Porter:  Daddy wanted to watch football. Mother:  Daddy really wanted to watch the football game didn’t Daddy? [chuckles] Was it kinda fun watchin’ with Daddy? Porter: Yeah. Mother: Yeah, but it made us sad that we didn’t get to go. Unlike Honoré in the song, Porter actually recalls many accurate details about the afternoon’s events, mostly in response to direct questions from his mother. But note the smooth back and forth, the interweaving of details as the full narrative emerges. This mother skilfully elicits and integrates her child’s memories into a more elaborated and coherent story. Moreover, the mother brings in multiple family members; this is a story about all of them, and how their varied needs and wants are interwoven. The mother ends the story by encouraging Porter to ultimately evaluate this event in a positive way (“Was it kinda fun watchin’ with Daddy?”) while acknowledging that Porter may have been disappointed at not going to the museum. Throughout, a sense that they are in this together persists; they are creating a shared memory of a shared moment that helps define who they are in relation to each other and their family. This book lays out how our very sense of self is inescapably shaped by our personal experiences, but also how this very personal journey is accomplished with and through other people, embedded in social and cultural contexts that give form to our understanding of our personal experiences and our sense of who we are. To set the stage for this discussion, we must first establish some foundational definitions: what exactly do we mean by autobiographical memory, and what exactly is the autobiographical self?

Defining Autobiographical Memory Intuitively, it seems easy to define autobiographical memory as conscious memories of our personal experiences – events, people, and places we can recall and communicate about, either in private reminiscence with ourselves or in

10   Autobiographical Memory

conversations with others. Often, this form of explicit, conscious recollection is contrasted with what has been called procedural or implicit memory, i.e., memory of how to do things, such as drive a car or catch a ball (Baddeley, 2010). Within the explicit memory system, a distinction is also made between semantic and episodic memory. Semantic memory is knowledge gleaned from experience that has become abstract, no longer tied to a specific time and place, such as knowing that Venice is a city of canals located in Italy. Episodic memory, in contrast, is memory of an experience that is located in a specific place at a specific time, such as my honeymoon trip to Venice. When Tulving (1972) first distinguished semantic and episodic memories, he argued that episodic memories and autobiographical memories are the same, in that both are located in a specified time and place and are accompanied by a sense of reliving or re-­experiencing the event, what he calls autonoetic consciousness. But equating episodic and autobiographical memories is problematic, because not all episodic memories are autobiographical and not all autobiographical memories are episodic. One issue raised by Tulving’s definition is the dual criteria for episodic memory – that it be specific in time and place and include a sense of re-­ experiencing. But these two criteria are separable; one can locate an event in time and place with no sense of re-­experiencing (Fivush, 2010a). A sense of reliving involves a sense of self in the present recalling an event in the past, while being aware that it is the same self that experienced that past event and is now recalling the event in the present (Fivush & Graci, 2016). We know from a great deal of excellent animal research that nonhuman animals are able to remember specific occurrences, including quite specific information about when and where an event occurred (e.g., Clayton, Bussey & Dickenson, 2003; see Roberts, 2002, for a review). For example, blue jays can recall the specific time and place of hiding their food, as shown by complex sequential search behaviors based on exactly where and when the food was buried. There is no question that animals must be able to recall specific episodes to survive. However, this kind of search behavior indicates only recalled information about time and place; it does not demonstrate that the bird has a sense of re-­experiencing the initial hiding event. Having spatial and temporal markers of where food is located can be accomplished with no memory of the actual source of that information. Birds can know the where and when of hidden food items without having any experience of a self who hid those items or a self who is currently recalling that hiding sequence (Fivush, 2010a; Roberts, 2002). This type of subjective consciousness of the present self recalling a past self is quite a complex and sophisticated cognitive accomplishment, and as I will show in later chapters, it develops very gradually across the first five to six years of human life. That nonhuman animals (and infants) can recall specific episodes from their past without this kind of self-­awareness indicates that not all episodic memories are autobiographical.

Autobiographical Memory   11

Second, not all autobiographical memories are episodic, as clearly demonstrated in this memory written by a young college student, Mandy, when asked to recall a significant life experience: Mandy’s Narrative The summer before my senior year in high school, I enrolled in the summer program for high school students at [name of university] in Minneapolis. I was excited to be in a big city. I am from [name of a small town in Minnesota] and nervous to be away from home. When I arrived in Minneapolis, I was overwhelmed with all the hustle and fast pace of the city life. I spent one month there, taking a course in genetics. While the university enriched my mind, the people I met there changed who I was and helped me discover who I wanted to be. I met many great people there, however there were two girls who I became particularly close with – one was Chelsea, a girl from Minneapolis. She brought me around the city because she was familiar with it. We also lived together in the same suite. I instantly became attached to her within days of knowing her. Chelsea was also in my particular class on genetics so we were also study buddies. She filled the void that was left when I left my comfort zone at home; my family and friends. Then there was Jessica from Iowa. The three of us became best friends over the course of those 4 weeks. We did everything from going downtown to get knock-­off designer purses, to shopping almost daily at Steinmart, to getting lost (a lot) on the public transit system. Our friendship taught me so much. I learned how to allow people I barely knew into my life and allow them to know things about me that others do not. Although I only knew Chelsea and Jessica for four weeks by the end of the program, I felt as if I had known them longer than some of my close friends. Even now, two years later, we still face-­book each other with updates on our lives and I hope I will be able to see them again. Even when asked to recall a specific experience, Mandy embeds multiple specific episodes within the larger temporal framework of an extended summer experience, including both one-­time episodes and recurring events, such as shopping daily and getting lost a lot. The entire summer experience is itself embedded in her larger life context, both her prior experiences (she grew up in a small town) and the present (“even now, two years later”; “helped me discover who I wanted to be”). Also apparent in this example is that this event is recalled not simply as an unconnected series of actions or facts that occurred

12   Autobiographical Memory

across the summer, but as a series of specific, recurring, and ongoing experiences linked through a theme of growing up and growing together, infused with an abstract sense of personal growth and significance that moves these autobiographical memories well beyond recall of specific episodes. Many theorists have argued that autobiographical memory is, indeed, more complex than a collection of unconnected specific episodes (Brewer, 1988; Barsalou, 1988). Current models of autobiographical memory have incorporated this more expansive definition. For example, Conway and Pleydell-­Pearce (2000) propose a hierarchically organized model of autobiographical memory, with specific event details at the base of the hierarchy (getting my college acceptance letter) that are then organized at a higher level into extended and recurring events (I studied hard all thorough high school), which are themselves incorporated into overarching life periods (school days). Within the hierarchy there can be parallel tracks, such as work and relationships (my first kiss, with my first boyfriend, whom I dated for two years in high school). Although different theorists have proposed somewhat different forms of this type of hierarchical organization (e.g., Brown, 2016; Rubin, 2005), the basic conception of a hierarchically organized autobiographical memory system is widely accepted. From this brief overview, we can see that autobiographical memory is a highly complex system. Autobiographical memory is a dynamic, fluid interplay of specific and recurring experiences, embedded within more extended life events and periods, blended and intertwined into a subjectively meaningful coherent story of a personal past leading to a present self and projected onto an anticipated future. Autobiographical memory defines who we are, how we came to be this way, and what we will become (Barnes, 1998; Fivush, 2010a; McAdams, 2001; McLean, Pasupathi & Pals, 2007). It is, truly, an autobiography. As such, autobiographical memory is uniquely human. Whereas nonhuman animals certainly remember the past, only humans weave together a personally meaningful story of self. And if autobiographical memory is uniquely human, it raises the question of why humans recall this kind of information at all, and why we construct complex life stories that link our various past experiences together into a coherent whole. Moreover, if autobiographical memory is so dynamic and complex, it raises the issue of the accuracy of autobiographical memories; as we connect our various past experiences together into a life story, into our autobiography, how much of what we recall is accurate and how much may be reconstructed?

Autobiographical Memory is Reconstructive Much of the psychological research on autobiographical memory has focused on issues of the accuracy and accessibility of memory: how much do we remember, how true is it to the actual event, and how easily can we recall it? The general metaphor for memory has been of a type of archive, or filing

Autobiographical Memory   13

system (Brockmeier, 2015). Events occur, information is encoded and stored in some form, and then that information is retrieved, much like we might do when we file information and tag that content with a label which we then use to find it when needed. Stored information can be accessed through multiple tags, or multiple associative networks, such as times I was really angry, or experiences with my mother, or excursions to the beach. The more tags, or cues, that constrain the search for information, such as times I went to the beach with my mother and got really angry, the longer it might take me to retrieve an event, because there are fewer cases to find, requiring me to sort through all the tags to locate the ones that represent the intersection of these events. This archival model assumes that there are fixed memory traces stored in the mind/brain that are accessed at recall, and lead to the idea that memory is a process of locating pieces of information, and when memory is not accurate, we call it a memory error (Schacter, 2002). But it is now widely accepted that memory is reconstructive (Conway & Pleydell-­Pearce, 2000; Rubin, 2006). Retrieval is not so much a process of accessing specific stored information, but of recompiling information in the present moment. When events occur, the mind/brain encodes patterns, and these patterns are reactivated when in a similar context. For example, when a friend asks me about my beach vacation last summer, my mind reactivates patterns based on all the experiences I have had of beaches, settling on a pattern of activation that best responds to this specific cue or question. Thus my recall may include details from a different beach vacation that I have now reconstructed to be from my last beach vacation (e.g., I recall sitting on the beach reading a great novel that I had actually read on my previous beach vacation), or it may include inferences about what most likely happened (e.g., I used sunscreen, because that is what I usually do), even if it did not actually occur in this instance. Confusion among similar events and inferences based on likely occurrences are among the most common “errors” of memory. I put quotes around error here, because, it does not really make sense to call these errors, as this is the way that memory naturally works. Memory processes are dynamic and fluid. Even in the process of encoding a “new” experience, we are already calling to mind similar previous experiences, anticipating events, filling in gaps, and making inferences. Thus even what gets “encoded” is already partly reconstructed. This means that remembering any given event is a process that occurs over time. Each and every time we bring an event to mind, whether to ourselves, or in conversation with others, we reactivate neural patterns of both that event and related events, and this current reactivation changes the way we later recall the event (Dudai & Edelson, 2016). The neural patterns of retrieval are therefore in constant flux, highlighting another critically important way in which memory is reconstructed over time: through social interaction (Fivush, 2010a; McLean, Pasupathi & Pals, 2007). As I have noted, we talk about our past experiences all the time, and in these

14   Autobiographical Memory

conversations, both what we say and what others say may change our subsequent memory of the event. As the narrative construction between Porter and his mother illustrates, we each add bits and pieces to the reminiscing. Reminiscing about a shared experience may be in the form of new or different details about what happened; how will Porter and his mother remember this event next time? Will Porter remember watching football with his Dad and integrate this into his own narrative of what happened? Research by Hirst and his colleagues (Cuc, Ozuru, Manier & Hirst, 2006; Hirst & Echteroff, 2012) demonstrate that conversations about shared experiences both reinforce information that is recalled during the shared reminiscing and make information not mentioned or discussed less easy to retrieve over time. Listeners can also provide new frameworks or interpretations of the event. For example, if I am complaining about a recent fight with my best friend, my husband may suggest that my friend was upset about something else or having a bad day, leading me to reframe the event as one in which I failed to be attentive to my best friend’s needs. Listeners who are attentive facilitate longer and more coherent narratives from the speaker, but inattentive listeners, those who are distracted or dismissive, lead to incoherent and fragmented narratives (Pasupathi, 2001). Importantly, subsequent memory of the event is affected as well. When narrating experiences to inattentive listeners, people subsequently recall less and more fragmentary information (Pasupathi & Billitteri, 2015; Pasupathi & Hoyt, 2010). So how listeners attend and reframe our experiences during reminiscing changes the way we remember these experiences in the future. The reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory, both as we reminisce to ourselves and with others, suggests that memory is better conceptualized as an ongoing process; each new experience and/or recalled memory changes the patterns of future activations, such that future recalls will reconstruct somewhat different memories. Memory is not what happened, but what we remember now about what happened then.

Autobiographical Memory Normally Varies in Accuracy and Stability Having said this, it is important to point out that a good deal of evidence shows that memories are reasonably accurate and stable over time. For example, 8- to 12-year-­old children show high levels of consistency and accuracy in recalling the details of medical events experienced during the preschool years (Peterson, 2012); concentration camp survivors show remarkable consistency and accuracy in recalled details 40 years after their initial debriefing interviews (Wagenaar & Groeneweg, 1990); and adults asked to recall their earliest memories recall the same events with the same information across a two-­year period (Bauer, Tasdemir-­Ozdes & Larkina, 2014). Yet it is also the case that people can be highly inaccurate and inconsistent in their recall over time. The best evidence

Autobiographical Memory   15

of this comes from the large literature on so-­called “flashbulb” memories (Brown & Kulik, 1977); this research assesses what people recall of culturally shared events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Challenger disaster in the United States, the death of Princess Diana in the United Kingdom, or the Loma Prieta and Marmara earthquakes in Northern California and Turkey (see Conway, 2013, for an overview). The common assumption is that because these events are shocking and demand our attention, they should be recalled in accurate, vivid detail. Yet the general findings show that people are strikingly inconsistent in recalling where they were and who they were with when they heard the news of these types of events. Research focusing on when and why flashbulb memories may be more or less accurate has found that personal emotional reaction and significance are the best predictors of accuracy (Talarico, LaBar & Rubin, 2004). In general, more emotional events, especially negative events, that are of high personal significance are recalled more accurately than emotionally neutral or less personally significant events (Talmi, 2013). In a sense, research on the accuracy of autobiographical memory is a glass half empty, glass half full phenomenon. Autobiographical memory is certainly reconstructive and dynamic, but because reconstruction is based on similar experiences and plausible inferences, it may lead to accurate recall, and this recall may stabilize over time. Most likely, our own personal memories are a complex mix of accurate details and reconstructive errors and inferences, all of which become blended into stable aspects of our recall of significant events over time.

The Functions of Autobiographical Memory Directing Future Behavior Most people are somewhat disturbed to learn that their memories of personal experience may not accurately correspond to what happened. Why do we care if autobiographical memory is accurate? One simple reason is that we use our memories to predict the future (Nelson, 1986; Schacter, Addis & Buckner, 2007). We know what to expect next time because we remember what happened last time. Indeed, we often use our memories of the past to direct our current or future behavior (Pillemer, 2003). For example, when asked for a significant life experience that defines who she is as a person, Tony, a college freshman, wrote: Tony’s Narrative For 5 summers, I have worked at a camp for children w/speech delays, most of them have Autism. I looked forward to those 3 months each summer, as that is the time when I am truly the happiest. Although I initially began simply to do a community service

16   Autobiographical Memory

project w/one of my friends, x after the first week, I was in love! I fell in love w/these kids who taught me so much & were struggling to improve their speech & social skills each & everyday. It put my life into perspective, as I realized how many things we take for granted. Even just being able to sit in a chair for a few minutes is a struggle for some of these children, or being able to tell you their name is a milestone … Even though there were new children each year, I connected w/each new group & got to watch them grow over the summer & some of them over the years. While many of my friends were tanning in Hawaii or attending prestigious college summer programs, I was at camp, making picture frames & cleaning up spills – but I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything & by the end of the 1st summer, I knew this experience had changed me forever. As a result, I have been back every summer & want to devote my life to working w/Children w/Autism. I am studying psychology & hope to volunteer at the [University] autism center & of course, I am returning to camp this summer. Those children have taught me so much, & I know that my life has been permanently changed by each one of them. First, note that although asked for a significant life experience, we see how Tony chooses a set of related experiences rather than a single episode, again emphasizing that our lives are organized as seamless, interleaving periods of time that encompass specific episodes and extended events. More to the point here, this experience has obviously changed Tony’s sense of herself as a person and helped her set lifetime goals. But it also directs very specific behavior, namely to work again this summer in this camp, to major in psychology, and to gain experience at the university autism center. So memories can be quite useful for guiding our future behavior, both our immediate future actions and our lifetime goals. But it is important to note that, often, for predicting what is going to happen in the immediate future as you encounter a new event, reconstructive memory may be more useful. We more successfully predict future experiences to the extent that our anticipation and inferences are based not on a single occurrence but on multiple similar past occurrences. Essentially, it makes more sense to rely on “scripts” of what usually happens than to rely on single instances (Nelson, 1986). For example, when I enter a fine restaurant, my best prediction is that I will need to wait to get seated, will be handed a menu, and will then order food. Even if I have had a recent experience where this was not the case, given that this is the most common sequence, my best prediction follows the script. Similarly, thinking about that unpleasant fight with my best friend last week, if virtually all my other memories of her are positive, then I should predict that her future interactions with me are more likely to be supportive

Autobiographical Memory   17

than negative, even though the fight was the most recent experience. We therefore do not need specific autobiographical memories to predict the future; more generalized memories of what usually happens suffice. Indeed, this kind of script-­like memory seems to operate across species and across human development, as it is difficult to imagine any organisms navigating successfully through their environment without this form of memory (Donald, 2001; Nelson, 1986; 2003). While memories of the past certainly help direct future behavior, this cannot be their only, or even their most vital function.

Defining Self and Relationships If we look again at Mandy’s narrative of her summer experience in Minneapolis, we can identify other ends served by autobiographical memory. Mandy recounts what she learned from this set of events (to allow people into her life), but this seems not so much a directive regarding a specified future behavior as a larger life lesson, a way to be in the world. Mandy has learned something about herself and her relationships with other people. Autobiographical memory is very much about defining self and relationships over time. Indeed, when people are explicitly asked why and under what circumstances they engage in reminiscing, they self-­report reminiscing about the events of their lives to think about who they are, to call to mind others in order to feel more connected, and to create intimacy with others through sharing stories of the past (Bluck, 2003; Bluck & Alea, 2009). For these functions, accuracy about the facts of what happened may not be paramount; rather, the meaning of the event for the self and other may be most important. My sister and I may disagree on what color dress she was wearing the day she refused to let me play with her favorite doll, but if we do not agree that this was an act of aggression on her part, then we have a problem! The self and relationship functions of autobiographical memory certainly rely on the details of what happened, but even more so on the evaluation, interpretation, and emotional resonance of that experience. To be autobiographical means, in essence, that we recall an experience from our own subjective perspective – what we thought about the experience then and now, and what this experience means in relation to other experiences in our lives, to our sense of who we are, and to our understanding of our relationships with others. At heart, autobiographical memory is about meaning-­making, creating a meaningful sense of self through time, as we can see clearly in Tony’s narrative of working with autistic children, which goes beyond directing her immediate future decisions and behavior. More than the recall of what happened to us, narrative meaning-­making encompasses values, beliefs, motivations, and goals. Essentially, autobiographical memory integrates our experiences with our self-­concept into a life story that tells the “story of me” (Barnes, 1998). Thus, the most important or even the most functional aspect of autobiographical memory may not be accuracy or anticipation of the

18   Autobiographical Memory

future, but meaning-­making. We recall our past to create a personal story of who we are, and this story helps define both our self and our relationships through time. The social relationship function of autobiographical memory is particularly interesting in light of how frequently we share the past in everyday conversations. Talking about both events of the day and life experiences with friends and family, in person and across the miles, is a ubiquitous part of human interaction, supporting the idea that autobiographical memories both create and maintain relationships over time (Fivush, Haden & Reese, 1996). Through sharing our past, we share ourselves while creating an emotional bond with others, and this happens in multiple ways. First, by telling our personal stories to others and hearing their stories, we create a sense of identification, both through a recognition of similarity of experiences and through empathic understanding of other. Second, our reminiscing about shared experiences, the times we had together, re-­creates positive feelings and reinforces the sense of a shared history that provides a basis for a shared future. Third, the actual content of the stories we tell is often about relationships, and through this reminiscing and reflecting on the meaning of relationships, we enhance and reinforce those bonds. For example, when asked to write about a recurring event that helped define who she was as a person, 18-year-­old Sally, a college freshman, wrote about her daily drives to school with her father: Sally’s Narrative Every weekday morning in middle & high school, my dad would drive me to the school bus stop or to school. Although some mornings I was so exhausted that I barely spoke & would only grunt single word responses, these rides were truly special times. On the mornings where I wasn’t half asleep, we had some great conversations – about classes, friends, the days activities, tv shows, his schedule & work – you name it, we talked about it. Some days when I had a test that day, he would patiently listen to me as I literally talked at him, going over dates, xx or Spanish vocab or math equations. If it was an area of his expertise, he we would engaged in a discussion, as he asked me questions about the topics & made sure I fully grasped the concepts. On other days we would listen to music – from classical to disney & sing along – or I’d sing & he’d try to! Although initially I only viewed it as a method of transportation, when I began to drive myself to school, I realized how much I missed those car rides – so I found myself often making excuses for why I couldn’t drive & since my school was on his way to work – he took me! Even though the cars changed over the years & I

Autobiographical Memory   19

moved from the back seat to the front seat & eventually to the driver’s seat, the special times we shared remained the same. This was truly a bonding time & I cherish each trip we made together. This was our time together – just Daddy & Sally & it was just one thing that makes our relationship so special. We see all three social functions in this narrative. When asked about a significant experience that helped define who she is as a person, Sally chooses an event that she experienced on a regular basis with her father, driving to school every day. This is a time that Sally and her father spent alone, talking, so the content of the story is clearly about the relationship itself and how meaningful it  was and still is. The story therefore also functions to keep that relationship close; in reminiscing about these recurring experiences, Sally continues to connect with her father, implicitly sharing values and identifying with him in anchoring ways.

Regulating Emotions The multiple ways in which we use our memories of and with others point to how we use our memories to understand ourselves, including our emotional lives. In creating coherent accounts of who we are, we simultaneously create coherent accounts of our emotions over time. In Chapter 7 I discuss in more detail how autobiographical memories are linked to emotional regulation and well-­being, but here it is important to foreshadow that how we tell the stories of our lives is critical to our sense of emotional well-­being. Individuals who create more coherent, elaborated narratives about their past enjoy higher levels of psychological health; they report higher levels of self-­esteem, lower levels of depression, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose in life (Adler et al., 2015; Graci, Watts & Fivush, 2018; Pennebaker & Chung, 2007; Waters & Fivush, 2016). We see these functions interwoven into the self and relationship functions in Mandy’s narrative about becoming friends with her summer roommates, both in terms of regulating emotions during the experience (“She filled the void that was left when I left my comfort zone at home”) and in terms of giving her a new sense of meaning and purpose in her life (these new friends “helped me discover who I wanted to be”). We also see the beginnings of learning how to regulate emotions through narratives in Porter’s conversation with his mother about the scotched visit to the natural history museum. Although the 4-year-­old never mentions emotion, his mother brings the narrative to a close by providing an overall, rather complex emotional understanding of the event (“it was kinda fun watchin’ with Daddy” … “but it made us sad that we didn’t get to go”). Porter is already learning that even in the midst of disappointment, being with loved ones can make us happy. Whether

20   Autobiographical Memory

emotional regulation is a separate function from defining self and relationships or an integral aspect of these functions is not yet clear (Pillemer, 2003), but how we tell our stories to and with others undoubtedly matters for our emotional well-­being. The above discussion also highlights the inherently social nature of narratives – we both construct them with others in ways that influence our own interpretation of our experiences and include others in our narratives – their thoughts and emotions, their motivations and intentions. Moreover, these local narrative interactions also occur in larger social and cultural frameworks that help define what a narrative is and why our narratives matter.

Cultural Life Scripts, Master Narratives, and Autobiography Individual autobiographies are constructed within layers of social and cultural expectations about what a self is and what a life looks like (Fivush, Habermas, Waters & Zaman, 2011). We can see this clearly when we consider how individuals respond to questions about their autobiographical experiences. For example, 35-year-­old Pamela was asked for a self-­defining memory, i.e., a memory of a specific experience that defined who she is as a person. She responded by recalling an event that had occurred 10 years in the past: Pamela’s Narrative The strongest memory I have that I believe defines who I am is the first time my newborn son fell asleep on my chest. This happened about 10–12 years ago but when I think about it the feelings are still strong today and I know this little event is what made me who I am today. I was never particularly interested in being a mother. I was not excited to find out I was pregnant and hated every aspect of the entire pregnancy. I just wasn’t sure it was what I needed in my life at the time. My partner encouraged me constantly and talked positively of all the great experiences we would have but I still wasn’t 100% convinced. When my son was born I cried and loved him but it still didn’t feel like he was mine. I felt no different, definitely not like a mom how I imagined I would. About 2 weeks after taking him home he was having trouble sleeping in his crib. I got up to get him, propped up some pillows for my back and half lay down with him on my chest. He fell asleep quickly with his hand tightly gripping one of my fingers. I instantly felt overcome with emotion. I felt happiness, calm and peace. I felt clarity, like this is who I am, this is where I’m supposed to be. I knew that my life had meaning.

Autobiographical Memory   21

Pamela centers the story on a single episode, when her son fell asleep on her chest, but this is embedded in an extended life experience, starting from her ambivalence, if not outright negativity, about her pregnancy, to her initial emotional reaction to the birth of her child, to the moment of insight that altered her perspective on life. Note that Pamela narrates her own changing emotional reactions over time, how her own interpretation and perspective evolved. Thus even in narrating a single episodic moment, Pamela places this moment in a larger life story and is able to hold and narrate changing subjective perspectives on an event as it unfolds. Moreover, even in Pamela’s highly personal construction of a meaningful life story, we see the influence of cultural expectations, specifically the dominant Western cultural script about motherhood. Pamela narrates her story against the script; she did not have an instantaneous emotional connection to her baby, “definitely not like a mom how I imagined I would.” Her emotional negativity about the pregnancy and mixed feelings toward the baby are plotted against prevailing cultural expectations, the assumed shared understanding of what this experience “should” mean. And then she has her epiphany, a moment of clarity when her life perspective shifts in a transformative way. Even our most personal autobiographical moments are imbued with culturally mediated narrative frameworks. Life scripts, or canonical cultural biographies (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), are culturally shared schemas about the course of a typical life in a given culture. When adults are asked to nominate the most important events that will occur to someone born into a specific culture, there is high agreement on what those events will be and when in life they will happen. The life script includes both biologically and culturally defined milestones, such as the age of entering school, graduating, first romance, getting married, having children, and so on. Children can already provide cultural life scripts by the age of 8 years (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008). And whereas many of these events are culturally universal, such as having children, many others are culturally variable and specific, such as age of schooling, or age of marriage (Ottsen & Berntsen, 2014). Importantly, cultural life scripts are not simply normative; they are prescriptive (Fivush, 2010b). Such scripts define when in a typical life certain events should occur. For example, in the United States, it is not just that one does graduate high school at age 18, it is that one should graduate high school at age 18. It is not just that one does get married and have children, it is that one should get married and have children. The compulsory moral nature of these life scripts becomes evident when an individual does not conform to the script (McLean & Syed, 2015). One does not need to explain why one married and had children, but one must explain why one did not marry or did not have children. Individuals whose life experiences do not conform to the expected life script are called upon to explain their (deviant) life story. Of course, what is defined as

22   Autobiographical Memory

acceptable and what is defined as deviant are culturally and historically variable. A good example of this is the changing roles of women, who in the post-­WWII years often had to explain why they pursued careers; with the arrival of second-­ wave feminism, however, women seldom had to justify such choices. Similarly, the number of children women or couples have and the timing of childbirth have changed dramatically in the last few decades (see Shanahan, 2000, for a review). These are just a few examples among many showing that the prescriptive nature of life scripts in relation to individual life stories must be placed in historical and cultural perspective. Life scripts define the overall structure of a life; in addition, cultural master narratives provide evaluative frameworks for these lives (McLean & Syed, 2015). It is not just that certain events will/should occur, but our interpretations of those events are mediated through prevailing cultural values. Again, we see this in Pamela’s story of motherhood. It is not just that she adhered to the life script of having a child, but that her interpretive and evaluative framework for the event comes from a master narrative of “the good mother” who is joyous in pregnancy and immediately bonds with her baby (Johnston & Swanson, 2006). Clearly, cultures provide both a prescriptive set of events and prescriptive interpretations of those events, against which we each create our own life story. Master narratives provide evaluative frameworks at all levels of the life story: specific episodes, recurring events, extended experiences, and full life stories. The overall shape of a life, the specific events that should be experienced and when, and how these various experiences should be interpreted are all implicit in our everyday interactions with others and with our cultural artifacts – books, movies, television, and so forth (Harbus, 2011; McLean & Breen, 2015). A prime example of a cultural master narrative in the United States is the redemption narrative (McAdams, 2004a). Although this narrative takes various forms, the overall shape is one of overcoming negative experiences through strength and resilience, leading to positive outcomes and empowerment. The essential American rags to riches story is a redemption narrative, one of rising above initial poverty and despair to gain considerable material success through hard work and perseverance. The American recovery narrative is another: an individual suffers the chaos and degradations of addiction but recovers through persistence, the help of others, and the grace of a higher power, becoming healthier, more reflective, and/or more humble (Dunlop & Tracy, 2013). Master narratives pervade our understanding of how life is experienced, influencing how we come to tell our own personal stories. At all the points and milestones of a life, individuals are creating autobiography within socioculturally constructed narrative themes and motifs.

Autobiographical Memory   23

Summary Autobiographical memory comprises the dynamic, reconstructed memories of personal experiences, specific episodes, and recurring and extended events, going beyond the facts of what happened to create personal meaning. In narrating our past to, with, and through others, we construct layers of interpretations and evaluation, a complexity that infuses autobiographical memory. In remembering our past we create meaning in the present and goals for the future, and in this sense, autobiographical memory is ever-­changing; as our perspective changes, so do our memories and how we interpret them. We are constantly rewriting our past in the service of our current goals. And, as I will argue throughout this book, we do this in social and cultural contexts that privilege certain interpretations over others.

3 The Autobiographical Self Developmental Foundations

When a mother and her 8-year-­old daughter, Rebecca, were asked to reminisce about a special, one-­time event they had shared, they chose to talk about a family vacation to the mountains from a few months earlier, and in the course of a long conversation about the vacation more generally, they talked about a bike ride they took together across a mountain path and over a bridge:

Rebecca’s Narrative Mother:  And we were all goin’ on a bike and you didn’t wanna go on a bike and so you were just going to jog but you got so tired – Rebecca:  NOT TIRED! (very loud voice) Mother:  [laughing] You didn’t get tired. OK.You didn’t get tired – Rebecca:  [giggles] Mother:  – but you wanted to sit on the bike seat I was peddling. What do you remember about that? Rebecca: Wanting you to go really, really slow. My legs were hurting. Mother:  [Laughs] Why were your legs hurting? Rebecca:  Cuz I was like this [spreads legs wide to show how she was riding on the mother’s handlebars] all the time. Mother:  Cuz your legs were spread apart like that. Rebecca: Yeah, but if you went slowly I could relax. Mother:  Uh huh. Rebecca:  And you went too fast.

The Autobiographical Self   25

Mother:  But you had fun, though, didn’t you? Rebecca:  It was great! Mother: What was that, a half mile or something? Rebecca:  I was afraid I might, uh, you might go flying off the edge [both laughing], edge of the bridge and, umm, I just wanted to jog. Mother:  And you were afraid of riding on the bike with me across the bridge, huh? Rebecca:  Uh huh uh huh uh huh. This is a seemingly simple exchange between a mother and daughter describing a relatively mundane shared experience, yet there is a great deal going on in it. First, of course, is the very fact that mother and daughter are sharing a conversation in the present about an event that happened in the past. Both must be calling that event to mind, and both must be aware that the other is engaged in the process of remembering an event that they experienced together. This event no longer exists in a shared physical environment but only in overlapping mental memories and conversation. This, alone, is a complex understanding of how mind and memory work, yet it is completely backgrounded in everyday conversation. Whenever we ask someone, “Remember when?” we make the assumption that they will initiate a process of recall that will bring to mind the same event we have in mind. In other words, when we are reminiscing about shared events, the object about which we are talking is only a mental object, existing in separate minds yet held in common. In addition, the reminiscing between Rebecca and her mother displays several striking characteristics of autobiographical memory. One is that the mother and daughter do not simply recite what happened; they negotiate the past. Was Rebecca tired? Was the event fun? Or perhaps a little scary? And while the facts of the event are negotiated (“what was that, a half mile or something?”), most of the negotiation concerns interpretation and evaluation. How was this event experienced by the mother and by the child? Did they have the same emotional reactions? Ultimately, what was the meaning of this event (“But you had fun, didn’t you?” “It was great”). And perhaps most interesting for the development of an autobiographical self, many elements in this conversation at least implicitly define who each of these individuals is and what their relationship is like. Rebecca is portrayed as someone who may be a bit more timid in this situation than the mother, not wanting to go too fast, feeling a bit afraid, while the mother simply bikes on, flying across the bridge. Especially striking is how very much the mother and daughter are enjoying reminiscing. This event may or may not have been fun when it occurred – it certainly appears marked by mixed emotions experienced at the time – but now, sitting and recalling the event together, the mother and daughter are laughing so hard it is sometimes

26   The Autobiographical Self

difficult for them to get the words out. The sense of emotional bonding through this experience is palpable. It is in these everyday moments of sharing the past in conversations with others that we create a sense of our own personal past, of our autobiographical self. This process begins in infancy, in the family, the first group of people with whom we interact, share experiences, and reminisce, then expands into the larger social world as we develop our social networks, accelerating in adolescence and early adulthood as we forge our sense of identity and an overall life story that defines how we became the person we are and who we will be (McAdams, 2001). At all points, how we remember and evaluate our past is constructed with and through others, and indeed, we would not even have an autobiographical self if we did not live in a sociocultural group that defined and valued a certain type of self and a certain form of personal memory. This is a large claim, one that I will explicate and support both in what follows and throughout the book. Building on the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 2, I begin below by delineating the development of autobiographical memory more specifically, including its modulation in sociocultural contexts.

The Development of Episodic Memory In the last chapter I made a distinction between episodic and autobiographical memory, arguing that episodic memory is memory of discrete experiences located at a specific time and place. In contrast, autobiographical memories may consist of individual episodes, or of recurring events, extended events, and life periods. Regardless, autobiographical memories are always referenced to self, the sense of a self existing in the present moment while recalling that past event. Distinguishing between these two criteria for episodic and autobiographical memory allows us to better understand how these different forms of memory develop (Fivush, 2010a; Fivush & Graci, 2016). Even newborn infants display some evidence of recognition memory, evidenced by preference for previously heard stimuli over new stimuli. For example, within hours of birth infants will suck harder on a pacifier in order to hear their mother’s voice, heard more frequently in utero, compared to other voices, suggesting a preference for this familiarity (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). More telling of early discrimination and recognition abilities, infants prefer stories read to them in utero over new stories, suggesting that they recognize not only specific voices, but also specific cadences and rhythms that are more familiar than others (De Casper & Spence, 1986). These early abilities are certainly adaptive for infants, enabling them to bond with their caretakers and to begin to parse patterns in the world (Saffran, 2001), but they are not yet evidence of any form of conscious or deliberate episodic memory. Similarly, Rovee-­Collier and Hayne (2000) have shown systematic developments in memory across the first year of life in a mobile conjugate reinforcement

The Autobiographical Self   27

paradigm. In this task, a ribbon connects the infant’s foot to an interesting mobile hung above the crib, and the infant learns that kicking produces the very pleasing effect of the mobile moving and swaying. At a later point, the mobile is again hung above the crib, but now the infant’s foot is not attached, and kicking has no effect. The question is whether infants recall that kicking was previously effective and therefore kick, even though it no longer produces the wanted result. Compared to infants who have never been taught this contingency between foot kicking and the movement of the mobile, infants trained to kick do so more upon seeing the mobile again, suggesting they recall the previous experience. Two-­month-old infants will manifest this type of recall up to 24 hours after the initial experience; over the course of the first 12 months of life, this retention interval increases, such that 6-month-­olds will recall the contingency for a few weeks, and 12-month-­olds will recall the contingency for a month or more. The interval can be extended with reminders, suggesting that the memory is not completely forgotten, just difficult to retrieve. This research demonstrates that over the course of the first year of life memory becomes more durable, and experiences are recalled for longer and longer periods of time. However, it is not clear whether or not this kind of remembering depends on recalling specific time and place information. In contrast, a highly systematic series of studies by Bauer and her associates (Bauer, 2007; Bauer, Wenner, Dropik & Wewerka, 2000) addresses the question of deliberate episodic recall. Using a deferred imitation task, the researchers show infants and toddlers a sequence of actions performed on a novel set of objects. For example, infants and toddlers are shown how to “make a gong” with a frame, a disk, and a small hammer, as well as how the disk can be hung on the frame and hit with the hammer in order to make a pleasing sound. The sequence is displayed once or twice on one day, and the child is brought back after a specified delay, handed the objects, and asked, “what can you do with these?” To the extent that they now produce the modeled actions in the correct sequence compared to children who never saw the model, we can say that they remember this event. Because the task requires an active response of performing a series of actions in a specified sequence in order to achieve the desired outcome, the recall is organized and deliberate. Although this task is clearly more demanding that the mobile conjugate task, we see similar developmental progressions. Six-­month-olds can recall one or two actions for a period of a week or so, 12-month-­olds can recall three actions for a period of multiple weeks, and 24-month-­olds can recall quite complex sequences of up to eight actions for multiple months. Thus, similar to increasing duration of memory for contingencies in infancy, we see increasing duration of memories for specific action sequences in the transition from infancy to toddlerhood. These developments in early memory indicate that over the course of the first two years of life, infants and toddlers become increasingly able to recall specific episodes and to base their current action on those episodes. Memory

28   The Autobiographical Self

also becomes more durable, in that information is retained for longer and is more generalized. Much of this development relies on changes in neural structures, specifically in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe, which develop rapidly in the first few years of life and then more gradually across childhood (see Bauer, 2007, for an excellent review). But whereas good evidence indicates that episodic memory develops in the first few years of life, as of yet we have not seen evidence or expressions of autobiographical memory during this period.

The Transition from Episodic to Autobiographical Memory In addition to being able to locate a previous episode in specific time and place, a memory, to be autobiographical, must further reference self in at least three ways. First, the child must have a sense of self in the present; that is, without consciousness of a self as the center of experience, one cannot have a sense of re-­experiencing a past event. Second, the child must have a sense of a self in the past. That is, they must understand that the self that is remembering now is remembering a self that existed in the past. And this leads to the third criterion, that the present remembering self and the recalled previous self be linked through time; they must comprise the same self. Thus, for a memory to be autobiographical, the individual must have a temporally extended sense of self (Fivush, 2001; Fivush & Nelson, 2006).

Self in the Present Children develop a sense of self in the present as early as 16 to 18 months of age. This can be demonstrated using the mirror mark test, in which a spot of rouge is surreptitiously placed on the forehead or nose of the toddler, who is then placed in front of a mirror (Lewis & Brooks-­Gunn, 1979; Rochat, 2015). The question is whether the child recognizes the image in the mirror in terms of self – is that me reflected in that glass? If so, the reflected spot of rouge will lead to touching the spot of rouge on the physical body, with the baby putting hand to forehead to investigate this unknown mark. When there is no recognition or understanding of the reflection, the baby will touch the mirror or simply turn away, uninterested. Although one might argue that this merely assesses the representation of a physical sense of self, the fact that this kind of mirror self-­ recognition is linked to other self-­referenced behaviors suggests that it is a marker of a new form of self-­consciousness (see Rochat, 2015, for a full theoretical explication). First, mirror recognition is linked to children’s developing use of pronouns to mark the self and other. I will discuss the role of language in the development of self-­concept in more detail later in this chapter; for now, let me note that pronoun use indicates an initial marking of a self in relation to others. There is an “I” that is being referred to. Second, mirror self-­recognition

The Autobiographical Self   29

is related to the display of what has been called the self-­conscious emotions: shyness, coyness, and embarrassment. These emotions depend on a sense that the self is being evaluated (perhaps negatively) in some way. Toddlers not only touch the mark on their forehead; they also show signs of embarrassment and turn away in shame from adults’ eyes, suggesting that they have a sense of being judged, which requires an understanding of a self that is being looked at and evaluated.

Self in the Past Early memory abilities indicate that even very young infants retain information over time; after all, it is hard to imagine any adaptive organism not being able to make use of previous experiences to learn about the surrounding world. But when does this evolve into an understanding of a past “me” who has had these experiences? Children begin to refer to past experiences virtually as soon as they begin to talk, at about 16 to 18 months of age (Eisenberg, 1985; Uehara, 2015). Note that this is the same age at which we see mirror self-­recognition. But at this early point in development, toddlers almost always refer to quite recent events, such as something that happened earlier that day or the day before, rarely referencing events from more than a few days ago. Between 20 and 28 months of age, toddlers will begin to use the past tense to refer to previous events and will start to use temporal terms such as “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” suggesting an incipient understanding of time as differentiated into past, present, and future. But at this point in development, “yesterday” refers to anything that happened in the past, whether the day before or weeks ago, and “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are often confused, suggesting a still fragile understanding of temporal relations (Uehara, 2015). For the most part, toddlers exist in the here and now, with an undifferentiated sense of the “not now.” Nelson (2006) has provided perhaps the best documentation of this progression by analyzing one young child’s bedtime monologues from 22 to 36 months of age. Like many children her age, Emily talked to herself before falling asleep, and much of what she talked about was what had happened to her that day and what she anticipated happening tomorrow. Although she was linguistically very advanced, Emily had difficulty marking time with tense and temporal terms, often evincing confusion and misunderstanding. Clearly apparent, however, was how hard she was working to try to understand what for her was a very complicated sense of time unfolding from past to present and into the future. So, we see the beginnings of children forming a sense of self in the past in these early verbalizations between the ages of two and three: marking tense, using temporal terms, and laying out temporal sequences of what happened and will happen. By age 3, most children are able to verbally recall quite accurate details of events that happened in the distant past, as much as six months ago, and use appropriate pronouns and tense markings (Fivush, Gray & Fromhoff, 1987; Uehara, 2015).

30   The Autobiographical Self

But a sense of self in the past at this age does not yet allow the child to create a personal timeline, which links what happened to a “me” who existed before to the “me” that exists now. This linkage is the crux of autobiography.

Linking the Present Self to the Past Self The ability to link a past “me” to a present “me” requires a new form of awareness, a subjective consciousness of an interior self that exists through time. This necessitates at least two new developmental skills: the ability to link not only a previous physical self to the current self, but – perhaps even more importantly – the previous mental self to the current self. It might seem that the ability to recognize oneself in the mirror, a relatively early achievement, also heralds the ability to recognize oneself physically over time, but this does not appear to be the case. In a very clever series of studies, Povinelli and his colleagues (Povinelli, 2001; Povinelli, Landry, Theall, Clark & Castille, 1999) adapted the mirror self-­recognition task to examine this question. During individual play sessions with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-­old children, the researchers surreptitiously placed a sticker on the child’s head, similar to the rouge-­marking task. But now, rather than placing the child in front of a mirror, they took the child into another room after a period of time to watch a video of the play session, which of course featured the child with a sticker on the head! The video viewing occurred at one of two intervals: either within the hour or a day or two later. Even when seeing the video just an hour later, 3-year-­olds did not realize that they still had a sticker on their head; they pointed to the video and laughed, and many even made comments suggesting they did not link the person on the video to themselves at all, saying things like, “Look, he’s wearing my shirt!” None of the 3-year-­olds reached up to remove the sticker on their head. Five-­year-olds, however, were very good at this task. When watching the video just after the play session, they immediately put their hands to their heads and pulled off the sticker, but for those who returned after a day or two and saw the video, they understood that the video was from a previous experience and that the sticker was no longer on their heads. They could differentiate temporal patterns and distinguish between a present self who does not have a sticker on the head, and a past self who does. Four-­year-olds were in transition. They understood they were seeing themselves on the video, but they reached up to remove the sticker from their heads whether they were watching less than an hour or days later. They had a clear mental representation of their physical self, but they could not reliably differentiate temporal patterns of that self, unable to accurately link their past physical self to the present physical self in time. The second developmental skill required to link the past to the present self is a subjective perspective that one is the same person over time – essentially consciousness of a self that is continuous, even if ever evolving. One may change one’s thoughts, emotions, attitudes, or even values, but these alterations are

The Autobiographical Self   31

explainable by physical, social, and emotional growth experiences (McLean, Pasupathi & Pals, 2007). Indeed, it is the very sense of a temporally extended subjective consciousness that allows us to experience ourselves as the same person over time irrespective of such changes by providing a sense of who one was, how one thought and felt, and how and why this has evolved over time, leading to the current subjective perspective (Fivush, Booker & Graci, 2017). Developing this type of subjective consciousness is quite complicated and occurs gradually across childhood and adolescence, an idea I will return throughout this book. But here I focus on the earliest glimmerings of this understanding. How and when do young children come to understand that their current mental state has a personal history, that their present thoughts and emotions are shaped by their past thoughts and emotions?

Acquiring Theory of Mind The above question is intrinsic to the broader concept of “theory of mind,” the understanding that human beings have internal states, beliefs, emotions, desires, and thoughts that may be the same as or different than those of others’, as well as the same or different for oneself over time (Wellman, 2002; 2018). I like chocolate ice cream, but my husband prefers vanilla. When I am sad, I want to watch old movies and have a good cry, but my best friend likes to go for an exhausting run in the local park. And in terms of my own self over time, I was furious at my sister yesterday for disagreeing with me about a problem at work, but after thinking it through today I realize that she was just trying to help me solve a difficult problem, for which I am now grateful. This idea that our internal states are both variable across people and, for ourselves, variable across time, is difficult for young children to grasp. A large body of research has examined multiple aspects of the development of theory of mind across the preschool years (see Wellman, 2002; 2018, for reviews), documenting a systematic growth in this kind of awareness, beginning with an early comprehension of beliefs and desires. Two- and 3-year-­olds evince a rudimentary understanding that different people may have different likes and dislikes and may want different things. My favorite treat is ice cream, but for my sister, it is potato chips. From an incipient understanding of different minds having different desires, children gradually develop a more complex grasp of false belief, the idea that someone can truly believe something about the world that is demonstrably not true. Toddlers find it difficult to fathom that thoughts may not accurately reflect reality. For example, when asked where my sister is, I can honestly answer that she is playing in her room, because that is where I last saw her, even though she is actually now in the backyard. Three-­year-olds insist that if my sister is actually in the backyard that I will somehow know this, and that I am lying if I say she is in the bedroom; by the end of the preschool years, most children recognize that thoughts are mental representations that have some basis in our perceptual

32   The Autobiographical Self

systems but may not always accurately represent either the current or past physical environment. I honestly believe my sister is in the bedroom, but this belief is false. I am not lying when I say she is in her bedroom; I am simply mistaken because that is the last place I saw her. My past knowledge has not been “updated” appropriately. So children’s developing understanding of how the mind works very much rests on how children come to link past mental representations about the world to current mental representations about the world. Preschoolers also have difficulty understanding how past emotional states relate to current emotional states. This is an especially challenging concept, both because there is no reference to a physical environment, and because it is not simply a matter of updating information, but of understanding how feeling one way in the past might influence how one is perceiving the present. This is best shown in a series of studies by Lagattuta and Wellman (2001; 2002). For example, they show a picture story to children between 3 and 6 years of age depicting a child who takes her pet rabbit to the park. A big, affable dog comes along, but despite its friendliness, the dog scares the child’s rabbit, which runs away, making the child very sad. A few days later, she returns to the park, as does the good-­natured dog. How does the child feel? Well, if we understand that the dog will remind her of her pet rabbit and was the cause of her distress, the girl should feel sad or upset. But if no link is made between the past experience and the current situation, perhaps the girl will be happy to see the large and good-­natured dog. Indeed, this is what 3-year-­olds think. They do not understand that the girl’s previous emotional experiences will color her current emotional reactions. Four- and 5-year-­olds are starting to understand the relations between previous experiences and current feelings, and so more of them say the girl will be unhappy or upset upon seeing the dog again, but it is only at age 6 that the majority of children make this link. Thus, it is not until the end of the preschool years that children come to understand that their current emotional state is modulated by their personal past experiences in a way that links mental states across time from a past “me” to the current “me.” Taken together, documented patterns indicate that the development of a temporally extended sense of self is a gradual developmental process occurring throughout the preschool years. Whereas infants and very young children can recall their experiences, it is not until the end of the preschool years that children have a full understanding of a present self recalling a past self from one’s own subjective perspective. The ability to represent one’s self as an experiencer of events, as a continuous being with a past, present, and future who links specific episodic representations into meaningful sequences of events that define a person and a life, is the cornerstone of autobiographical memory, the biography of self (Barnes, 1998; Conway et al., 2004; Pillemer, 1998). Thus far, I have laid out some of the developmental achievements that undergird children’s growing ability to create an autobiographical self but have not yet addressed how these foundational abilities coalesce into the sense of an autobiography. To do this,

The Autobiographical Self   33

I return to two of my earlier claims, that autobiographical memory is uniquely human and that it can only emerge within sociocultural contexts that value certain forms of memory. A consideration of these claims points to the critical role played by language and narrative in the construction of autobiography (Donald, 2001; Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Nelson, 1993; 1996).

Language and Narrative in Autobiography I have sprinkled narrative examples throughout this book, both narratives produced by individuals and narratives co-­constructed between mothers and their young children, but I have yet to actually define narrative or explain why it is so fundamental. To put it simply, narratives are the way in which human beings understand their experiences (Bruner, 1990; 1991; Gottschall, 2012). Narratives carve the undifferentiated flow of experience into meaningful units with beginnings, middles, and ends (Ricoeur, 1991), connecting these smaller narrative chunks into larger, interrelated ones (my family dinner, embedded within my family vacation, embedded within my summer break). Perhaps most important, narratives move beyond what Bruner (1990) calls the landscape of action to the landscape of consciousness. Narratives go beyond what happened to include information about inner life, thoughts and emotions, and motivations and goals, explaining what has occurred in terms of human intentionality, creating a human drama of complex psychological and physical events coalescing into a meaningful story that makes “human sense.” And all of this is done through language. Although stories may be told in many formats, including pictures or dance, narratives are linguistic forms with a sequential organization that allows for the explicit expression of how events unfold, as well as the temporal and causal connections among those events (Chafe, 1990; Eakin, 2008; Labov, 1982). Through linguistically structured narratives, individuals create new forms of understanding self and others. Not only are narratives themselves linguistic forms, but narrative forms are learned through everyday language interactions, as illustrated in the co-­ constructed narratives presented above. In 2004 Katherine Nelson and I proposed a sociocultural developmental account of autobiographical memory and narrative which, along with some of our subsequent theory, I draw on here (Fivush & Nelson, 2004; 2006; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). We based our model on Vygotsky’s (1978) broader sociocultural model of development. Vygotsky argued that children are socialized to become competent members of their culture; if a skill is important in a given culture, children will be drawn into activities that help them learn this skill and, across development, will be asked to participate more fully in these activities as they master the skill. Literacy, a  critical skill in industrialized cultures, is an excellent example. Walk into most  homes with infants or toddlers in an industrialized culture, and you will see examples of literacy everywhere – magnetic letters and numbers on the refrigerator, alphabet and number books strewn about, letters and numbers on

34   The Autobiographical Self

clothes, toy blocks, and crib mobiles. Stay a while and you will hear alphabet songs and rhyming games. In all of these ways, infants and toddlers are learning that these funny little squiggles are important, that they have meaning, while activities are structured in ways that shepherd the child into literacy. As children develop, they are expected to master these skills, singing the alphabet, counting to 10, creating rhymes, and reading picture books; with increasing age, greater participation and mastery of these skills is expected. Just as literacy is an essential cultural skill, so is having a coherent autobiography, although this is culturally variable, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 12. Perhaps especially in modern industrialized cultures, where family members move from place to place and individual achievement and autonomy is valued, children must learn to tell a coherent story of self to provide continuity that family and place may more consistently provide in more traditional cultures (Fivush, 2010a; Nelson, 2003: McAdams, 2001). Think about applying to college, or going on a job interview, or meeting a possible romantic partner. Individuals are expected to be able to provide a coherent story of who they are and what they want to be. And just as with literacy, infants and toddlers are swept up into this activity essentially from birth. Family members whisper stories into infants’ ears to soothe and comfort them, telling them who they are and about the family they have been born into (Fiese, Hooker, Kotary, Schwagler & Rimmer, 1995). As soon as they can talk, children are asked to tell Mommy what happened at daycare, Daddy about today’s visit to the park, Grandma about the birthday party at a friend’s house. As early as preschool, children are asked to share these stories with others, recounting what they did over the weekend, or where they got their new, shiny toy. By elementary school, children are asked to write essays on what they did over the summer vacation; by middle school they are writing their autobiography. Clearly, the importance of providing a coherent story of self begins early and is rewarded. Language, an indispensable part of this process, is the most important tool that cultures offer (Vygotsky, 1978). Although language does not determine thought, it facilitates certain forms of thought over others (Boroditsky, 2001). In particular, for autobiographical memory language facilitates a narrative form that helps establish a canonical structure for expressing our experiences. To be clear, autobiographical memory is multisensory (Conway & Pleydell-­Pearce, 2000; Rubin, 2006); we recall sights, sounds, sensations, and so forth, some of which may be difficult to put into words, but language provides a form for expressing these multisensory experiences in ways that create higher levels of organization and coherence. Once we put our experiences into words, the way we describe them may change our subsequent memory (Dudai & Edelson, 2016). Language is a mode of expression for our personal experiences but, over time, it may also come to shape our understanding of those experiences. Perhaps most important, it is only through language that we can fully share our past experiences with others. We may be able to refer to objects that are

The Autobiographical Self   35

physically present now and were physically present then, but outside of language, it is hard to imagine how we would be able to communicate our thoughts and emotions about past events, or to understand others’ thoughts and emotions about their pasts. Without language, it is not clear how we could coherently express whole sequences of integrated experiences and emotions to others who were not there with us, nor how they would do this for us. Language allows for the seamless back and forth of sharing our past blended into our present with others, as we saw in Rebecca’s narrative, and in so doing, it provides both the form and the process of creating a coherent personal past. It is only through sharing our past with others through language that we come to understand our personal experience as our own. And this process begins early in development, as parents invite children into this very human form of interaction through the process of parent-­guided reminiscing about past experiences. It is in these early parent-­guided reminiscing conversations that children begin to construct a temporally extended self, a present self recalling a past self from one’s own perspective.

The Social Construction of a Temporally Extended Self Children are drawn into co-­narrating their personal experiences by parents who ask questions, suggest possible answers, confirm, negate, and generally help them structure their experiences into more organized and communicative forms. This process begins before children are even able to participate and continues throughout childhood and adolescence, as they become more competent narrators of their own experience. Much of the rest of this book describes this process in detail, examining in particular individual and family differences and why they matter for the development of autobiographical selves. To begin, I present the framework for how these parentally structured narratives facilitate the development of the temporally extended self through the preschool years, as illustrated by the following co-­constructed narrative between a mother and her 4-year-­old daughter, Sarah, talking about the previous Friday night when Sarah’s friend, Melinda, slept over. In the exchange, Sarah expresses contradictory emotions – anger that Melinda slept in her bed and sadness that Melinda had to go home on Saturday – which her mother helps to tease out and shape into a more coherent story. Sarah’s Narrative Mother:  I remember when you were sad. You were sad when Melinda had to leave on Saturday, weren’t you? Sarah:  Uh huh. Mother: You were very sad. And what happened? Why did you feel sad?

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Sarah:  Because Melinda, Melinda say, was having [unintelligible word]. Mother: Yes. Sarah:  And then she stood up on my bed and it was my bedroom. She’s not allowed to sleep there. Mother:  Is that why you were sad? Sarah: Yeah. Now it makes me happy. I also, it makes me sad. But Melinda just left. Mother:  Uh huh. Sarah:  And then I cried. Mother:  And you cried because … Sarah:  Melinda left. Mother:  Because Melinda left? And did that make you sad? Sarah:  And then I cried [makes “aaahhhh” sounds] like that. I cried and cried and cried and cried. Mother:  I know. I know. I thought you were sad because Melinda left. I didn’t know you were also sad because Melinda slept in your bed. Even though this appears to be a somewhat disorganized, incoherent narrative, multiple complex cognitive processes are at work, underscoring how these kinds of conversations facilitate the development of a temporally extended autobiographical self. Table 3.1 describes five ways that parentally guided reminiscing propels children’s cognitive processing and undergirds their developing understanding of self and other (Fivush & Nelson, 2006). First is beginning to understand that a memory is a representation of an event experienced in the past and, as such, different people may recall different details or aspects of the event. It is only through reminiscing with others that we become aware that what I remember may or may not be the same as what you remember and, through this realization, come to understand that my memory is a mental representation rather than a direct copy of the world. We see this process at work in the conversation between Sarah and her mother as her mother genuinely questions Sarah about what she recalls; in doing this, the mother is implicitly teaching Sarah that not everyone who experienced the same event recalls the same information. But it is not just that details may differ. As already discussed, a person needs to have a sense of the present self experiencing a past self. Again, we see Sarah’s mother helping her make these connections. First, Sarah’s mother attributes a past internal state to Sarah (“I remember when you were sad”) but does not assume that Sarah is still sad. Again, the implicit message is that the self can have different states over time. Further, these internal states have causes in the real world; there is ample discussion over why Sarah was sad! Moreover, the mother

The Autobiographical Self   37 TABLE 3.1 Relations

between parent–child reminiscing, child’s cognitive processing, and child’s developing understanding of self and other

Parent–Child Reminiscing

Child’s Cognitive Processing

Child’s Developing Understanding of Self and Other

Negotiations about what occurred

Representational theory of memory

Self as having unique memory of past event

Use of internal state language about child

Coordination of past self with present self

Self as having temporally extended mind

Use of internal state language about others

Coordination of past other to present other

Other as having temporally extended mind

Negotiations about past internal states

Coordination of past self to Self and other as having past other; unique perspective on past Perspectival theory of event memory

Narrative structure: Causal explanatory framework

Coordination of internal states with motivation and behavior

Self and other as psychological entities extended over time

Source: Fivush & Nelson (2006).

expresses her own internal states as being confused and different than the child’s (“I did not know you were also sad because Melinda slept in your bed”), underscoring that self and other can feel and know different things at different times, and that all of this is open to negotiation. The mother is expressing that she, too, has variable internal states and now knows something she did not know before, demonstrating her own extended mind. Notice as well that the mother privileges Sarah’s access to Sarah’s own internal states, and that her daughter has a unique perspective on the event of which the mother was unaware. Through using internal state language, both talking about her own internal states and eliciting and validating Sarah’s internal states, the mother is helping Sarah to understand the complexity of the “landscape of consciousness” over time and in different people. Finally, although Sarah is obviously engaged and providing information, her verbal contributions seem incoherent. Yet the mother pulls them together, eliciting additional information, making causal connections between actions and between mental states and external events, and finally, at the end, providing the overarching coherent narrative summary that unites Sarah’s inchoate thoughts: “I thought you were sad because Melinda left. I didn’t know you were also sad because Melinda slept in your bed.” Obviously, Sarah is not learning all of this in this one reminiscing interaction. But across the preschool years, in countless co-­constructed narratives, children are learning that they have their own memories; what they remember may be

38   The Autobiographical Self

unique to them, both actions in the world and accompanying mental states, and thus they have a singular perspective on their memories. And just as important, others have their own as well. Each of us brings to the reminiscing context a unique set of memories, with our own understanding and perspective on what happened, and in sharing these memories, we each come away with a little better understanding of ourselves and of others. We also create more coherent memories of our own experiences, steeping our reminiscing in how we and others thought and felt while creating unique stories of self. But as the song from Gigi, “I remember it well,” shows, some of us seem to remember our past in more elaborate and emotional detail than others. It is to a consideration of individual differences in autobiographical selves that I now turn.

4 Maternal Reminiscing Style The Emergence of Individual Differences in the Autobiographical Self

When asked to talk about a shared special outing with her 40-month-­old daughter, Arlene, this mother selects an excursion to the Baltimore aquarium during a longer trip to visit family: Arlene’s Narrative Mother:  Remember when we first came in the aquarium? And we looked down and there were a whole bunch of birdies … in the water? Remember the name of the birdies? Arlene:  Ducks! Mother:  Nooo! They weren’t ducks. They had on little suits. Penguins. Remember what did the penguins do? Arlene:  I don’t know. Mother: You don’t remember? Arlene:  No. Mother:  Remember them jumping off the rocks and swimming in the water? Arlene: Yeah. Mother:  Real fast. You were watching them jump in the water, hmm? Arlene: Yeah. It is clear that Arlene does not recall this event very well, if at all. In fact, her one substantive recalled detail (“Ducks!”) seems to be wrong. But notice how the mother frames the event with her very first question, already providing a

40   Maternal Reminiscing Style

good bit of elaborate detail to place this event in time and describe what they were doing. When Arlene replies with what appears to be a wrong answer, the mother clearly negates Arlene but also perseveres, determined to tell a  story; with each question she provides a bit more detail, trying to cue Arlene and elicit some shared memory. Ultimately, the mother ends up telling the entire story, that they went to the aquarium and saw penguins in their little “suits” jumping on the rocks. It is a brief story, but it presents a sweet, shared experience between mother and daughter, and Arlene’s mother works hard to structure a coherent narrative about it. Contrast this with Charlie’s mother, who, asked to perform the same task, chose to discuss a car ride to Florida: Charlie’s Narrative Mother: Who else went with us? Think about who was in the car, when we went … Charlie: Tyler [his younger brother]. Mother:  Did Tyler go with us? Charlie: Yeah. Mother:  No, Tyler didn’t go with us. Who else went? Did Daddy go? Charlie: Yeah. Mother:  He did? Now think about who was in the car the day we went. Charlie: You and Daddy did. Mother:  Daddy wasn’t there. Who was sitting up front with Mommy? Like Arlene, Charlie seems to be having difficulty recalling this event, and also like Arlene, Charlie initially provides what the mother considers to be wrong information. But notice the very different way that Charlie’s mother handles his contribution. After Charlie’s first mistaken response, she questions him a second time about Tyler, and, when Charlie affirms his previous answer, she negates it. But rather than elaborate on some aspect of the event that might help him remember, as did Arlene’s mother, Charlie’s mother simply asks the same question again (“Who else went?”). Indeed, she even floats a leading question with wrong information (“Did Daddy go?”)! And when Charlie takes the bait, so to speak, she drags her response out before negating that Daddy had gone with them. After the mother repeats the question one last time (“Who was sitting up front with Mommy?”), Charlie simply stops responding. Whereas Arlene’s mother keeps the story going, sprinkling additional details in her questions while fashioning a little narrative that Arlene at least confirms, Charlie’s mother

Maternal Reminiscing Style   41

simply asks the same question over and over, with no sense of an emerging story and no resolution to the conversation. More than 30 years ago my students and I became fascinated with these kinds of differences in how mothers structure reminiscing conversations with their young children, and we began to explore these variations more systematically, studying if and how they might matter for children’s developing autobiographical memory and narratives (Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988; Fivush, Haden & Reese, 2006; Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993). In this chapter, I tell the story of our early research on maternal reminiscing style in the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University, how we first discovered and conceptualized maternal reminiscing style, and how this work has expanded to multiple other research labs around the country and around the world.

Defining Maternal Reminiscing Style: Early Beginnings Vygotsky’s developmental theory, discussed in the last chapter, proposes that children are drawn into activities that are culturally meaningful in order to learn critical skills and become competent adults in their own cultures. Given that the ability to construct a coherent narrative of self is imperative in industrialized cultures, we would expect to see adults, typically parents, drawing children into learning these narrative competencies early in their development. Further, because this is assumed to be a socially constructed skill, individual differences in how adults structure these activities with children should be directly related to children’s developing abilities. This was our starting point more than 30 years ago, when we began to study how mothers reminisce with their young children and, more specifically, how narrative structuring on the part of mothers in these reminiscing conversations may be related to children’s developing autobiographical skills. We were not the first to ask either how mothers help children remember (Ratner, 1984; Rogoff, 1990) or how mothers help children narrate (Engel, 1995; Peterson & McCabe, 1992). Our ideas, like all ideas, built on multiple foundations to examine if and how mother-­guided reminiscing might specifically facilitate autobiographical memory skills and the development of an autobiographical self.

Initial Questions We started with two basic questions: first, are there empirically demonstrable, individual differences in how mothers structure reminiscing conversations with their preschool children, and, second, if so, are these systematically related to differences in the development of children’s autobiographies? We started with preschoolers, the age at which children are beginning to be able to participate in conversations about their past experiences, as discussed in Chapter 3, in order to examine the early development of these skills. We also started with mothers,

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rather than fathers, in line with most of the research on parent–child interaction more generally both then and into the present (Paquette, 2004). I discuss this limitation in more detail, and expand my discussion to include fathers, in the next chapter, where I discuss possible gender differences in parent–child reminiscing. For now, I focus on delineating maternal reminiscing style. Before describing our early studies in more detail, I offer a brief overview of our general procedures – who participated in our studies and what we asked them to do.

Basic Methodology Our goal was to provide a systematic description of how mothers reminisce with their young children, and we wanted to capture this process as naturalistically as possible. We recruited mothers from the local area in which we were working, metro-­Atlanta, a fairly large city with a very diverse population in the southeastern United States. From a sociocultural perspective, characteristics of the family – both stable attributes, such as gender and culture, and more variable ones, such as socioeconomic status, education, and family structure – were all important to consider. In our initial research, families who agreed to participate were racially and ethnically diverse, although majority Caucasian; broadly middle class; and well educated, with all mothers having a high school diploma and most having at least some college education. In later research, a number of these family characteristics have been more fully studied; I return to a selection of these characteristics in later chapters. We told families that we were interested in how mothers and children communicate, remaining as vague as possible, so that mothers did not try to adapt their behavior to conform to what they thought we were looking for. We also conducted the interviews in the home, reasoning that mothers and children are likely more comfortable and more natural at home than in a laboratory setting. A female research assistant visited the home and, after chatting a bit and getting informed consent, asked the mother and child to sit in a comfortable place and to talk as they naturally would about two to three events that they had experienced together. Mothers were told that we were specifically interested in events that happened only one time, so that we could assess memory for a specific episode, and we suggested some possible examples, such as a trip to a museum or amusement park, or a special family outing (because these were quite young children, these types of events were still novel experiences). The assistant left the mother and child alone with an audio recorder and waited in an adjacent room reading or doing paperwork until the mother indicated they were finished. We decided not to videotape the interactions, because we did not want to heighten any self-­consciousness the mother might feel over participating in a study and being audio recorded. In this way, we reasoned we were getting as close as possible to what naturally happens in everyday conversation. I want to

Maternal Reminiscing Style   43

emphasize that in all of the research we have done with hundreds of families over the years, mothers have never needed much in the way of instruction to do this task. While mothers have displayed individual differences in how they engage in reminiscing with their young children, we have never encountered a mother who did not understand what we wanted her to do. This, alone, confirms that these types of conversations happen frequently in everyday conversation.

Are There Individual Differences in Maternal Reminiscing? In our first study of maternal reminiscing style (Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988), we asked mothers and their 3-year-­old children to discuss two or three events they had experienced together. All audio recordings were transcribed verbatim. When we began the process of examining these interactions, we were not sure what to look for or what we would find. But in listening to the audio recordings and reading the transcripts, we found it hard to ignore the kinds of differences illustrated in the two examples at the beginning of this chapter. Some mothers asked multiple questions, each adding more detail and building on the previous one, creating a sense of narrative tension and telling a small story. Other mothers barely did this. They asked a question, and if the child did not respond, they simply asked the same question again. The basic difference seemed to be one of elaboration, or how much rich detail mothers provided in each additional question. So we developed a more systematic way of coding for this factor, categorizing each utterance or sentence of the mother and child in three ways: providing new information, elaborating on already mentioned information, or repeating information. Indeed, we found that this dimension of elaboration served to differentiate mothers quite well. Across the various events they co-­constructed with their children, some mothers could be categorized as highly elaborative, asking many questions, incorporating rich detail, and – especially when the child was not really recalling anything – moving the story forward with additional details. In contrast, other mothers were low elaborative, asking simple, repetitive questions that offered few details. Arlene’s mother is highly elaborative, while Charlie’s mother is not. Thus, our first study established elaboration as a key dimension of a maternal reminiscing style.

Does Maternal Reminiscing Style Matter? As excited as we were by our initial findings, they raised many more questions than they answered: is maternal reminiscing style consistent across time? Across different children in the same family? If this is indeed a style, we would expect it to be a reasonably stable characteristic of the mother. And is this style specific to reminiscing, or is it just that some mothers talk in more elaborative ways about everything? Is it even about the mother, or are mothers responding to characteristics in their children, such as how well they are able to talk or to

44   Maternal Reminiscing Style

recall information? And if this is a stable maternal reminiscing style, does it have measurable effects on children’s developing autobiographical skills? These questions led us to design a longitudinal study that began to offer some answers. We enrolled families when the child was 40 months old, and we collected data at three additional time points: 46 months, 58 months and 70 months of age, meaning we worked with these families across two and a half years. This was an especially fun study because two young graduate students, Elaine Reese and Catherine Haden, were involved from the very beginning and stayed with the project until the end, with the result that we enjoyed several years working in a highly collaborative way with each other and with the enrolled families, learning about maternal reminiscing style together (Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993). These data allowed us to examine many questions, and some of our major findings are presented in Figure 4.1. Our first and most pressing question, of course, was whether maternal reminiscing style was stable over time. Children’s language, communication, and memory skills develop rapidly from 40 to 70 months of age, so we assumed all mothers would become more elaborative as their children became increasingly able to participate in these conversations. But would mothers who were more elaborative compared to their counterparts when their children were 40 months of age remain more elaborative than their less elaborative counterparts as their children grew older? The answer is a resounding yes, as can be seen by the correlations displayed at the top of the figure, showing that mothers who were highly elaborative early in development compared to their maternal peers remained highly elaborative across this two-­and-a-­half-year period. Not surprisingly, mothers who were more elaborative also had children who recalled more detailed information. That is, at each age in the study, children of .47* .57** Mother Elaborations

.47*

Mother Elaborations

.46*

Mother .70*** Elaborations .50*

Mother Elaborations

.57**

.60**

.66**

Child Memory Responses

Child Memory Responses

FIGURE 4.1 Cross-lagged

.85*** .69*** Child Memory Child Memory .69*** Responses Responses .59**

correlations between maternal elaborations and children’s memory responses.

Source: Reese, Haden & Fivush (1993). Note: * Peter:  < integrated > Mother:  yourself as I said, you had friends, especially Dennis > Peter:  the other Dennis > Mother:  And another Dennis, right, I would say this being uncomplicated runs like a thread through your life up to today; would you see it the same way? Peter: Yeah, I can actually only confirm this. Well when – to judge one’s own character is not so easy, but if you put it like that now, I think I can only confirm. Most things I don’t take as a problem. Mother:  He’s got a talent; you just sit down at the drums and play, and it always sounds fantastic! Peter: Well this – I’ve definitely got a musical talent, but has, have, and never had the – ehm to develop it. Mother:  Do you remember that as a small boy, you were maybe 2 or 3, you built yourself a drum kit? Peter: Yeah, I’ve seen the pics with cardboard boxes and pots? The mother interweaves temporal information with evaluation of these experiences, explaining that Peter is an uncomplicated person who easily integrates himself into whatever situation he finds himself in. The mother also temporally links early experiences of building a drum kit with later emerging talents as a musician. The whole life story is about defining common themes across Peter’s life. This exchange illustrates how, at a point when early adolescents are struggling with creating a coherent temporal autobiography, mothers focus on helping their children create these temporal timelines, and as adolescents begin

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to engage in more subjective perspectives on their lives, mothers begin to help them shape these coherent subjective views of self that carry evaluative personal meaning. Clearly, the ways that parents, and perhaps especially mothers, directly scaffold children’s emerging personal narratives and life stories remain important as children develop through adolescence. Of course, it is rare that individuals actually narrate an entire life story. Rather, as adolescents develop more organized ways of thinking about their lives as coherent wholes, with one event leading to another in causal and explanatory ways, they begin to narrate individual episodes in more meaning-­laden ways, referring back to previous experiences that led to this one, flashing forward to how the specific episode reverberates in their present life, and making explicit links between the experience and their sense of self, i.e., how it changed them for better or worse, or led them to new values and commitments. As we see in Mandy’s story, this kind of narrative meaning-­ making matters for our sense of self and well-­being.

Narrative Meaning-­Making, Voice, and Well-­Being Personal narratives inform self and well-­being in multiple ways. Narrative coherence and elaboration are related to how clear and compelling a story is for self and others. The level of subjective perspective – the inclusion of internal state language that expresses the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of self and others – explicitly reflects on the meaning of the event for the self, as Mandy does in saying, “Our friendship taught me so much. I learned how to allow people I barely knew into my life and allow them to know things about me that others do not,” or even more explicitly, as in Pamela’s narrative, also in Chapter 2: “I felt clarity, like this is who I am, this is where I’m supposed to be. I knew that my life had meaning.” Further, the themes that an individual chooses to highlight inform the kinds of beliefs and values he or she holds. Among these, themes of agency and communion may be particularly important (Bakan, 1966; McAdams, Hoffman, Day & Mansfield, 1996). Agency focuses on individual autonomy, on mastery and achievement, whereas communion focuses on relationships, care, and community. These are not mutually exclusive; most individuals experience and express both themes in their lives, but the question is whether one theme dominates the other, and what that might mean about creating individual meaning. We begin to see increases in all these forms of meaning-­making across the adolescent and early adult years (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a). How individual adolescents begin to weave together these various forms of meaning-­making to create more or less coherent, elaborated, reflective, agentic, and communal narratives that define self across time begins to define a narrative style, a voice. Narrative voice emerges from a history of family reminiscing, and, perhaps not surprisingly, is linked to both gender and to emotional well-­being.

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Gendered Narrative Voices With the emergence of more complex and sophisticated autobiographies in adolescence, we also begin to see increasing differences in how girls and boys tell their stories (Fivush, Bohanek, Zaman & Grapin, 2011). As mentioned in Chapter 5, gender differences in autobiographical narratives emerge as early as age 4, but in adolescence these differences become more pronounced. Adolescent girls narrate more detailed, more emotionally expressive, and more communally oriented narratives than do adolescent boys, and these differences are consistent through adulthood (see Grysman & Hudson, 2013, for a review). Looking at the narrative examples already presented, Deidre’s is about a birthday party, being with friends, and helping others, and it is studded with emotions and evaluations of the experience. Similarly, Mandy’s narrative is about developing meaningful friendships during her summer school program, folding in a range of emotions and internal reflections. Moving into adulthood, Pamela’s narrative centers on the meaning of life being defined by her relationship with her child. In contrast, boys’ narratives, while highly meaningful, focus more on autonomous achievements and offer less reflection on feelings, as illustrated in 18-year-­old Richard’s narrative about his father’s death three years previously:

Richard’s Narrative Three years ago my dad fell in the kitchen and went into cardiac arrest. I tried to save him and handle the situation as best as I could. Unfortunately, he died. Whereas most people fall after the death of a loved one, I rose. I was only 16, and I lost my foundation, the house was crumbling and it was up to me, my mom, and sister to alter the shape and rise back up. His death changed me a lot. I became more open, understanding, started to let people in and to get to know me. I matured and carried a heavy load. Psychologically I was brittle, but music, my inspiration, my love, my life, kept me going strong. This event changed me from a boy to a man. Richard narrates a highly coherent and quite meaningful narrative about the death of his father and its aftermath. But notice several things: First, his reference to emotion is metaphorical rather than direct. He never uses an actual emotion word, but only words that indirectly describe emotion, inserting, perhaps, some distance between the emotional impact and himself. Second, although he mentions other family members, he talks about the experience of the death as an impetus for autonomous growth, commenting on how he grew stronger, not how his relationships grew stronger. Certainly, this is a highly redemptive story, but it is a story of individual triumph over a difficult event,

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not a coming together. Even though both Richard and Mandy talk about becoming more open to new people in their lives as a result of their experiences, for Richard this is expressed as a personal triumph of growing from a boy to a man, whereas for Mandy it is expressed as a communal achievement she learned through her relationships, and her goal is to be with these new friends again. Further, Mandy details many of the specific activities, feelings, and experiences she shared with her friends, telling a long, elaborated story of building relationships over time, and how these relationships impacted her sense of self. Richard, in contrast, mentions relationships in passing, and does not speak to how the relationships changed him, but rather how his autonomous growth has allowed him to have different kinds of relationships. A particularly interesting example of this gender difference is how adolescents tell stories about their own birth. Birth stories are an interesting pivot point between family and individual life stories. Although an individual life begins at birth, we do not recall this experience, learning about it only through others. Thus, stories of our own birth constitute family stories that mark the beginning of our individual life story (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008; Reese, Hayne & MacDonald, 2008). Surprisingly few studies have examined how mothers tell their children the story of their birth (although see Reese, Hayne & MacDonald, 2008; Reese & Neha, 2015, for cultural differences in birth stories). Hayden, Singer and Chrisler (2006) examined mothers and their adult daughters’ knowledge of the daughter’s birth story; daughters who knew more of the story were generally better adjusted and had higher self-­esteem than daughters who knew little of the story of their birth. This leads us to ask how adolescents might narrate their own birth story. Given that it is a story heard and not recalled, and that it is almost always the mother who tells the story, will it reflect a more female narrative style that mirrors the mother’s mode of expression, or will it reflect the gendered style of the adolescent narrator? In the Family Narratives Lab, we asked 13- to 16-year-­old children to tell us the story of the day they were born (Andrews, Zaman, Merrill, Duke & Fivush, 2015). Overall, girls told longer, more coherent, more elaborated, more emotionally expressive, and more communally related narratives about the day they were born than did boys. In fact, almost all of the girls we interviewed had a story about the day they were born, whereas few of the boys did. All of the adolescents who had stories had been told these stories by their mothers, underscoring that it is mothers who are passing on these stories to their children. For example, here is 12-year-­old Ava’s response when asked to tell about the day she was born: Ava’s Narrative Um … hm … they were at my cabin and my mom and I think someone related to her or something was up there and she started having what they call … um I don’t know the

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name … contractions. And she was like, “Oh, I’m fine.” And the person, her friend or something, was like, “No, I think you’re about to have a baby.” So she went to [unintelligible] and used the phone and her um … her um doctor said, “You need to come home right now.” So they drove home and she went to her friend’s house, Laura’s … and she like took a shower and stuff ’cause she had been constructing our cabin with my dad and my grandpa. And … and then went to the hospital and then I remember once that right after, like I think the day after my grandpa was with us and my dad and my grandpa went out to eat breakfast and they had like pancakes and all this stuff and my mom was getting out of the hospital and they didn’t bring her anything and she was really mad ’cause she wanted pancakes. This is a quite detailed story, covering events before, during, and after the birth while including multiple family members and friends, as well as being highly elaborative and integrating direct speech, emotions, and evaluations. This is clearly a story that has been told and listened to, one with obvious personal meaning for Ava. Contrast this with the birth story told by 12-year-­old Matthew: Matthew’s Narrative Interviewer:  Do you know what happened on the day you were born? Matthew:  No. I don’t really remember. Interviewer:  Has anyone ever told you that story? Matthew:  Uh-­uh. Interviewer:  Okay. Do you know where you were born? Matthew:  In the hospital. That’s about all I know. [laughs] Interviewer:  Good answer. Do you know what time of day you were born? Matthew:  Uh, nope. I know I was born on April 13th. Interviewer:  Is there anything else you remember? Matthew:  No. Oh, when I was born, I was born on a Monday, but they actually thought it was a Friday, so they told me I was born on Friday the 13th my whole life and we just figured out, like a couple of months ago, that it was like a Monday or a Tuesday.Yeah. So I guess they kinda forgot what day I was born. But yeah.

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When first asked, Matthew simply says he does not remember his birth (which of course he doesn’t!). When the interviewer pushes a little bit, Matthew provides some facts, that he was born in a hospital and the date. After one last attempt to elicit some kind of story, Matthew does end up providing what seems to be quite important information, about the family misremembering the day of his birth, ultimately dismissing this as not very meaningful. For Ava, the story of the day she was born seems to provide a sense of the family she was born into, but for Matthew, it is simply not relevant. Birth is the anchor of our life story, and girls appear to have a more elaborative, emotional, and communal anchor than do boys. And this may be one more way in which mothers and daughters share the past differently than do mothers and sons or fathers and their children.

Gender Identity Gender differences in autobiographical stories are consistent, from telling stories of our birth to multiple and varied significant events of our lives, but the explanation of these gender differences is a bit more elusive. Certainly, some of the gender differences in parental reminiscing documented throughout this book play a role, but there is a great deal of variability within gender groups as well. One reason for this variability is that gender may simply be more important to some individuals than to others. That is, for some people, being female or male is a critical and defining part of their identity. Perhaps defining being female as very important for who one is in the world facilitates more gendered personal narratives. Azriel Grysman and I examined this possibility in a series of studies (Grysman, Merrill & Fivush, 2017; Grysman, Fivush, Merrill & Graci, 2016), assessing individuals on their gender identity, the extent to which they identified as being female or male, and the extent to which this identity was important for defining their sense of self. We found the expected variability in self-­ reported gender identity; some women and men self-­reported gender as being highly salient to their identity and some did not. Surprisingly, however, gender identity had little relation to the narratives. Regardless of self-­reported gender identity, young women provided more elaborated and emotionally expressive personal narratives than young men. These findings suggest that gender differences in narratives are deeply embedded in our ways of expressing ourselves and reflect implicit and nonconscious ways of being in the world. Gendered styles of narrative may both reflect and construct our very sense of what gender means (Fivush & Marin, 2018). Certainly our findings of parental differences in reminiscing suggest that mothers and fathers engage in this activity in different ways, and findings of gender differences in how boys and girls come to tell the stories of their lives further suggest that these parental styles establish models for children’s growing understanding of how to narrate in gendered ways. This certainly matters for how we understand our experiences and relationships, but it may also matter for our sense of emotional well-­being.

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Narrative Voice and Well-­Being Adults who narrate their lives in more detailed, coherent, and emotionally expressive ways show higher levels of well-­being, exhibiting fewer symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression and a higher sense of self-­worth, meaning, and purpose in their lives (see Adler, Lodi-­Smith, Philippe & Houle, 2015 for a review). For children, who are dependent on adults to help them construct these kinds of meaningful narratives, we have seen how those who engage in more elaborative and emotionally expressive family reminiscing show higher levels of emotional regulation and self-­esteem. With adolescence and the emerging ability to construct one’s own life story in these more meaning-­laden ways, we also start to see stronger relations between adolescents’ narratives and their well-­being. But surprisingly, this is a rocky road to travel. When children and adolescents independently narrate their experiences, especially difficult and challenging experiences, without an adult to help scaffold that narrative, trying to make sense of it may actually raise their anxiety levels. They may not yet have the narrative and emotional regulation skills to use narrative meaning-­making to successfully manage and resolve these experiences, let alone grow from them. Indeed, we see surprisingly negative effects when children are asked to narratively reflect on difficult experiences: 8- to 12-year-­old children who engage in more narrative meaning-­making, including explanations and attempts at resolutions, when asked to write about highly stressful and challenging experiences actually show increased levels of anxiety afterwards (Fivush, Marin, Crawford, Reynolds & Brewin, 2007). From early to late adolescence, about ages 12 to 18, we begin to see a rise in narrative meaning-­making, including an increase in drawing life lessons from past experiences, as well as in the use of emotion language to reflect on and evaluate past experiences. While in early adolescence, before about age 16, adolescents who engage in more narrative meaning-­making and emotional expression and explanation may actually exhibit lower levels of well-­being. After about age 16, higher levels of narrative meaning-­making begin to predict higher levels of well-­being, with higher emotional expressivity relating to higher self-­esteem (McLean & Breen, 2009; McLean, Breen & Fournier, 2010). For example, high school seniors who were able to narrate a specific turning point experience, an event that changed their life in highly meaningful ways, showed increased well-­being compared to their assessed level of well-­being in 9th grade, as well as compared to high school seniors who were not able to narrate a meaningful turning point event (Tavernier & Willoughby, 2012). These patterns hold across culture; across European, Chinese, and Maori adolescents in New Zealand, younger adolescents who tell more causally coherent narratives show lower levels of well-­being, whereas older adolescents who tell more causally coherent narratives show higher levels of well-­being (Reese et al., 2017). The patterns suggest that adolescents must first gain independent control

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over narrative structure and meaning-­making in order for narratives to begin to regulate emotion and sense of self. In examining research on gender differences in adolescents’ personal nar­ ratives together with relations between narratives and well-­being across adolescence, we might expect to see gender differences in how narrative meaning-­making relates to well-­being, especially in terms of emotional expressivity, which manifests the most marked narrative gender differences. Once again, however, the picture is complicated. Adolescent girls do include more emotional content in their personal narratives than do boys, but it seems that emotionally expressive personal narratives are more tightly related to well-­being for young adolescent boys than for girls (Bohanek & Fivush, 2010; McLean & Breen, 2009). It may be a question of threshold. Perhaps a certain amount of emotional expressivity is sufficient to allow for the expression and regulation of emotion, and since girls are already doing a great deal of this, doing more is no more effective for them, whereas for boys, because they are not doing very much of this, doing more is helpful. The other possibility is that expressing and explaining too much emotion may begin to dip into dysfunction, becoming a form of unhelpful rumination. Girls and women ruminate more than boys and men, brooding over negative emotional experiences and feelings to a greater extent, and this is a risk factor for depression (Nolen-­Hoeksema, Wisco & Lyubomirsky, 2008). Thus far, I have highlighted the positive aspects of family and personal reminiscing, but in Chapter 12, I address the dark side of family narratives. What we do know is that by late adolescence, both girls and boys benefit from coherent and meaning-­laden narratives, although the developmental trajectories may be complicated and gendered.

Beyond Adolescence: Narrative Identity and Well-­Being Adolescence seems to encompass the difficult terrain of developing one’s abilities to create more meaning-­laden personal narratives while struggling to use those narratives in positive ways to define self and regulate emotion. But once individuals become young adults, relations between narrative identity, meaning-­ making, and well-­being are clear and consistent. The now substantial body of research documenting these many positive relations is beyond the scope of my focus on family reminiscing, but it is important to note that from one’s early 20s through old age, constructing coherent, meaningful personal narratives defines a more positive sense of self and well-­being in the world while infusing life with a sense of meaning and purpose (see Adler et al., 2015, for a review). And of course for parents, the ability to engage children in this kind of reminiscing is critical for their children’s development as well. Thus we see the cycle of reminiscing, with coherent and emotionally explanatory family reminiscing early in development setting the stage for the development of positive individual narrative identity, which in turn sets the foundation for engaging as a parent in

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more elaborated and coherent reminiscing with the next generation. Family reminiscing may both create and transmit narrative skills and values across the generations.

Summary Adolescence signals rapid changes in both individual abilities and societal expectations. As children navigate these turbulent waters, they begin to construct overarching life narratives that define who they are as a person now, in the past, and into the future, anchoring their autobiographical self. But importantly, these expanding temporal and subjective perspectives on adolescents’ own experiences are still scaffolded in parent–child reminiscing that helps adolescents create a personal time line and an evaluative perspective that gives voice to their experience. Just as early parentally scaffolded reminiscing is tied to a sense of self and well-­being, adolescents’ emerging personal narratives begin to establish a foundation for understanding self and regulating emotion, although this is a surprisingly protracted development across the adolescent years. Moreover, while I have focused here on the construction of an individual life narrative, individual lives remain deeply embedded in family contexts. In Chapter 8, I noted the surprising frequency of family intergenerational story telling. Children and adolescents are immersed in stories that move beyond the self to include parents,  grandparents, and family history across the generations. How might these kinds of stories inform individual identity and become woven into the autobiographical self?

10 Beyond the autobiographical self The Intergenerational Self

As April’s narrative about her mother’s lost lip gloss demonstrates, even quite young children show an interest in learning about their parents’ childhood experiences. Similarly, even around an everyday dinner table, such stories can be collaboratively constructed, as illustrated by Becca’s and Aaron’s narratives, told often and, at least sometimes, listened to closely. How are family stories integrated into the autobiographical self in ways that extend the boundaries of our own life across the generations?

Intergenerational Narratives as Frameworks Intergenerational narratives sit at the nexus of the person and the larger culture (see Merrill & Fivush, 2016, for a full theoretical review). As stories experienced and recounted by an older family member, and received by a younger family member, they belong in the microsystem of the teller but the exosystem of the listener, expanding the latter’s world beyond their direct experience, as depicted in Figure 8.1. Moreover, because these stories are often about a time when the listener was not yet alive, as in stories about parents’ childhoods, they move into the macrosystem, describing historical moments accessed only through narrative while serving as models not only of the ways in which the past and present worlds are both similar and different, but also of the stability and modulation of people and relationships over time, of how and why things can go well or badly, and of the lessons one can take from all of this. Families tell stories of their past to inform the younger generation of who they were, who they are, and who they will remain as a family, and what that means (McLean, 2015; Pratt & Fiese, 2004). Intergenerational narratives provide models of both narratives and selves for adolescents; they express ways of understanding what a life looks like, how

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experiences should be evaluated, and what it means to be an individual that is part of this family. These are the stories that seep into our individual ways of understanding our experiences and narrating our lives. But what kinds of stories are being told, and how are children and adolescents hearing them?

Intergenerational Narratives Told and Heard Even in infancy, 96 percent of parents and grandparents report telling family stories to this new family member, stories of exploits and adventures that begin to describe the family that this little one has been born into (Fiese et al., 1995). As April’s narrative illustrates, preschool children ask for stories about their parents, stretching their understanding to a time before they were born, when their parents were little, like them. Intriguingly, these stories are influenced by both gender of the parent and age of the child (see Merrill & Fivush, 2016, for a review). When children are quite young, parents focus more on stories about affiliation, family relationships and bonds, but as children develop into middle childhood and become increasingly immersed in a world of comparisons and competition, parents begin to tell more stories about achievement, working hard, and reaching goals (Fiese & Skillman, 2000). The more difficult or subtle stories, stories about moral dilemmas and transgressions, such as lying or cheating, do not seem to be told with any frequency until adolescence (Thorne, McLean & Dasbach, 2004). Relatedly, parents report telling stories to their children that match their own age at time of experience, i.e., stories about when they were very little to their preschoolers, and stories about when they were adolescents to their adolescents (Merrill, Booker & Fivush, in press). So it seems that parents are using these stories, either implicitly or explicitly, as ways to identify with and help their child understand the particular developmental challenges they are currently facing, a phenomenon McLean (2015) calls “developmental matching.” But to what extent are children hearing these stories, and why do they think their parents are sharing them? My students, colleagues, and I have now conducted several studies in the Family Narratives Lab asking adolescents and young adults to tell stories they know about their mothers and their fathers growing up. In some studies we have left the question quite open, asking for any story they might know, and in other studies we prompt for specific types of stories, such as events that define who your mother or father is as a person, or a time that they did something wrong, or felt guilty, or particularly proud. Across these studies, well over 90 percent of the adolescents we asked were able to tell us stories they knew about both their mother’s and father’s childhoods, and they heard virtually all of these stories from their parents (Merrill, Booker & Fivush, in press). Clearly, parents are telling these stories and children are hearing them. Again, adolescents and young adults reported stories about their parents when their parents were about the same age as the child, again suggesting that these stories are usually told

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and heard when developmentally appropriate, or matched. When asked why they thought their parents told them this story, about two-­thirds of the adolescents and young adults we studied said it was to teach them a life lesson, something about how the world worked. The second most frequent reason was to learn something about who the parent was as a person. We can see both of these aspects in 12-year-­old Nancy’s response when asked to tell a story she knows about her mother, when her mother was growing up: Nancy’s Narrative Um, I think she was in sixth or seventh grade. Yeah, it was middle school, and she was going to class and she saw these two twins that had always, always been picked on and some boys and girls I think were just crowded around them and calling them names and everything. And, actually, it was just one of the twins. And she was just sitting there crying and she couldn’t do anything. And my mom felt so bad, she went up and she grabbed the girl and she said, “Come with me now,” and she stormed off and just took ’er up to the office and she said, “This girl needs some help. Will you please help her?” And then she ran to her class, but she was late and um so my mom’s teacher got really, really angry, ’cause she didn’t have a pass or anything and so she gave her a detention I think. And my mom just didn’t have the courage just to fight back because it was a big, scary teacher. So she just didn’t fight back and um so she told me that I think when I didn’t have the courage to stand up to a teacher or tell a teacher that I was struggling in the class or something. So she just told me that story and said, you know, I shouldn’t … she said that I should have written the teacher a letter because verbally speaking is really, really difficult. So she said, “I wish that I had, you know, sat down later that night and written my teacher a letter and stuck it in her mailbox. And then maybe the teacher would have realized what I had been doing and that it was a good thing and that I was trying to help someone out.” So um I mean I’ve written teachers letters now and it helps me to actually understand and for the teacher to understand, too. This is a highly coherent, detailed story about Nancy’s mother when she was about Nancy’s age now, and Nancy listened to it closely. It showcases the kind of person Nancy’s mother is, one who helps someone in distress. Nancy elaborates on her mother’s internal thoughts and feelings during this event, and the ample dialogue in this narrative indicates how present this story is for Nancy, how real it feels. She ends by explicitly noting that her mother told her this

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story to help her with a challenge Nancy herself is currently experiencing with a teacher, along with a strategy for working through it. The connection between Nancy and her mother is unmistakable, and the meaning of her mother’s story for own life is clear. Nancy’s narrative also illustrates the kinds of gender differences we see in intergenerational narratives. While both mothers and fathers adapt their stories to their child’s current age, differences remain in the kinds of stories they tell, and how they tell them. Throughout their offspring’s childhood and adolescence, mothers tell intergenerational stories that privilege affiliation and relationships, stories with communal themes, while fathers tell stories more focused on achievement and autonomy, stories with an agentic theme (Buckner & Fivush, 2000; Fiese & Bickham, 2004; Fiese & Skillman, 2000). Nurturing the next generation, mothers, as well as women more generally, also tell stories with more generative themes than do men and fathers (McAdams, 2004b). These gender differences in how mothers and fathers tell stories of their own childhoods mirror the gender differences we saw when parents co-­construct narratives about their children’s experiences, representing just one more way in which gendered narratives and gendered understandings of self and other are modeled in these family stories. Perhaps not surprisingly then, we also see differences in the stories adolescents tell about their mothers compared to those about their fathers. There are very few differences between girls and boys when adolescents tell stories about their parents, but both girls and boys tell stories about their mothers that are more elaborated, coherent, emotionally expressive, explanatory, evaluative, and communal than the stories they tell about their fathers. Nancy’s narrative is a good example of how elaborate and emotionally expressive stories about mothers typically are. In a similar vein, 14-year-­old Dave relates a story he knows about his mother when she was in high school: Dave’s Narrative Well, she was telling me that they were by the bus stop one day and this kid had been made fun of a lot and that she just didn’t want … like she was kinda tired of it and so she just said, “Why don’t you just stop making fun of this kid …?” and stuff. And it ended up that the bully … punched her in the nose. It was just so weird because, first of all, like you don’t usually hit a girl. I mean just … I don’t know; people just say that, but, when you think about it, I don’t know … But he just … he didn’t even know her, and he just punched her in the nose, and she actually had to go to the hospital and stuff. And so it just seems like a pretty mean thing to do for the bully and just a really courageous thing to do for my mom, just to stand up for some kid and get her nose broken.

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In many ways, Dave’s narrative is quite like Nancy’s, in that it spotlights a dramatic moment when the mother stood up for a bullied peer, thus expressing a high level of communion. Dave also incorporates direct speech, quotes that render his mother’s experience more immediate and intense. Notice also the emotional and evaluative aspects of the story, both how his mother felt and his own evaluation of how brave she was. The gender roles are likewise intriguing; Dave at first echoes a culturally shared moral imperative that boys not hit girls, but he instantly questions it, complicating, perhaps, his understanding of gender. Both Nancy and Dave end their narratives on learning a moral life lesson, the importance of standing up for those who are bullied, as well as for oneself. In contrast, when asked to tell a story he knows about his father’s childhood, Jason responds: Jason’s Narrative Well, my dad wants me to work at his office with ’im, like help ’im out and stuff, and he always tells me that he used to work at his dad’s grocery store. So he started working at a really young age and he started building up from there, so he wants me to work with ’im. All I know is that he worked there, and he started working there when he was like nine, ten, or something like that, just to earn a little extra money. This is clearly a story with a moral lesson – to work hard – and Jason makes a connection between his father and himself, but the story itself is general, in that it is not very detailed and contains little in the way of elaboration or emotional expression, supporting our finding that narrators typically tell stories that align with the gendered narrative conventions of the protagonist, rather than that of the narrator. In other words, when the story is about a female, the narrative is told in a female gendered way – perhaps because this is the way the mother initially told the story. Yet boys and girls tell their own personal narratives in gendered ways. That boys and girls tell stories about themselves that reflect their respective gendered roles, and stories about their parents that reflect their parents’ respective gendered roles, is further evidence that it is not that boys and girls are not capable of telling certain kinds of narratives, but that they choose to tell narratives that accord with the cultural norms of the protagonist’s gender, be it self or other. Boys can tell highly elaborated, communal, and emotionally expressive narratives about their mothers, but when asked to narrate about themselves, they most often choose not to. This underscores our contention that gendered narratives are a powerful framework within which children and adolescents learn the culturally conventional norms that prescribe what it means to be a male or female in the world.

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Regardless of these gender differences, we have learned that adolescents know and tell intergenerational narratives; what functions might these kinds of narratives serve for understanding self and regulating emotion?

Intergenerational Narratives, Identity, and Well-­Being We know that parentally scaffolded narratives about the child’s experiences that are coherent, elaborated, and emotionally expressive help young children develop a more positive sense of self and higher levels of emotional well-­being. Intergenerational narratives may extend the scaffolding beyond one’s own experience, situating it within a relatable family history that provides meaning for individual lives. In essence, intergenerational narratives may help adolescents frame an intergenerational self, a way of understanding themselves as a member of a family that provides both an historical and emotional anchor for their self-­ identity (Fivush, Bohanek & Duke, 2008). In fact, adolescents who tell more coherent and meaning-­laden narratives about their parents also report a more emotionally secure relationship with their parents (Zaman & Fivush, 2013). Just as specific aspects of parental scaffolding are related to positive sense of self and well-­being in children, specific aspects of the ways in which adolescents tell intergenerational narratives are related to positive outcomes. First, many adolescents make explicit connections to their own lives or sense of self in these stories, as we saw in Nancy’s narrative. They don’t just tell a story about their mother or father; they readily connect this story to something that is personally important. Second, many adolescents openly adopt the perspective of the parent in the story, again as we see in Nancy’s and Dave’s narratives, where they include information about what their mother was thinking and feeling and why. In a very real sense, these adolescents are getting inside their parents’ heads, allowing them to more fully embrace their parents’ subjective perspectives on an experience. Third, the use of direct speech enlivens the event with immediacy, with present relevance, sparing it from the flatness of a vague past. Finally, adolescents make the stories their own by adding their evaluations of the experience, layering their perspectives on top of their parents’ perspectives, as Dave does in his narrative: “and just a really courageous thing to do for my mom …” By making explicit connections, espousing the perspective of the parent, incorporating dialogue to render the event timely and real, and folding in their own evaluations of the event, adolescents may be using these kinds of intergenerational narratives to construct and understand new perspectives on the world and on themselves. Indeed, we have found that adolescents who tell more coherent intergenerational stories, and stories that make more explicit intergenerational links between themselves and their parents, as well as adolescents who take the perspective of their parent in these stories, narrating what their parent was thinking and feeling, show higher levels of identity exploration and achievement, higher

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sense of self-­worth, and fewer internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (Fivush et al., 2006; Fivush, Bohanek & Zaman, 2011; Fivush & Merrill, 2016). Interestingly, we also see gender differences in these correlations, finding that the relation between intergenerational narratives and sense of self and well-­ being is stronger and more consistent for adolescent girls and young women than for adolescent boys and young men. Still, the findings are quite remarkable; across multiple studies, we see strong relations between intergenerational narratives and personal identity and well-­being. This is particularly striking given the research reviewed in the last chapter suggesting that adolescents are still struggling to create meaningful narratives of their personal experiences that serve positive self and emotion regulation functions. Moreover, in multiple studies, we have examined the effects of intergenerational narratives while controlling for whatever positive effects personal narratives might have; that is, intergenerational narratives are related to positive outcome above and beyond any effects of personal narratives. That personal narratives are inconsistently and unevenly related to well-­being, but intergenerational narratives are clearly and consistently related to well-­being, offers strong evidence that these kinds of family stories provide a foundation for a healthy sense of self in the world. Are adolescents indeed using these stories as frameworks to model their personal stories?

Modeling Narrative Identity Being immersed in family storytelling both implicitly and explicitly informs children of the forms and functions of narratives in everyday life. In listening to and telling family stories, children and adolescents are learning how to better construct coherent and expressive narratives. Kate McLean (2015) posits that family stories provide a form of master narrative, a shared way of understanding the world that provides a specific form of narrative arc within families. There are at least three ways in which adolescents can use intergenerational narratives to internalize this narrative arc in the creation of their narrative identity: they can model specific narrative forms from intergenerational stories, such as coherence, elaboration, and emotional expressivity, in their own personal narratives; they can model larger life narrative arcs from their parents in the construction of their own life story; and in terms of the functions that narratives may serve, they can incorporate specific values and morals modeled in their parents’ stories into their own stories. We know from our research that parents are scaffolding all of these narrative forms and devices in their reminiscing about shared experiences and life narratives, but here we explore whether adolescents are modeling narrative forms heard in the stories parents tell about themselves. Looking first at whether adolescents are modeling narrative forms from their parents’ stories, we asked 13- to 16-year old adolescents in the Family Narratives Lab to tell us highly significant stories about themselves, the best thing that

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ever happened to them, and the worst thing that ever happened to them; in addition, we asked them to tell us stories about their mothers and their fathers (Merrill, Walsh, Zaman & Fivush, 2011). We compared how they told their personal stories to how they told their parents’ stories in terms of both coherence and emotional expressivity. Adolescent girls told stories about themselves and about their mothers that were similarly coherent and emotionally expressive, but there were no similarities between girls’ personal stories and the stories they told about their fathers. And for adolescent boys, there were no relations at all between their personal stories and the stories they told either about their mother or their father. So girls seem to be adopting a similar narrative style to their mother, but it is not clear that boys are adopting a parental narrative style. This finding echoes research by Carole Peterson, in which parents and adolescent children were asked to independently narrate an injury the child had incurred several years ago. Again, girls and mothers showed similar narrative styles, but there were no relations between girls and fathers or boys and either parent (Peterson & Roberts, 2003). In Chapter 5 I noted that girls share similar language styles with their mothers, but not with their fathers, and that we have found no relation between boys and either parent. So this broad similarity of language style between mothers and daughters appears to extend to narrative style as well. This finding seems related to previous findings that it is mostly for girls that a more coherent and elaborated intergenerational narrative is related to well-­being, suggesting an underlying pattern such that, for girls, the narrative ecology of the family is more critical for their own narrative development and well-­being than it is for boys. In addition to modeling parental narratives that focus on particular experiences, adolescents and young adults may also model their overarching life narratives on their parents’ life narratives. This is a new area of research by Dorthe Thomsen and her colleagues (Lind & Thomsen, 2018; Lind, Jørgensen, Heinskou, Simonsen, Bøye & Thomsen, in press), in which adolescents and young adults are asked to tell their own life story as a series of chapters, and the life story of a close other, such as a parent or friend. So far, the research has not fully differentiated between telling a life story of a parent versus a close friend, but initial results suggest that young people use their parents’ life stories as a model for constructing their own life narratives. This is an intriguing avenue for future research. Finally, there is good evidence that adolescents are internalizing their parents’ moral “voice” in their own personal narratives (see Wainryb & Recchia, 2014, for a full review of how parents and children talk about morality). Michael Pratt and his colleagues (Mackey, Arnold & Pratt, 2001; Pratt, Norris, Hebblethwaite & Arnold, 2008) have examined the extent to which adolescents internalize morals and values intentionally taught through parental storytelling, showing that adolescents incorporate the “voice” of their parents, and especially their moral lessons, into their own stories. We see this in both Nancy’s and Dave’s

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narratives, where each uses details of their mothers’ experiences to derive a larger moral lesson about the world. When asked what they learned from hearing stories about their parents’ experiences, adolescents and college students report that these kinds of stories help them think about who they themselves are as people and what their values are (Merrill et al., in press; Pillemer, Steiner, Kuwabara, Thomsen & Svob, 2015), indicating that these memories provide narrative models of how to be in the world.

Family History and the Benefits of Telling Family Stories One final aspect of the narrative ecology of family stories deserves attention: stories that extend beyond the present and recent past to encompass family timelines and the histories of parents, grandparents, and great-­grandparents, as in Jasmine’s family narrative about her great-­grandfather’s death. Families tell stories about the struggles and successes of family members through the generations. What might adolescents know about these more far-­ranging family histories, and does it matter for their sense of self and well-­being? Marshall Duke and I developed a simple 20-item “Do you know …?” questionnaire, asking whether adolescents and young adults know certain facts about their family history, such as where their grandparents were born, or went to school, or how their parents met. Adolescents who indicate that they know more family history show higher self-­esteem, higher identity exploration and commitment, and fewer internalizing and externalizing behavior problems; they also report higher levels of positive family functioning (Duke, Lazarus & Fivush, 2008; Fivush, Bohanek, Marin & Duke, 2010). The ability to anchor oneself in the knowledge of where one comes from, the kind of family from whom one descends, seems to provide a sense of strength and resilience for adolescents. In general, adolescents who know more of their family history report positive benefits, and themselves tell more coherent and elaborated intergenerational narratives. But not only do adolescents benefit from hearing these stories; parents and grandparents benefit from telling them. Older adults report telling stories to the younger generation to teach lessons and to pass on values, as well as to create and maintain family bonds (Norris, Kuiack & Pratt, 2004; Ryan, Pearce, Anas & Norris, 2004). Middle-­aged adults who are more generative, who are concerned about mentoring the next generation and leaving a legacy, also report telling more family stories than mid-­life adults who are less generative (McAdams, 2004b). Also interestingly, generative adults were more likely to report telling difficult stories, stories of suffering that led to growth, again suggesting that generative adults want to pass on life lessons about coping with and growing from life’s challenges. Looking more specifically at why and when parents tell certain kinds of stories, McLean (2015) found that parents begin to tell more vulnerable stories as their children age into adolescence, sharing times the parent may not have

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known what to do or how to act, or when things did not go well, perhaps trying to teach by example that what happens is not always easy to control or predict. But McLean adds that there are consequences for parents who tell these kinds of vulnerability stories, which may provoke a re-­negotiation of their own sense of self, a process that may be more difficult for some parents than others. Parents gain a sense of intimacy with their children through sharing difficult stories, but they also gain new reflections on their own narrative identity in these moments. What McLean reminds us is that family storytelling involves multiple people simultaneously telling, listening, and negotiating their own narrative identities individually and in unison.

Summary Adolescents construct their narrative identities within the complex, multifaced environment of family storytelling, in which intergenerational narratives figure as a frequent and critical component. In addition to passing on values and history, intergenerational narratives provide models of how the world works and what a life looks like. Perhaps most interesting, whereas adolescents’ personal narratives are related to self and well-­being in developmentally com­ plicated ways, the research is quite clear that adolescents and young adults who know their family history and tell coherent and elaborated narratives about their intergenerational past have a more positive sense of self and well-­being. Placing the self in family context and history results in positive outcomes. But of course even these broader family stories are embedded within larger cultural and historical contexts that shape individual identities.

11 Beyond the Autobiographical Self The Cultural Self

In The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston (2010) writes about her childhood growing up in a traditional Chinese household in California. Many of her early memories layer different understandings of the world, cultural ways of being, interleaved in often confused and confusing patterns. She writes about her mother exhorting her to go back to her village in China the same way they came, naming the routes and roads, even though Maxine had never been there, how her mother channeled these memories into her very sense of being such that these cultural experiences become part of who we are even if we have no memories of our own. We assume that our cultural background and heritage colors the way we see the world and ourselves, but how is this realized in the way we talk about our experiences? How is culture expressed and transmitted through the stories we tell about ourselves and our worlds? Although I have argued that personal narratives are constructed in sociocultural contexts, up to this point I have not really explicated the role of culture in this process. Almost all of the research I have discussed thus far has been conducted with generally middle-­class, Western families. Certainly, even within this loosely defined group, we see important individual differences, but if autobiographical selves are created in social and cultural contexts, we need to take a closer look at how culture infiltrates family reminiscing, and how family reminiscing, in turn, instantiates culture. In this chapter I try to provide a more concrete understanding of how culture and narrative are integrated not only within and across cultures but also in early maternal reminiscing style and the creation of adolescent identity through family reminiscing. As will become evident, culture remains a slippery construct, and the ways in which individuals and families construct their experiences and themselves through narrative is both culturally universal and uniquely individual.

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Culture and Narrative “Culture” is notoriously difficult to define (Jahoda, 2012). A prominent approach is to conceptualize cultures as ways of world-­making, of constructing a weltanschauung, a worldview that defines what a life looks like, what a person is, and what it means to live well (Goodman, 1978). And this is what narratives do; they provide a way of making sense of the world, and we use them to make sense of ourselves (Gottschall, 2012). More specifically, as argued by Bruner (1990) and Sarbin (1986), human beings understand the world, how and why it came to be, and how to live in it, through narratives: origin stories, religious myths, and stories of our ancient ancestors – their struggles and successes, their strengths and foibles. Narratives and storytelling are culturally universal, suggesting that world-­making through stories is also universal, although the stories may be culturally specific. Returning to the ecology of family narrative model discussed in Chapter 8, to understand culture, we need to understand narratives in the macrosystem, i.e., those that expand beyond the individual, the family, and the community to encompass the cultural groups that define who we are – race, class, religion, nation – as well as how these narratives interact with individual and family stories in ways that produce culturally specific worldviews and allow new worldviews to emerge. I think about my own childhood in a working-­class Jewish family in Queens, New York, growing up in an extended family in the 1960s and 1970s. My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, having landed in the U.S. through Ellis Island in the great wave of migration in the early 1900s. Many of my neighbors were Holocaust survivors. The stories of my childhood were both ancient and new, from the escape of enslaved Jews from Egypt over two millennia ago, ritually recounted every year at Passover, to the escapes of European Jews from Nazi ghettos and camps, to the thwarted escapes of murdered friends and family members. My grandparents told stories of crossing Europe pursued by soldiers, of making their way onto ships and traveling in steerage to reach the promised land, of living in tenements on the Lower East Side, struggling to make a better life. And in the 1960s, I heard even newer stories: the persecution of African Americans and civil unrest in the American South, the triumph of the Civil Rights Act, the horrors of the Vietnam War, the exhilaration of the second wave of the women’s movement, and the failed promise of equality. These were the stories that permeated my childhood and fundamentally shaped who I am. My identity as a New York Jewish woman from an immigrant family growing up in an historical period of social unrest and political change are not abstractions, but the lived material of my individual life stories. Even when I tell a seemingly unrelated, highly personal, idiosyncratic story about myself, this is the narrative backdrop of my life.

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Master Narratives As mentioned in Chapter 2, meta-­narratives, narratives that define a people or a way of life, have been called master narratives (McLean & Syed, 2015). Hammack (2008) defines cultural master narratives as the dominant discourses in a culture, narratives that define a social order and why it must be that way. He uses the conflicting master narratives between Israelis and Palestinians as prototypical. The Israeli master narrative is one of emerging from the ashes and reclaiming a homeland, a narrative of redemption, whereas the Palestinian master narrative is one of displacement and rupture, a narrative of contamination. Growing up with one or the other of these master narratives as the background of one’s life creates a tendency toward a certain kind of identity, and these identities are polarized. Until we understand the power of such stories in defining individual lives and identities, we can never bridge the gap. For Hammack, identity itself is a narrative structured by the dominant ideological discourse. Personal narrative identities are the means by which cultural narratives are reproduced across the generations. Through telling one’s personal story, one recreates the cultural narratives from which it derives. Thus, in a very real sense, culture is defined through the narratives individuals tell. Importantly, we can also forge narratives against the culturally dominant discourse. Personal narratives that do not fit the cultural narrative, however, are often silenced (Fivush, 2010b), an issue I return to in the next chapter. But there are moments of cultural and historical inflection during which narratives that go against the norm, that express different ways of being in the world, are able to be told and heard. We can see this process at work in the changing narrative of same-­sex sexual orientation. A few decades ago, male homosexuals in the West remained largely closeted, silenced by invective and shame, but with social changes since the 1980s, young men with same-­sex desire have changed the dominant narrative and in so doing have provided new possibilities for positive personal narratives around issues of coming out and being gay (Cohler & Hammack, 2007: see Diamond, 1998, for similar findings on lesbians). In a similar vein, research by Rogers and her colleagues (Rogers & Way, 2016; Way, Hernández, Rogers & Hughes, 2013) have examined how minority male adolescents, including African American, Chinese American, and Dominican American adolescents, define themselves against dominant negative cultural stereotypes and construct an emerging identity that revolves around avoiding or resisting these stereotypes. Importantly, these kinds of resistance narratives are still told with the dominant cultural narrative as the backdrop and are understandable only in contrast to the dominant discourse, meaning that the master narrative still dictates the ways in which individual narratives can be told – either in conformity to or in deviance from the master narrative (McLean & Syed, 2015). Both Hammack (2008) and McLean and Syed (2015) argue that master narratives form the pivot point between the individual and culture; master

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narratives are internalized by the individual, then negotiated and transformed as individuals tell their personal stories in ways that affirm or question the master narrative. Master narratives find pervasive reiteration in our cultural artifacts, books, movies, television shows, blogs, and so on (McLean & Breen, 2015). Among the most common of master narratives in American culture is the redemption narrative; it is, indeed, the founding American myth, starting with the Pilgrims, who, escaping religious persecution, helped establish a new democracy, then evolving to incorporate Manifest Destiny and the immigrant rags-­ to-riches motif (McAdams, 2004a). All are stories of initial hardship and struggle that the individual overcomes through perseverance, personal strength, and hard work, eventually thriving in a new environment. Even in the earliest autobiographies written by European Americans, the redemption narrative constitutes the predominant theme (McLennan, 2013); with the rise of Oprah, it has become only deeper and more prevalent. Each of us is an individual project that we must work on, and if we work hard enough we will overcome and succeed. Redemption is a prototypical narrative theme for Americans, but it is just one of many American master narratives, some of which are gendered (e.g., the Cinderella myth), while others unfold along racial or ethnic lines (e.g., my cultural narrative as a Jewish American, or the “strong Black woman” master narrative; Beauboeuf-­Lafontant, 2007). Master narratives shape how we tell our individual life stories. For example, when Thorne and McLean (2002) asked adolescents to narrate a highly traumatic and challenging experience, boys primarily narrated “John Wayne” stories of surmounting a challenge through brute strength, as illustrated in Richard’s narrative about overcoming his father’s death, while females favored “Florence Nightingale” narratives of help and compassion, as in Mandy’s narrative of caring relationships. Such narrative arcs implicitly structure the ways we think about our personal experiences, but they can also be employed quite intentionally. Breen, McLean, Cairney and McAdams (2017) found that both young and mid-­life adults explicitly referenced culturally shared narratives from books and movies when interpreting and evaluating their own life experiences. Clearly, humans understand themselves in terms of the stories that surround them. And as we have seen throughout this book, this process starts very early in development. If we examine the practices of family reminiscing from this perspective, we can see many ways in which family reminiscing both reproduces and challenges cultural narratives and world-­making. It must be emphasized, however, that I am describing only general differences among cultural groups; critically important and more specific differences, such as subculture, gender, race, and class, exist within any group we examine. That said, some of the most common tendencies at the larger group levels help us understand processes that are always, at all points, individually variable.

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Culture and Autobiographical Memory Within the autobiographical memory literature, cross-­cultural differences play an especially important role, with the most significant distinction laying between what we loosely describe as independent cultures – cultures that value autonomy and individualism – and interdependent cultures, cultures that value community and relationships (Triandis, 1989; see Wang, 2013, and Wang, 2016, for a close theoretical discussion of this issue). Studies have operationalized this distinction by researching Western European cultures, characterized as independent, and East Asian cultures, characterized as interdependent. In general, when Western European adults narrate their lives, traits such as agency and autonomy predominate, as does a focus on the individual self, whereas East Asian adults privilege social relationships and are especially concerned with one’s position and behavior as part of a community (see Wang & Ross, 2007, for a review). Prioritizing an autonomous self leads to the formation of highly elaborated, emotionally expressive, and detailed memories in support of an individual autobiography, whereas focusing on a communal self results in less elaborated, less emotionally expressive, and more general memories of what one does and how one behaves in social settings (Wang, 2016). In terms of master narratives, these differences in cultural worldviews and personal narratives can be traced to culturally varying ways of worldmaking. Again, very generally speaking, Chinese culture, for example, is based on narratives derived from Confucius, which emphasize virtuous activity in the service of social harmony, of cultivating a communal self, whereas Western European culture is based on narratives derived from Socrates, which emphasize individual questioning and the ability to evaluate and judge information, attributes more strongly associated with an autonomous self (Tweed & Lehman, 2002). Intriguingly, evidence indicates that these very broad-­based master narratives are expressed even when parents begin reminiscing with their very young children.

Culture and Maternal Reminiscing Style In their seminal work on cross-­cultural differences in maternal reminiscing style (see Wang, 2013, for a review), Qi Wang and her colleagues argued that if mothers indeed express internalized cultural narratives of what it means to be a self in their respective cultures when reminiscing with their children, then compared to Euro-­American mothers, Chinese mothers should be less elaborative, paying less attention to the child’s experiences and emotions, and more attention to the child’s behaviors and moral standards within their community. Initial research confirmed this hypothesis, indicating that mothers in China are generally less elaborative when reminiscing with their preschool children and focus more on complying with moral rules and behavioral regulations than mothers of European descent in the United States (Wang, Leichtman & Davies,

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2000). Examining this longitudinally throughout the preschool years, Wang and her colleagues found that Euro-­American mothers are more elaborative across time than Chinese mothers overall, but that both Euro-­American and Chinese mothers who self-­report valuing independence in their children are especially elaborative. Moreover, Euro-­American and Chinese mothers who are more elaborative and evaluative facilitate more elaborate narratives in their children both during shared mother–child reminiscing (Wang, 2007) and when telling a story to an unfamiliar adult (Wang, 2006), suggesting that maternal elaborative and evaluative reminiscing style has the same effects across these two cultures (Wang, 2007). Euro-­American mothers also integrate more emotion into their reminiscing and spend more reminiscing time trying to explain and resolve difficult emotions with their children than do Chinese mothers, whereas the latter devote more time to reminiscing about other people and relationships, and to emphasizing proper behavior and maintaining harmony, than do Euro-­ American mothers (Wang & Fivush, 2005). Prioritizing emotion, and especially explanations of emotions experienced by the child, simultaneously directs the child’s attention to their autonomous internal experience of an event and indicates that this autonomous emotional experience is of importance. That Euro-­ American mothers do this more than Asian mothers indicates that the former are socializing their children to assume that one’s independent reflection on and interpretation of an event is paramount, and that autobiography is about an elaborated, emotionally expressive individual self. Thinking about culture more complexly, we must ask what happens when families exist in multiple cultures simultaneously, as in Maxine Hong Kingston’s experience as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Wang (2013) compared families in China to first-­generation Chinese immigrant families in the U.S., finding that the immigrant mothers were even less elaborative in their reminiscing than were those in China; they also used less emotion language, offered fewer explanations of emotions, and did not help their children resolve or regulate negative emotions to the same extent that Chinese mothers did. Perhaps being situated as an immigrant in a new culture accentuates the importance of keeping one’s own cultural values alive. Compared to Euro-­American mothers, immigrant Chinese mothers made fewer references to emotions or thoughts and were less likely to describe their children’s traits or interests. Again, however, both Euro-­ American and immigrant Chinese mothers who did engage in more emotional and explanatory reminiscing had children who showed higher levels of self-­ concept understanding (Wang, Doan & Song, 2010). Three critical findings emerge from this research. First, while acknowledging the inherent variability within cultures, we do see prevailing differences across cultures that align with predominant cultural values of what it means to be a self and to interact with others in culturally appropriate ways. The second critical finding, however, is that maternal reminiscing style that is more elaborative, emotionally expressive, and explanatory has the same effects across these cultural

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groups. Finally, Wang’s program of research points to the complexity of culture and autobiography, signaling that we need to acknowledge the multiplicity of cultural identifications, including both individual mothers’ socialization goals and those of the larger communities to which they belong. In general, Chinese mothers view personal narratives as a channel for teaching moral and social standards, whereas Euro-­American mothers use stories to affirm and validate their children’s experiences (Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen & Boldt, 2012). And children are implicitly learning to narrate in these culturally appropriate ways, and more explicitly, what the functions of such reminiscing are. When asked the purposes of reminiscing about the past, Asian American children more often affirm using their memories to guide their behavior than do Euro-­American children, whereas Euro-­American children endorse reminiscing about the past to help define who they are and to regulate their emotions to a greater extent that do Asian American children (Wang, Koh, Song & Hou, 2015). Despite these foundational findings, Wang’s research also illustrates the problems inherent in conceptualizing cultures as either independent or interdependent. Kagitcibasi (2005) has provided an especially nuanced theoretical understanding of cultural differences, arguing that independence and inter­ dependence are not orthogonal, but that all cultures value both traits to different extents in different contexts (see also Wang, 2016). Hence a closer look at how diverse cultural values of both becoming autonomous and remaining related are expressed in maternal reminiscing might shed more light on how culture influences the development of individual autobiography. A good case in point is the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Maori, whose communal culture strongly values family, family history, and lineage, and engages in complex rituals involving interlaced oral stories and traditions. Compared to European settlers in New Zealand, Maori mothers are more elaborate when reminiscing with their preschoolers, but they also pay more attention to cultural rituals and child misbehavior than do mothers of European descent (Reese & Neha, 2015). Cross-­cultural studies like these enable us to see more clearly how complex cultural value systems play out in different ways in maternal reminiscing style. Looking at a much wider array of cultures that vary along dimensions of independence/interdependence and autonomy/relatedness, Lisa Schröder, Heidi Keller, and their colleagues have been conducting research in communities that represent three different cultural models: autonomy-­oriented (middle-­class Western families from Germany and Sweden); relatedness-­oriented (rural non-­ Western agricultural families from Cameroon); and mixed autonomy-­related (urban, middle-­class non-­Western families from Estonia, and families from Latin America). The findings are nuanced but can be summarized as confirming and extending much of the existing research. In general, mothers in autonomous-­ culture families engaged in more elaborative and evaluative reminiscing with their preschoolers than mothers in relatedness-­oriented culture families, but there was greater variability in reminiscing style among mothers in mixed

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autonomy-­related culture families (Tulviste, Tõugu, Keller, Schröder & De Geer, 2016). For example, as expected, Cameroonian families were less elaborative and more attentive to social aspects of personal experiences than German families, but Latino mothers from Costa Rica and from Mexico were not only as elaborative as German mothers but also paid greater attention than the latter to the social aspects of their children’s experiences when reminiscing, showing a more mixed pattern between autonomy and relatedness (Schröder, Keller & Kleis, 2013). In addition, Melzi (2000) has found that Central American mothers focused more on creating a conversation with their child during reminiscing, whereas Euro-­American mothers strove to help their child create a coherent narrative. Perhaps most noteworthy, there were also important differences within similarly oriented cultural groups; within autonomy-­related culture families, German mothers reminisced more about other people than Swedish mothers, and Swedish mothers reminisced more about their child’s autonomous activities than German mothers (Tõugu, Tulviste, Schröder, Keller & De Geer, 2012). These kinds of more granular analyses of similarities and differences in cultural reminiscing may help us better understand how nuanced cultural worldviews are transmitted to younger generations through reminiscing. A caveat to all of this is that across these cultural contexts, maternal reminiscing style and goals seem to have similar effects on child outcome. Mothers who are more elaborative and evaluative when reminiscing have children who show higher levels of autobiographical memory skills regardless of cultural group (Schröder, Keller, Kärtner, Kleis, Abels, et al., 2013). And within each cultural group, mothers who endorsed valuing the child’s independence to a greater extent reminisced less about other people than mothers who did not endorse valuing independence to the same extent (Tõugu, Tulviste, Schröder, Keller & De Geer, 2012). The complex picture that emerges is one of both cultural variability and similarity. Both across and within cultures, mothers who value relatedness over autonomy reminisce more about other people and the social aspects of experiences and less about the child’s internal or autonomous experiences, whereas mothers who value independence reminisce more about the child’s own experiences and emotions. But across cultures, mothers who reminisce in more elaborated and evaluative ways facilitate more elaborated and detailed autobiographical memories in their children. More elaborative maternal reminiscing is related not only to the ability of children to create more detailed and coherent memories of personal experiences, but also to the development of a more elaborated sense of self. Across multiple cultures, children of more elaborative mothers refer to themselves more often in their personal narratives, draw pictures of themselves that are more detailed, and provide more differentiated self-­descriptions and evaluations across the preschool years than do children of less elaborative mothers (Schröder, Keller, Tõugu, Tulviste, et al., 2011; Wang, Doan & Song, 2010). All of this is to say that cultural values and worldviews are expressed both implicitly and

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explicitly in early maternal reminiscing, and that children are internalizing these narrative models early in development. More elaborative, evaluative, emotionally expressive and explanatory maternal reminiscing facilitates a more differentiated sense of self, essentially teaching children to be an autonomous self in the world. The patterns in these and in similar findings also indicate the importance of looking within cultures to individual differences in mothers’ goals and strategies for reminiscing with their young children. Unfortunately, there is less research examining the contexts, boundaries, and constraints of intracultural differences in early maternal reminiscing than of intercultural ones. Maternal reminiscing style, for example, may play varying roles in diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups within a majority White culture, such as the U.S. For instance, there is some suggestion that working-­class mothers in the U.S. narratively guide their daughters toward self-­reliance more often than do middle-­ class mothers (Miller & Sperry, 1987), perhaps to equip them with the tools their mothers assume are necessary to thrive in their environments. Low-­ income Hispanic mothers in the U.S. appear to be less elaborative than either low-­income African American or low-­income White mothers, but again, regardless of which community they belong to, children of mothers who are more elaborative during reminiscing display more advanced autobiographical memory skills (Leyva, Reese, Grolnick & Price, 2009). And across racial and ethnic groups, low-­income mothers who are trained to be more elaborative when reminiscing with their preschoolers facilitate their children’s development of more coherent and elaborated narratives (Reese, Leyva, Sparks & Grolnick, 2010). But this research is limited, and much more needs to be known. As our society becomes more complex and heterogeneous, how does family reminiscing create and recreate cultural values and identities both in early development and throughout childhood and adolescence? And how do adolescents come to understand their ethnic and racial identities within a dynamically evolving cultural narrative?

Cultural Narrative Identities in Adolescence Adolescence is a time of identity exploration and upheaval; adolescents begin to question who they are in the world, whether their values and beliefs align with those of their parents, and how to make the transition to independent adulthood while maintaining close family relationships. And all of this occurs within intersecting layers of personal narratives, family narratives, and cultural narratives that begin to coalesce into the adolescent’s autobiographical voice. I have already discussed how identity is forged within family reminiscing, and how this might differ by gender, certainly a critical aspect of emerging identity. But what about ethnic and racial identity? Living in a heterogenous culture rife with stereotypes, both positive and negative, about majority and minority individuals,

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how do adolescents integrate their individual identity within these cultural narratives? Ethnic, racial, and gender identities emerging in adolescence reflect complicated intersections of disparate roles and beliefs (Ghavami, Katsiaficas & Rogers, 2016). Adolescents, especially in U.S. culture, are members of multiple social categories simultaneously and need to navigate complicated terrain to maintain a coherent sense of self. Minority youth, in particular, face experiences of both personal and structural discrimination, suffering psychological distress as a result. But adolescents who have a stronger and more positive sense of their racial and/ or ethnic identity show higher levels of well-­being, better academic performance, and better physical and mental health (Rivas-­Drake, Seaton, et al., 2014; Yip, Gee & Takeuchi, 2008). We still know little, however, about the process of constructing a more positive racial and ethnic identity. Most research examines identity using questionnaire, rating-­scale measures. As Moin Syed (2015) argues, we need to understand individuals’ lived experiences, how they make meaning of racial and ethnic identity-­related events. Syed and Azmitia (2008) have proposed a narrative approach to positive ethnic identification in emerging adulthood. Because narratives reflect evaluations and interpretations of lived experiences, narratives about experiences relevant to minority identity, such as awareness of difference, or episodes of discrimination, as well as experiences of racial and ethnic pride, may play a particularly important role in how minority youth come to synthesize an understanding of who they are and where they belong in the world (see also Syed, 2010). Syed and Azmitia asked young adults from both majority and minority groups entering college to share narratives of ethnicity-­related experiences, finding that these narratives fell into four categories: experiences of prejudice, awareness of difference, awareness of underrepresentation, and connection to an ethnic group. White and mixed-­ ethnicity youth told mostly awareness of difference narratives, with awareness of privilege stories predominating among White youth, whereas Asian American and Latino youth mainly offered experience of prejudice narratives. Interestingly, minority youth who told experience of prejudice narratives also showed the highest levels of identity commitment, suggesting that reflecting on these kinds of experiences might help young adults become committed to specific values and beliefs, perhaps especially around issues of social justice. Examining these same students as they traversed college, Syed and Azmitia (2010) found that those who showed increasing exploration of their ethnic identity narratives also generated more narrative content related to experiences of prejudice while deepening their levels of identity commitment. This pattern suggests that as young adults grapple with how to make sense of experiences of prejudice through narrative meaning-­ making that reflects on and interprets these difficult identity-­defining experiences, they show a rise in levels of commitment to values and ideals. Although we have not explicitly solicited narratives specific to racial or  ethnic identity in our studies in the Family Narratives Lab, these sorts of

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narratives do emerge spontaneously, and we have observed some of the processes described by Syed and Azmitia (2008; 2010), mostly in the accounts of international adolescents and young adults in our studies as they struggle to make sense of racial and ethnic identity-­related experiences. At times these young adults cannot create any positive meaning or identity from such incidents. For example, when asked about a challenging experience, 18-year-­old Chen recalls when she started secondary school after moving to the U.S. from China: Chen’s Narrative In high school, I was constantly bullied. I was laughed at despite my best effort. There was a combination of stereotype threat from my part and belief perseverance on theirs. As an international student from China who just came to U.S., I was utterly lost and sad as I did not fit into the social circle at all. I felt very alone. Chen describes in fairly vague and general terms the ordeal of being bullied because of her racial identity and does not seem to be able to make any sense of it. But some young adults are able to process these kinds of occurrences in more reflective ways, contributing to a positive sense of identity, as we see when 18-year-­old Bao narrates his most challenging experience, also about moving from China to start school in the U.S. (Bao uses no capitalization in his written narrative, perhaps on purpose; in any case, it is reproduced here as written): Bao’s Narrative the event that has shaped me as a person the most is moving to america. i moved here when i was 14 years old and i did not speak any english. girls were mean to me and school was so challenging. i used to have everything figured out and in a very short ti[m]e my life got turned upside down. i had to define myself simply by who i was because i no longer had academic accomplishments, popularity, or material things to represent me. i had to figure out what was important to me from the inside out. thinking about this time makes me feel sad but also accomplished. i am so happy about how this experience shaped me. i learned that i am more than what others think of me and i am way stronger and smarter than i seem or even than i believe. i think this event was absolutely necessary for my maturity and greater comprehension of the world. overall i am grateful for this hardship.

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Like Chen’s, Bao’s narrative is generalized; he does not describe any specific episode. But unlike Chen, he does include more specific details about when, where, and what. Even more significantly, the entire narrative centers on overcoming these experiences of discrimination, on thinking over and realizing what is important to him, and ultimately, about how these experiences defined him as a person. This is a clearly redemptive narrative. Bao is further along than Chen in his identity journey, processing his experiences of discrimination in a way that allows him to grow, and even flourish. Differences may also arise in how youth from different racial and ethnic groups make use of historical narratives to construct and strengthen pride in their identity. Way, Santos, Niwa and Kim-­Gervey (2008) found that African American adolescents derived identity pride from distant historical events, whereas Puerto Rican adolescents derived ethnic pride from more contemporary events. This suggests that the ways in which adolescents and young adults understand their own experiences of prejudice are embedded within larger cultural and historical narratives; these narratives are certainly part of the overall cultural narrative ecology, but they are also articulated within family reminiscing in ways that transmit values, beliefs, and pride from parent to child.

The Expression of Cultural Identities in Family Reminiscing A growing literature has examined family socialization of racial and ethnic identity (see Evans, Banerjee, Meyer, Aldana, Foust & Rowley, 2012; Hughes, Rodriguez, Smith, Johnson, Stevenson & Spicer, 2006, for reviews). Following Hughes et al. (2006), I will use the term “cultural socialization” to refer to socialization practices specific to both racial and ethnic identities and beliefs. Although still limited in scope, this body of research has established that parents, especially within families of color, frequently engage in socialization of cultural practices and beliefs. Most often, parents convey positive messages that focus on culturally significant rituals, holidays, and customs, as well as sharing stories and books about important historical and cultural figures. In addition to more positive cultural socialization, parents of color also frequently prepare their children, especially their adolescents, for experiences of discrimination (McHale, Crouter, Kim, Burton, Davis, Dotterer & Swanson, 2006; Rodriguez, Umana-­ Taylor, Smith & Johnson, 2009). Less common are explicitly negative socialization messages that convey little sense of pride or self-­worth, although these do occur in some families (Neblett, White, Ford, Philip, Nguyen & Sellers, 2008). In general, positive cultural socialization is linked with positive youth development; children and adolescents who receive positive messages about their cultural group from their parents show higher levels of self-­esteem, fewer mental health problems, and better academic performance in both concurrent and longitudinal investigations (Murry, Berkel, Brody, Miller & Chen, 2009; Rivas-­ Drake, Hughes & Way, 2009).

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More specific to identity, adolescents and young adults who receive more positive parental cultural socialization show higher levels of identity exploration and commitment (Juang & Syed, 2010; Rivas-­Drake et al., 2014), suggesting a more direct link between cultural socialization and cultural identity, in addition to well-­being. But as with the research on racial and ethnic identity discussed earlier, the majority of these studies rely on various forms of self-­report from parents and children; certainly, cultural socialization finds expression in the ways in which families share their stories – their shared past, their intergenerational past, and their family histories. Virtually no research to date has explicitly investigated how families reminisce about their cultural heritage and identity per se, but these topics do arise spontaneously across studies examining family reminiscing. In the following section, I use examples collected from multiple studies in the Family Narratives Lab to illustrate how family reminiscing creates and constructs both family and individual identities that are embedded within cultures.

Cultural Identities in Family Narratives As discussed earlier, the stories adolescents know about their parents’ childhoods furnish life lessons, express worldviews, and offer insights into what it means to be a person and to live a good life, and adolescents take these narratives as models for constructing their own narrative identities. Both Natalie’s and Dave’s narratives showed how coherent and elaborated these kinds of stories can be, and the kinds of life lessons that they inculcate. But what about cultural socialization? Do parents share stories about their childhood experiences to help their children understand their cultural identities? Across the studies in the Family Narratives Lab, stories with these kinds of themes did not emerge frequently, but they did occur. For example, when asked to tell a story he knew about his mother growing up, 12-year-­old Michael narrates an episode in which his mother encounters prejudice because of her Latina ethnicity: Michael’s Narrative Well, she said that she remembered some people driving around and calling her a “dirty Mexican” but that fact wasn’t true because my mom is um mostly Caucasian and she doesn’t believe that she has any roots in Mexico. When she was a teenager, which she … well, actually, more [unintelligible] … so she kind of wondered, “Hm, are Mexicans really dirty?” So then she went over to a friend’s house at first, which, of course, they were Spanish, so she kind of wondered whether or not they were dirty. She looked at them and she thought, “Hm, they don’t look very dirty.” And she checked out the bathrooms. Apparently, they had been using the

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shower. Well, I know the person who drove by and told her was some teenage guy in some weird car. And he was just making assumptions. [Interviewer asks: And what did you learn from that?] That some people are weird and they just make assumptions Like Natalie’s and Dave’s narratives, Michael’s is quite detailed, including what his mother was thinking and feeling. This story is about encountering discrimination and realizing it is baseless, and it was perhaps told to Michael to prepare him for the possibility of contending with prejudice and to help him to adaptively frame it as “weird,” or as founded on baseless “assumptions.” Other adolescents told narratives that were even more straightforward in their message, as in this one by 12-year-­old Charlotte. Charlotte and her family are White, and the story is about when her mother became aware of discrimination against Blacks: Charlotte’s Narrative Um when she was … she was born in [name of southern city] and um she didn’t go to school or anything until she was … until they moved to [name of second southern city]. But, in [city she was born in], she was raised pretty much by their housekeeper, Debbie, and uh my mom loved Debbie. Um … Like Debbie would braid her hair and give her cornrows and stuff and um and my mom would … you know, it was really hot where they were and I don’t think they had air conditioning. So my mom, you know, she was a little toddler. She would strip off all her clothes and lay on the cold tiles on the floor and um and when they … they moved to [name of second southern city] after that and they left Debbie behind and my mom was really upset. And my grandparents I guess just thought that it was because you know they were moving and she didn’t want to leave her home behind, but really it was because she really loved Debbie; she was like a mother to her. And um and she didn’t want to leave her behind. So she started school, first grade … Debbie was African American and she had always played with Debbie’s kids and um, you know, other African American kids, so when she first got to her school … she’d never been to school before and all the schools were newly … integrated. So, you know, of course, there was still a lot of changing between the races, so my mom automatically just kind of drifted towards the African American kids ’cause that’s who she had um been raised … raised around. So um … and no one … it didn’t really go over very well

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with … with the white children. Um and I think I recall her saying that like they called her like a “N-­word lover” and stuff like that and just really terrible things. So, but, you know … And she had no idea. I mean I don’t think she even knew about any type of racial discrimination. So like that was a really big shock for her. [Interviewer asks: And what did you learn from that story?] Um … I learned that we aren’t born with prejudices and stuff; it’s those are things that are learned by um … things you just kind of pick up I guess from your environment. This is a long, detailed, and elaborative narrative, spanning the mother’s toddlerhood and early school years, and although not much explicit emotion is expressed, the underlying emotional impact is strong. In sharing this story, Charlotte’s mother is helping Charlotte understand the racial divides that still exist in the U.S., with the implication that, even as a member of the privileged White community, she will both encounter this kind of thinking and, in some sense, be responsible for changing it. The underlying message of this narrative is about how wrong this kind of prejudice is, and that “good” people do not behave in this way. Through this story, Charlotte continues to learn who her mother is, and who she herself is, while navigating an identity within a heterogeneous, and too often divisive, cultural context.

Intergenerational Narratives Across Cultures We have seen how intergenerational narratives form a critical component of adolescents’ identity journeys in the U.S., but what about in other cultures? Most likely, adolescents in all cultures hear stories about their parents growing up, but what kinds of stories and how often? In the only published study to examine how adolescents from different cultures know and tell stories about their parents’ childhoods, several colleagues and I (Reese, Fivush, Merrill, Wang & McAnally, 2017) conducted research on youth in New Zealand, an ideal location, given its relatively small population and three distinct cultural groups: the indigenous Maori, who have a strong oral tradition culture that values family, community, and relationships; immigrant Chinese, who are broadly communal in their cultural orientation; and European White settlers, who have an autonomous-­oriented culture. We asked adolescents and young adults from 12 to 21 years of age and from all three cultures to tell a couple of stories they might know about their mother and their father growing up. As we had found in our earlier studies of U.S. youth, virtually all of the adolescents in this study easily told stories about both parents, indicating that these stories are recounted and heard across these cultural lines. As we saw with cultural differences in maternal reminiscing style with younger children, adolescents from the more

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communal cultures, the Maori and the immigrant Chinese, reported hearing these stories for didactic reasons, to learn lessons about themselves and the world, whereas adolescents from the more autonomous-­oriented European culture reported hearing these stories to learn about family members. Most interesting, the Chinese and Maori adolescents made more explicit connections between themselves and their parents in these stories than did the European adolescents, suggesting that these stories were being used more as identity information for these adolescents than for their European counterparts. Across cultures, adolescents who told more thematically coherent stories about their fathers, and those who told more emotionally expressive stories about their mothers, showed higher levels of self-­esteem (Chen, Cullen, Fivush & Reese, in prep). So once again, across cultures we see both differences in intergenerational narratives that mirror various patterns of shared family reminiscing, and similarities in the positive effects for sense of self in telling more coherent and emotionally expressive narratives.

Cultural Identities in Historical Context Although families most often tell personal stories, or those about family members both immediate and distant, they also sometimes narrate historical events that reinforce a cultural identity linked not to any specific experience of the narrator, but to a larger cultural group. In the example below, the Mexican Revolution finds its way into a Mexican American family dinner conversation about 12-year-­old Sebastian’s report on the American Revolution, due the following day. Of note, the mother and father were born in Mexico, but both sons were born in the United States. Sebastian’s Family Narrative Father:  Let’s talk a little bit about the Mexican Revolution. You know what’s the difference? Martin: What? Father:  Now, here in the States, what they call the American Revolution is really … Sebastian:  It’s the War of Independence. In Mexico, we call that the War of Independence. And what here in the States they call the Civil War, is what we in Mexico call the Revolution. Mother:  Father: The War of Independence in Mexico was in 18 … Mother:  Even before the um, the Americans did it. Father:  No! Mother:  No?

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Father:  < Uh-­uh. The Americans … Mother:  [unintelligible]. > Father:  … The American Independence in 1776 … Martin:  Does all this have to do with my brother’s report? Mother:  Uh-­huh. Father:  No, it has to do with your general knowledge. The conversation goes on to discuss similarities and differences between these two wars, but of interest here is that in the course of discussing Sebastian’s report, the father launches into a history lesson on the Mexican Revolution, placing this war in historical context alongside the American Revolution. Clearly, the father believes (and the mother agrees, as expressed through both confirmations and her own contributions) that their sons need to know this information at least as much as they need to know U.S. history. Of particular note, the father uses the first-­person plural “we” to describe the Mexican War of Independence and the third-­person plural “they” to describe the American Revolution. Even though both boys were born and bred in the United States, their “we” is Mexico, and their cultural identity is rooted in knowledge of and identification with the struggles of the Mexican people.

Summary Especially as Americans, we like to think we each have a unique story, a story that is distinctive to our personal experiences. But even the most personal and idiosyncratic of our experiences is shaped by the world of stories in which we live. Cultures are defined through master narratives that describe the shape of a life and appropriate evaluative frameworks for parsing and interpreting experience. Beginning early in development, families reminisce in ways that are already transmitting a cultural worldview to their youngest family members. Through childhood and adolescence, as individuals begin to construct their personal narrative identity, this identity is informed at all points by cultural stories told within the family, stories that place each individual life and family within a larger context of cultural meaning. And these multiple worldviews are dynamically interleaved at multiple levels: family, cultural group, and nation state. Who we are is defined as much by how we have been socialized to understand a life as by the unique experiences that make up that life.

12 The Dark Side of Family Stories

In A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley (1991) tells the story of a woman recovering her memories of being sexually abused as a child. Contemplating the process of remembering and not remembering, the narrator muses how things left unsaid become strange, too difficult to remember and think of as one’s own experiences. A similar sentiment is expressed by a character in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (2010), in this case of a trauma shared by both mother and daughter, where the daughter explains that unspoken horror leaves us unable to understand, and ultimately we are left feeling empty. Each of these female narrators speaks of the inability to remember when experiences are silenced, when words are not allowed to gather and cement what happened. In my own research on trauma and memory, I have found that women who were sexually abused by family members when they were children often express the same kind of struggle to remember and tell what happened. As one woman who had been sexually abused by her father across multiple years of her childhood says, It’s still hard for me to accept … there are occasions, even, I guess it’s called denial, even knowing all of it. Once in a while, I mean, it goes through my head, like, oh, you know I must be nuts or making all this up … (Fivush & Edwards, 2004) I have focused this book on the positive aspects of family reminiscing, but what happens when families do not allow certain stories to be told, or do not allow stories to be told in certain ways? If elaborated and emotionally expressive family reminiscing facilitates multiple aspects of positive child outcome and helps adolescents create healthy autobiographical selves, is it also the case that

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families that do not reminisce, or reminisce in less positive ways, hinder this kind of development? And who are these families? Are some families more likely to share stories often, and other families less so? Is this related to specific types of family experiences? Perhaps families who have experienced high levels of trauma, both within the immediate family and intergenerationally, may have more difficulty creating elaborated, expressive, and redemptive stories that build strength and resilience across the generations. There are at least two ways to think about how family stories can go awry. One is that some stories are simply never allowed to be told; they are silenced. The other is that some stories may be allowed to be told only in certain ways; they are imposed. Children and adolescents who grow up in an atmosphere of silenced narratives may simply have an impoverished autobiographical self, whereas children and adolescents compelled to adhere to sanctioned versions of events may have an autobiographical self that does not feel authentic, in that they have not been given the authority to author their own autobiography (Fivush, 2000; 2004). Despite a substantial literature on the intergenerational transmission of traumatic symptoms, such as anxiety and distress (Lehrner & Yehuda, 2018), there is very little research on the actual process of families telling stories – or not telling stories – around events that are emotionally threatening to share. In this chapter, I try to bring together disparate threads to explore the question of silencing and imposition in family storytelling.

Family Secrets In many ways, family secrets make the best stories. This oxymoron is the basis of great literature and engrossing talk shows – who knew what when, and who told what to who for what reason. From relatively benign secrets about minor infractions, such as lying, cheating, or shoplifting, to major concealments of first marriages, illegitimate children, criminals, mental illness, or incest, all families keep secrets. Most of the social science research on the consequences of families keeping secrets comes from insights from clinical practice (Imber-­Black, 1999), and relies on qualitative ethnographies (e.g., Poulos, 2016). Anita Vangelisti, who has systematically examined the frequency and types of secrets that families keep (Vangelisti, 1994; Vangelisti & Caughlin, 1997), argues that, against the prevalent view of family secrets as harmful, in some instances family secrets have quite positive benefits. She makes an important distinction between intrafamily secrets, or secrets where some family members keep information from other family members, and whole-­family secrets, or secrets that the whole family knows about but chooses not to share with those on the outside. These are dynamically quite different phenomena, with largely divergent repercussions. Intrafamily secrets are almost always destructive, creating division, feelings of insecurity, and even betrayal. In contrast, whole-­family secrets are a two-­edged sword; some whole-­family secrets can have insidious

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effects on children and adolescents, as in the case of children of alcoholics (see Manning, 2015, for a review). These children and their parents often implicitly agree not to discuss these issues either among themselves or with others, and these children often suffer highly detrimental consequences, including depression, anxiety, and low self-­esteem. But some whole-­family secrets can have the effect of creating bonds and intimacy among family members, in that they share private knowledge together. These kinds of secrets mark individuals as members of the “in-­group,” as being in the know. Overall, college students who ranked their families as having more intrafamily secrets than typical (however they themselves defined that) indicated lower levels of family satisfaction, but there were no relations between whole-­family secrets and family satisfaction, suggesting a more complicated relation between these kinds of secrets and child outcome.

Voice and Silence in Shared Family Stories Whereas some unfavorable stories are simply never told, some are allowed to be described only in certain ways. In the very act of narrating our personal experiences we give voice to some aspects of the story while silencing others (Fivush, 2010b). The question is how certain aspects of the story become accepted, dominant, and allowed, and other aspects are silenced – for even in telling a shared family story, there are things of which we do not speak. When we reflect on early maternal reminiscing style, more elaborative mothers are helping their children develop more coherent, elaborated, and emotionally expressive narratives about the children’s experiences, and, indeed, this is often a situation in which the mother tells most of the story, and therefore might be considered imposing. However, as we have seen in many examples throughout this book, most often the highly elaborative mother negotiates with her child, eliciting information and integrating it into the evolving narrative, checking that they have a shared interpretation, and so on. These kinds of negotiated elaborated reminiscing conversations not only help children develop a more positive view of self while enabling them to better regulate emotions, but also validate their autobiographical voice. Mothers who are less elaborative when reminiscing may verge on a form of silencing, on not helping their child voice their experiences, on negating. Take, for example, this excerpt between 4-year-­old Chad and his mother, who are discussing a visit to an amusement park: Chad’s Narrative Mother:  … That was our first time there, and I thought you had— Chad:  [interrupting] NO, I don’t, no, it wasn’t my first time there. Mother: Yes, it was.

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Chad: You don’t remember. Mom, remember when we went to it, umm, not at Johnny’s birthday and not when we met Lauren, some other time. Mother:  Oh, that was when we went to that place in Florida. Chad:  No. Mother: With the [unintelligible]? Chad:  No. Mother:  Okay, well, that’s enough about [name of amusement park]. I want to talk about something else. Chad is quite sure this was not the first time he had been to this amusement park and tries very hard to convince his mother, but she simply negates his version and moves to another topic of her choosing. This mother is implicitly informing Chad that he does not recall his own experience accurately, that she knows better, that her version is correct. When this kind of negation occurs on a regular basis, or when mothers simply do not engage in recurrent or significantly elaborated reminiscing with their young children, they may not be helping their children to build the necessary skills to develop an autobiographical voice. As Jane Smiley writes, their experiences may become “too nebulous to recall.” Or as my research participant says, “I must be making all this up.” These children may not learn to trust their own voice. Even when emotionally challenging experiences are acknowledged, families might engage in negating the child’s interpretation or evaluation. For example, the study I described from the Family Narratives Lab in Chapter 7 on mother– child conversations about distressing experiences related to the child’s asthma shows that mothers who can elicit, elaborate, and explain their children’s emotional reactions to challenging events have children who cope better (Fivush & Sales, 2006). In Barry’s narrative, we saw an example of a mother who is listening to and framing an experience in ways that help her child regulate present emotions while preparing him, perhaps, to handle future occurrences. Contrast the conversation between Barry and his mother with this one between 11-year-­ old Jaxon and his mother; Jaxon had gone out to a friend’s the night before and is now telling his mother that he had needed to use his inhaler: Jaxon’s Narrative Mother: You got out of breath? Jaxon:  Maybe once or twice. Mother:  Did you have your max air with you? Jaxon:  Mm-­hmm. Mother:  Did you use your max air? Jaxon: Yes, Ma’am.

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Mother:  How many puffs did you have to take? Jaxon: Two. Mother:  So why didn’t you tell me this last night? Jaxon:  I don’t know, you’ll get all hysterical. Mother:  Oh, so I get hysterical, is that what you call it? Jaxon:  Sometimes. Mother: What is your definition of hysterical? Jaxon: You’re um, you’re like, you, you … do things differently. Mother:  Like? Jaxon:  Like you get um … get all upset and stuff, and you’re like um … Mother: That’s not hysterical. Jaxon: You like get really um really um close up, if I tell you … you’re like look … what happened, what happened … what happened, what happened, blah blah blah … Mother:  Oh, so I am too protective. Jaxon:  No, it’s not that. Mother:  I shouldn’t ask you all those questions. Jaxon:  It gets so weird when you ask me those kinds of questions. Mother:  Oh, so you are trying to grow up and be independent. Jaxon:  Not yet, but um … Mother:  Is it too personal? Jaxon:  I don’t know, it’s hard to have … it’s hard to be in front of the kids or um has do this and my mom is constantly asking questions about what happened. Mother:  Oh, but that’s what being a parent is, don’t you think? Jaxon had clearly not told his mother about this event earlier because he was afraid of her emotional reaction. Rather than acknowledging how emotionally difficult this is for both of them, and having a more open exchange about their feelings, the mother becomes defensive, almost aggressively questioning Jaxon’s interpretation of her own emotional reactions and her parenting skills. Perhaps it is not surprising that Jaxon would prefer not to inform his mother, essentially silencing himself. Similar to the conversation with Chad, only the mother’s interpretation is valid.

Psychopathology, Family Violence, and Reminiscing Some aspects of voice and silence in maternal reminiscing may be what we consider normal variation, as has been described throughout this book. But it may be that mothers with specific limitations of their own may be less equipped to help their children develop voice. More broadly, both maternal depression and

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maternal anxiety confer risk of depression and anxiety for their children, and reminiscing may be one of the mechanisms for transmitting these problems (Salmon, in press; Salmon & Reese, 2015). There are at least two ways in which this can occur. First, limited reminiscing overall may confer risk, in that children do not have opportunities to develop elaborated autobiographical memories that help define self over time. Second, the specific forms of maternal reminiscing may be such that children do not benefit from emotionally regulated and resolved reminiscing. In terms of an overall lack of reminiscing, we know from a great deal of research with adults that over-­general memory, or difficulty in recalling specific, detailed autobiographical memories that place events in time and place, is broadly related to many forms of psychopathology (Williams, 2006). Kristin Valentino and her colleagues have developed a model of how maternal psychopathology may relate to problematic mother–child reminiscing in ways that may lead to over-­general memory (Valentino, 2011). Whereas highly elaborative mothers help their children form detailed memories of specific events, mothers experiencing depression and mothers who maltreat their children do not engage in highly elaborated detailed reminiscing, and as a result put their children at increased risk for developing not only over-­general memories (Salmon & Reese, 2015; Valentino, Nuttall, Comas, McDonnell, Piper, Thomas & Fanuele, 2014) but also poorer child language skills and poorer emotion knowledge (Valentino, Hibel, Cummings, Nuttall, Comas & McDonnell, 2015). In terms of the form of maternal reminiscing more specifically, Karen Salmon and her colleagues have begun empirical research on how a variety of maternal and child problems may both influence maternal reminiscing style and, as a result of this reminiscing style, increase child risk (see Salmon, in press, for an overview). Using a new theoretical model they have developed, they have found that highly anxious mothers have difficulty tolerating their children’s distress, and therefore may be less able to openly discuss and resolve negative emotional experiences with their children, practicing a low-­elaborative, emotionally avoidant reminiscing style that can exacerbate children’s anxiety. Similarly, mothers of children who display disruptive and oppositional behaviors may resort to a cycle of rigid interactions, both behaviorally and in language. In terms of reminiscing, mothers of children with conduct disorders may actually escalate hostility and have little success in resolving emotions into more positive states. Thus there are multiple pathways by which maternal reminiscing style may confer developmental risk to children when it comes to developing elaborated, emotionally regulated autobiographical memories that contribute to a healthy sense of self across time. Research on maternal reminiscing in the context of pathology typically examines children’s developing memories for a range of experiences, but what about memories of specific traumatic episodes? Instances of family violence and abuse in particular are often silenced within families (Callaghan, Alexander,

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Sixsmith & Fellin, 2018). In my interviews with adult women who were severely sexually abused as a child by a family member, most of them said either that they did not disclose the abuse or were not believed when they did (Fivush & Edwards, 2004). All of them expressed difficulties remembering these experiences, struggling with putting together vividly remembered bits and pieces with generally incoherent and vague images. One might think that perhaps it is better not to remember such awful experiences, but in fact, the research is quite clear that an inability to recall them creates distress and negative health consequences (Henderson, Hargreaves, Gregory & Williams, 2002). How much of this is due to the lack of opportunity to discuss these experiences with an adult who could help the child create some kind of coherent narrative of what happened? In a series of studies examining children’s memories of a distressing medical procedure, a voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG), Gail Goodman and her colleagues examined this question. Although a VCUG cannot mimic the horror of familial abuse, it is a painful event involving the genitals, where the child is touched and asked to do very uncomfortable things. This is a planned procedure done for medical diagnosis purposes for children who are suffering from symptoms. Yet many parents choose not to tell the child what will be happening, so the child comes to the procedure completely unprepared and is not given the opportunity to discuss the experience once it is over. Other parents simply tell the child they must be strong. Yet others help their child create a coherent understanding of the steps of the procedure, explain why they occur in that order, and allow the child to discuss and explore their emotions both during the event and after it is over. The former strategies could be considered a form of silencing, whereas the latter is consistent with a more elaborated reminiscing style. Follow-­up interviews with these patients after a few weeks, and even after a few years, indicate that children of parents who elaboratively discussed the experience after it happened had clearer and more coherent memories of the procedure and were less stressed about it, whereas those children whose parents did not discuss it had indistinct memories and retained high levels of stress when recalling what happened (Goodman, Quas, Batterman-­Faunce, Riddlesberger & Kuhn, 1994; Quas, Goodman, Bidrose, Pipe, Craw & Ablin, 1999). In addition to directly experiencing bodily trauma, children also witness violence in the home, where the experiences are shared by multiple family members but usually not talked about. Andrea Greenhoot and her colleagues asked adolescents to recall events of family violence that had been documented 6 years earlier; most adolescents could not recall any details, especially if the mother had been the victim (Greenhoot, McCloskey & Glisky, 2005). A third of them had no memories of these episodes at all. Importantly, adolescents who could not remember the abuse events also had more impoverished autobiographical memory overall, suggesting a less elaborated and coherent life story. Those adolescents who did recall the abuse narrated less emotionally expressive narratives about these episodes than about other childhood experiences (Greenhoot,

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Johnson & McCloskey, 2005), suggesting avoidance of their emotional meaning (Harris, Block, et al., 2016). Indeed, adolescents with histories of abuse who also displayed these over-­general memories showed greater levels of depression than adolescents who could recall these incidents with more detail (Johnson, Greenhoot, Glisky & McCloskey, 2005). The patterns suggest that extreme disruptions in mother–child reminiscing because of maternal and/or child psychopathology, or violence in the home, lead to a form of silencing. Because children do not have opportunities to recall their experiences with a parent who is able to scaffold even a minimally coherent and detailed narrative of what occurred, memories remain disorganized and become more and more difficult to recall over time, failing to support any form of reflection that might allow some kind of emotional regulation.

Voice and Silence in Intergenerational Narratives Stories of shared experiences told and not told within the immediate family may be quite different than stories told or not told about family history, including parents’ childhoods. As mentioned in Chapter 10, adolescents who know more of their family history, and tell stories about their parents’ childhoods that are coherent and richly detailed, show a higher sense of self and well-­being than adolescents who do not know these family stories. But what of experiences that are more problematic or painful for the parent? Do parents pass on stories about incidents of wrongdoing (Thorne et al., 2004)? Transgression stories, narratives about a time one did something wrong, or about an act one felt guilty about or ashamed of, are important socialization vehicles to help adolescents navigate their own difficult life choices (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b). In the Family Narratives Lab, we asked young adults to tell us stories about when their mother and their father did something wrong when younger; 86 percent of our participants were able to tell these stories, meaning parents are telling them and adolescents and young adults are hearing them. The majority were of minor infractions, such as cheating on a test, getting a speeding ticket, or sneaking a cigarette. But a substantial minority were about quite serious experiences, events that really challenged a sense of the self as a good person, as Sean’s written narrative about his father illustrates: Sean’s Narrative A story about when my father may have felt like he done something wrong is when him and my mom first started dating and she had broken up with him his temper was really bad. So he went to my mom house and when she opened the door her and one of her school friends (A guy) was studying and my dad went crazy so he beat the guy up and sliced him in the face with a pocket knife a my

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dad said he did it because of his love for my mom and he was hurt but he also said if he would have let them explain it would have went different. It was so bad the guy had to jump out the fire escape. My dad said all he could think was he wanted to be with my mom if he couldn’t then no one else could This story presents the father in a very negative light, as hot tempered and uncontrollable, someone impulsive enough to severely harm another person. There is a bit of a lesson embedded here, that the father should have calmed down and listened to the explanation, but overall, the narrative details a serious transgression with minimal redemptive qualities. This degree of misconduct, unmitigated by valuable lessons learned, was rare in our sample. Most often, young adults explicitly reported that the parent told the story to teach them a life lesson. Perhaps most interesting, young adults who know these kinds of transgression stories about their parents, and especially those who tell them in more elaborated and evaluative detail, show higher levels of well-­being than young adults who tell less evaluative stories. Similar to other types of family stories and intergenerational narratives, knowing about your parents’ transgressions is linked to positive outcome, but maybe only if these stories are explicit in the lessons to be taken from them, the meaning to be gleaned. In turn, adolescents and young adults who do not know any of these kinds of stories, whose parents have not revealed transgressive events, show lower levels of well-­ being, suggesting that the silencing of these stories can be detrimental. Adolescents may need these kinds of stories to help them navigate the rough patches in their own life journey; knowing how others, especially parents, have understood and learned from these kinds of experiences may provide positive models for adolescents.

Traumatizing Family Histories Critically, in transgression narratives, the transgressor is, in some sense, responsible for their actions. They have committed some kind of illegal or harmful act. What about stories where parents were victims, either of interpersonal violence or cultural violence? We do know that children of parents who survived traumatic experiences before the children were born still show significantly higher levels of psychological symptoms, including depression and stress disorders, than children whose parents did not suffer serious trauma. Some of this risk is conferred biologically, in hormonal changes in stress responses that are carried from parent to child, but family interactions, ways of talking or not talking about these experiences, must also play a part (Lehrner & Yehuda, 2018). For example, children of Holocaust concentration camp survivors perceive their parents as vulnerable and in need of protection, often leading to feelings of guilt,

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even though very few of these parents ever share their stories with their children (Wiseman, Metzl & Barber, 2006). Even implicitly knowing about parental victimization, perhaps if especially severe, may create unhelpful stress for children. Often, parents do not want their children to know about these severely traumatic histories, either because they are afraid of how it might affect their children or because their behaviors during these times were complicated; people often have to do terrible things to survive and, once out of that context, it is hard to explain these moral choices. For example, parents and grandparents who lived through Stalin’s purges in Russia do not want their children to investigate their family history and may even actively interfere with their children’s attempts to gain information (Baker & Gippenreiter, 1998). Relatedly, the generations following WWII in Germany were often confronted with family histories of collusion or even active participation in Nazi atrocities (Tschuggnall & Welzer, 2002). Yet even in the context of these distressing family histories, young adults report better functioning when they know key elements of their family history than when they do not (Baker & Gippenreiter, 1998). There is simply too little data on if and how families share these difficult histories, but the little that exists suggests that more emotionally open and honest communication may be better than concealment. Finally, some stories of family trauma may begin to build a sense of family strength. As I have argued throughout this book, stories that are elaborative and emotionally expressive may help children begin to understand how to withstand upsetting events. We certainly see this with everyday emotional regulation, and perhaps it holds in these more severe situations (see Fossion, Rejas, Servais, Pelc & Hirsch, 2003, for a discussion of clinical case studies suggesting this may be the case). When asked about the most challenging experience of his life, 20-year-­old Ethan writes about events that occurred before he can even remember: Ethan’s Narrative The most unstable part of my life happened before I can remember. When I was about 2 years old in Congo, there was a war that made my mother and her family a target for the military. For about 8 months my family was constantly under the threat of being arrested, assaulted, or even killed. After a while, we were able to leave the country and stay in a refugee camp in Cameroon. We stayed here for a few months before coming to the US. Although I was too young at the time to have any memories of this time, my parents have made sure that I know what happened to me. Knowing this has always helped me to keep

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things in perspective. Whenever I am faced with a personal difficulty or with troubled times, it helps me to think about where it is I came from, and where could be right now if we hadn’t had the chance to leave. This is obviously a highly redemptive narrative, a story of a family that overcame great odds to make a better life for themselves, and it is clearly a story that they want to make sure is passed on to the children. And, of course, this is a story with a more or less happy ending – the family did escape horrific circumstances and is ultimately thriving in the U.S. Perhaps it is not surprising that this has become a family story of strength and redemption.

Summary Even with regard to distressing, challenging, and traumatic experiences, the limited research that exists suggests that talking about those experiences within families benefits children and adolescents, and that, perhaps even more so, not talking about them within the family is detrimental. Just as with everyday emotional events, when a family constructs more elaborative, emotionally expressive stories of a child’s highly difficult experiences while also acknowledging the child’s emotions and perspectives, that child grows in positive ways. Further, families that can acknowledge complex and problematic family histories may help their children and adolescents cope with their own life challenges. An important caveat still unaddressed in the literature is the question of when in development these stories should be told. Just as more minor parental transgressions must be carefully revealed at appropriate developmental moments, darker and more fraught stories must be cautiously cultivated in how and when they are told to children. But ultimately, it is important that these stories be told, because without them children not only feel more bewildered by, and less equipped for, the world in which they live, but also develop a less rich interior life. Again quoting Anita Diamant: “You come hungry for the story that was lost. You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them … remembering seems a holy thing” (1997, p. 3). Some family stories may, indeed, have a dark side, but they are still stories that need to be told.

13 The Autobiographical Self Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

We create ourselves and our world through stories. We enter the world breathing in stories and we leave the world with stories on our lips. Through stories we form our families, our communities, and our nations. Stories are, simply put, the stuff of which we are made. From our lived experiences, each of us constructs an autobiographical self, a narrative identity that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives. But this autobiographical self is deeply socially constructed; it begins as children are drawn into cultures of storytelling, of presenting self to others, and it develops gradually across the first two decades of life, as memories coalesce into a temporally extended narrative that integrates discrete experiences into a coherent story of who I am, how I became this way, and what I will become. It is a surprisingly prolonged and complex developmental process, and as I have demonstrated throughout this book, it unfolds in richly embellished human social and cultural interactions. Through telling and retelling stories among ourselves and across the generations, autobiographical selves constitute, create, and recreate human culture. Although like everyone else, I grew up immersed in stories, I did not understand the power of stories to shape selves and worlds until I started listening to family stories, hearing how families reminisce about their individual and shared past, how family histories are integrated into stories of everyday life and commonplace experiences. In this book I have tried to convey the research story that documents how autobiographical selves are constructed in routine family storytelling – stories that define our individuality as well as our relationships with others, helping us enter a culturally enmeshed world of other people and other minds. But it is the narratives sprinkled throughout this book that really tell the story. Stories help us build a coherent sense of who we are and can guide or buoy us when dealing with life’s inevitable predicaments and

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crises. Stories bind us together in a common understanding of what is important and what is good, as the following narrative from Leila illustrates. When asked to tell a story about her family, 20-year-­old Leila describes a family trip to Italy with her mother and her two brothers: Leila’s Narrative A lot of my great stories and memories concern my mom. She is always laughing and trying to make those around her happy. No matter how much we make fun of her jokes or the things she says, she is always smiling. We always talk about the time [my mother], myself, and my brothers went to Italy together. We were young at the time, I was probably 9, my youngest brother was 7, and my older brother was 14. We had been walking around for hours and out of nowhere my mom looks at us and say “my feet are about to scream bloody murder.” I don’t know why but we thought that was so funny when she said. Until this day we make fun of her for saying it, and she always laughs along with us. [This] story has all of the people I love very much in it. It’s something we all talk about and reminisce about. Can there be a more mundane story? Yet this story is a powerful reminder of what matters and how we define ourselves. Leila chooses a story that characterizes who her mother is as a person and that bonds her to her family. She explicitly begins by stating that many of her great stories are about her mom, setting up the significance of this relationship in her life. And she concludes by reinforcing why this story is important to her, because it is about all of the people she loves. Perhaps most to the point, she emphasizes that this is a story her family tells frequently, another reason it is meaningful for her, as it continues to bring the family together in a shared moment from the past to recreate a shared moment in the here and now. This seemingly silly anecdote reminds us that it is the small moments in life, the little stories, that nourish us and help us understand who we are in the world; these stories may be about past events, but they very much live in the present. The research I have presented in this book demonstrates the critical role that family stories and family storytelling play in child development and outcome – for language and literacy, for memory, for emotion regulation skills, for understanding other minds, and for constructing a coherent narrative identity that establishes a foundation for psychological well-­being. But this is not the end of the story. As with all good stories, this one is satisfying in its resolution but leaves us hungry for more. Rather than providing an ending for the story I have told in this book, I raise questions that will hopefully lead to new stories.

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Stories Yet Untold Perhaps most important, a sociocultural approach demands attention to how individual differences are shaped by and help shape social and cultural interactions and systems. Examining individual differences in parent–child reminiscing styles underscores the extent to which systematic patterns of family reminiscing lead to particular child outcomes. But we still know too little about why parents display these individual differences and how these differences are produced by sociocultural contexts. Research on cultural, ethnic, and racial influences on reminiscing is still too limited, and much of the current research still cuts too broad a swath in thinking about how these groups are defined and constituted in culturally meaningful ways. In-­depth theoretical and empirical work on ways in which culture informs family reminiscing and on how family reminiscing recreates and reinforces culture in everyday interactions is needed. Related to culture are questions of gender. Family storytelling helps us think about gender as a process of evaluating lived experiences within culturally provided tropes and frameworks, such that gender becomes a dialogue between the individual and cultural stereotypes. From this perspective gender is deeply embedded in implicit language interactions that frame how we understand our previous experiences and approach new ones. How will rapidly changing cultural understandings of gender begin to seep into gendered family reminiscing? How will newer family forms, including single parents, same-­sex parents, interracial families, transgendered parents, and so on, influence and be influenced by cultural frameworks, and how will new kinds of stories emerge from evolving forms of families? How will family reminiscing both inform and be informed by these changing cultural understandings? These questions raise the larger question of family reminiscing across generations. How do families pass on family history in ways that both preserve positive family identity and allow for new identities to emerge? How do families help individuals create a sense of identity embedded in particular forms of cultural and political meaning, and how does this change as history is understood in new ways? How is reality redefined in family stories that cross generations? From a developmental perspective, I have focused on the first part of life, early beginnings of the autobiographical self and the formation of a narrative identity in young adulthood. But narrative identity is not stagnant. There is fascinating research on how narrative identities are negotiated in middle adulthood, as individuals struggle with new challenges, perhaps significant losses, but also as they open up to new ways of thinking about selves and the world (Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011; McAdams, 2004a). Almost all of this research focuses on individuals telling their story, but they are also embedded in families, be they adult children of now aging parents, parents themselves, or siblings who have remained close or drifted apart, telling and retelling their stories in family contexts. And even in old age, how does a person renegotiate their identity and

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reflect on the meaning and purpose of their life, and how is this done in family contexts (Birren & Svensson, 2013; Webster, 2001)? How are autobiographical selves continually evolving within changing family contexts and stories across the lifespan? This raises the question of accuracy, first addressed in Chapter 1. How do we define accuracy for family stories, and when and why is accuracy an important criterion as opposed to meaning-­making or family identity? Although accuracy is not the only interesting question we can ask about family stories, there are times when accuracy becomes paramount. How is this negotiated when families contest what happened, or when what actually happened may be too difficult to talk about? The dark side of family stories remains dark – we know almost nothing empirically about how families silence and/or impose certain story lines, under what circumstances, and with what outcomes. Also from a sociocultural perspective, we must take seriously the tools that cultures provide individuals for accomplishing culturally important tasks. We live in a world of astonishingly fast technological innovation. How might these new cultural tools influence family reminiscing and autobiographical selves? Certainly, diaries and family pictures are not new, but the technological tools to scaffold these processes, and the accessibility and public nature of these materials, are. To what extent does this kind of public display influence our individual identities? Although intuitively we think this must matter, there is actually very little evidence one way or the other (but see Breen et al., 2017; Harbus, 2011). Especially in the current generation of digital natives, how does access and interaction with these tools change the way we tell family stories and present our autobiographical selves to the world?

Coda All good stories end with a coda, a pithy summing up of the point of the narrative (Labov, 1982). I have spent my career thinking about stories, listening to family storytelling, and trying to piece together how and why family storytelling is so critical for the development of an individual identity, an autobiographical self. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, but we are also the stories we listen to. In the words of Alexander McCall Smith (2005): “There were many such stories, and he understood just how important they were, and listened with patience and respect. A life without stories would be no life at all.”

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Index

accuracy, role of in family narratives 2, 25, 31, 160 adolescence: and autobiographical voice 102–18; benefits of family history knowledge for adolescents 127; changes in autobiographical reminiscing across childhood 108–11; cross-cultural comparison of intergenerational narratives 143–4; cross-cultural comparisons of adolescent narrative identities 137–40; Deidre’s narrative 102; and the emergence of identity 104–5; enduring effects of early maternal reminiscing style 107–8; family reminiscing and the construction of personal life narratives 106; gender comparisons of elaboration in recounting style 122–3; gender differences in narrative style 126; gender identity 115; gendered narrative voices 112–15; the life narrative 105–11; modelling narrative identity through family storytelling 125–7; narrative identity and well-being for young adults 116–18; narrative meaning-making and well-being 111–17; Natalie’s narrative 103 affiliative language, mothers’ use of 63–4 agency, communion and 60, 111 Allen, J. 82 asthma, role of elaborative maternal reminiscing in coping with 83–4

attachment, and maternal reminiscing style 53–6 attachment security, maternal reminiscing style and 54–6 autobiographical memory: accuracy and stability 14–15; complexity 12; the concept 1–2, 9–15; cultural life scripts and master narratives 20–2; culture and 133; directing future behaviour function 15–17; emotional regulation function 19–20; examples of 8–9; functions of 3, 15–20; hierarchically organized model 12; Mandy’s narrative 11–12; Rebecca’s narrative 24–6; reconstructive nature 12–14; relationship with episodic memory 26; role of cross-cultural differences 133; role of language 34–5; social relationship function 17–19; theoretical foundations 8–23; transition from episodic memory to 28–33 autobiographical narratives, emergence of gender differences in 65–7 autobiographical reasoning 106, 108 autobiographical self: and the concept of theory of mind 31–3; cultural variability 34; developmental foundations 24–38; emergence of individual differences 39–56; gendered perspective 57–68; linkage of present self to past self 30–1; memories as core of 2; an overview 1–2, 157–60; in the past 29–30; in the present 28–9; role of language and

182   Index

autobiographical self continued narrative 33–5; social construction of a temporally extended self 35–8 autonoetic consciousness 10 Azmitia, M. 138–9 Barnes, H.E. 1 Bauer, P.J. 27, 67 Bergen, P.V. 82 Bird, A. 87 birth stories, gender differences in retelling 113–15 blue jays, information recall abilities 10 Bohanek, J.G. 90 Bowlby, J. 53 Breen, A.V. 132 Bronfenbrenner, U. 90, 92 Bruner, J. 33, 130 Cairney, K. 132 Chrisler, J.C. 113 Coffman, J.L. 74 collaborative reminiscing, Ethan’s narrative 155–6 communion and agency 60, 111 Conway, M.A. 12 cultural identity 129–45; author’s cultural background 130; cross-cultural comparison of intergenerational narratives 143–4; cross-cultural comparisons of adolescent narrative identities 137–40; cross-cultural comparisons of maternal reminiscing style 133–7; culture and autobiographical memory 133; culture and narrative 130–2; experiences of discrimination and 138; expression of in family reminiscing 140–4; in family narratives 141–3; historical contexts 144–5; resistance narratives 131; role of cross-cultural differences in autobiographical memory 133; Western European vs East Asian traits 133 cultural life scripts, and autobiography 20–2 cultural perspectives, on the value of narrative coherence 116–17 cultural socialization, positive 140–1 culture, the concept of 130 Dadds, M.R. 82 dark side of family stories 146–56; family secrets 147–8; psychopathology, family

violence, and reminiscing 150–6; traumatizing family histories 154–6; voice and silence in intergenerational narratives 153–4; voice and silence in shared family stories 148–50 deferred imitation task 27 defining self and relationships: and emotional regulation 20; Mandy’s narrative 17; Tony’s narrative 17 deliberate episodic recall, studies on infants and toddlers 27 depression: brooding as risk factor for 117; family secrets and 148; impact of depression on elaborative maternal reminiscing 151; levels of in children of survivor parents 154; over-general memories of abuse and 153; role of reminiscing in transmitting risk of 150–1 developmental matching 120 Diamant, A. 146, 156 directing future behaviour: as function of autobiographical memory 15–17; Tony’s narrative 15–16 discrimination: preparing children and adolescents for experiences of 140; psychological distress as result of facing 138; see also prejudice; racial discrimination Duke, M.P. 127 early years development: episodic memory 26–8; examples of literacy in the home 33–4; role of elaborative maternal reminiscing style 56; social construction of a temporally extended self 35–8 (see also temporal self-extension); subjective consciousness 30–1; theory of mind 31–3; understanding of temporal relations 29–30; Vygotsky’s theory 33, 41 elaboration: correlation with children’s memory responses 44; cross-cultural comparisons 133; early reminiscing style as predictor of in adolescents’ life narratives 107; effects of measuring methods 60; gender comparisons 63, 65–7 (see also gender comparisons of elaboration); as key dimension of maternal reminiscing style 43–50 (see also elaborative maternal reminiscing); positive effects on children’s narrative development 71; relationship with

Index   183

attachment security 54; relationship with psychological health and wellbeing 19; role in development of a positive view of self 148; role of in coping with difficult experiences 84; role of in creating healthier adult relationships 54; role of in positive sense of self and well-being 124; the value of in discussing negative experiences 93, 152, 154–5 elaborative maternal reminiscing: in Abigail’s narrative 62; about emotionally negative experiences 83, 93, 155–6; in Arlene’s narrative 40; in Billy’s narrative 54–5; in Charlie’s narrative 40; cross-cultural comparisons 133–7; in Debbie’s narrative 73–4; and emotional regulation 79–85; enduring effects 107–8; in Ethan’s narrative 72–3; impact of depression on 151; importance of 69; influence on cognitive skills development 77–8; in Jaxon’s narrative 149–50; Laible and colleagues’ study 82; and language and literacy skills 69–71; Maori style 135; in Micah’s narrative 96; in Porter’s narrative 9; potential impact of nonengagement 149, 151; as predictor of literacy and memory skills 5; in Rachel’s narrative 58; related maternal characteristics 50–1; role in children’s temperament 52–4; role of children’s language abilities 51–2; the spectrum 4; and strategic memory skills 71–5; and theory of mind 75–7; in Tommy’s narrative 55–6 emotional expressivity, gender differences 117 emotional regulation: Barry’s narrative 84; Carly’s narrative 80; elaborative maternal reminiscing and 79–85; as function of autobiographical memory 19–20; influence of elaborative and emotionally expressive family reminiscing on 116; Mandy’s narrative 19; Porter’s narrative 19; Rachel’s narrative 80; role of elaborative maternal reminiscing 149–50; role of family reminiscing 93; Sarah’s narrative 80; Zoe’s narrative 81 emotions, cross-cultural comparisons of prioritization in reminiscing style 134 episodic memory: definition 10; dual

criteria for 10; early years development 26–8; and maternal reminiscing style study 42; relationship with autobiographical memory 26; transition to autobiographical memory from 28–33 Erikson, E.H. 5, 104 ethnic identity, positive impact of adolescent exploration 138 false belief, children’s grasp of the concept 31, 76 family conversations: gendered perspective of language use and style 64; typical structure 2 family history: benefits of knowing for adolescents 127; and the benefits of telling family stories 127–8 family narratives: cultural identity in 141–3; ecological systems model 91 family reminiscing 89–101; categories of family narrative 95; comparing the value of mothers’ and fathers’ contributions 100; and the construction of life narratives 106; cultural identity expression in 140–4; dinner table narratives 95–100; ecology of family narratives 91–100; and emotional wellbeing 100; research framework 90; role of intergenerational family narratives 100; shared family narratives 92–4; value of parental intergenerational narratives 98; see also intergenerational narratives family secrets, place of in family stories 147–8 family stories: critical role in child development and outcome 158; the dark side of see dark side of family stories; family history and the benefits of telling 127–8; as form of master narrative 125; as foundation for a healthy sense of self 125; gender comparisons of parental contributions to 100, 122; role of birth stories 113; women’s role as keepers of 67; see also dark side of family stories family storytelling 6, 125, 128, 147, 158–60 family trauma, role of collaborative reminiscing in dealing with 155–6 Faulkner, W. 1 first memory, influence of collaborative reminiscing on age of 107

184   Index

Fivush, R. 50, 83, 115, 127; cultural background 130 flashbulb memories 15 functions of autobiographical memory 3, 15–20 gender: importance to the autobiographical self 57–68; role of family storytelling in understanding 159; role of in self-concept conversations 86 gender comparisons of elaboration: in adolescents’ recounting style 122–3; in children’s reminiscing style 65, 67, 113–15; in parental reminiscing style 59–60, 62, 63, 64–5, 100; relationship to well-being 19, 124, 126 gender comparisons of parent-child reminiscing: daughters and sons 60; emergence of gender differences in narratives 65–7; language use and style 63–5; mothers and fathers 57–60; narrative styles 61–2; reminiscing context 58–9 gender differences: in adolescent narrative style 126; in autobiographical stories 112–15; childhood development in narrative style 66; emergence in autobiographical narratives 67; in emotional expressivity 117; in how narrative meaning-making relates to well-being 117; intergenerational narratives 122–3, 125; in mother– adolescent reminiscing 108; personal narratives of adolescents 117, 123; reminiscing style 67; in retelling of birth stories 113–15; in stories about parents 122–3; in use of master narratives 132 gender differences in narrative style: Ava’s narrative 113–14; Deidre’s narrative 112; Mandy’s narrative 112; Matthew’s narrative 114–15; Megan’s narrative 65–6; Pamela’s narrative 112; Paul’s narrative 66; Richard’s narrative 112–13 gender identity, autobiographical stories and 115 Gigi, demonstration of autobiographical memory 8 Goodman, G.S. 152 Greenhoot, A.F. 152 Grysman, A. 115 Habermas, T. 106, 108 Haden, C.A. 44, 50, 72, 74

Hammack, P.L. 131 Hayden, J.M. 113 Hayne, H. 26 Hirst, W. 14 historical context of cultural identity, Sebastian’s narrative 144–5 Holocaust 130, 154 identity: adolescence and the emergence of 104–5; role of intergenerational narratives 124–5 identity crisis in adolescence, Erikson’s argument 104–5 imposition of narrative see silencing and imposition integration of perspective, Mandy’s narrative 103, 109 intergenerational narratives 119–28; adolescents’ recounting style 120, 122–4; April’s family narrative 93–4, 98; Becca’s family narrative 98–9; children recounting stories about parents 121–2, 158 (see also stories about parents); Conner’s family narrative 99–100; cross-cultural comparison 143–4; family history and the benefits of telling family stories 127–8; as frameworks 119–20; gender differences 122–3, 125; hearing and telling 120–4; Jasmine’s family narrative 89–90, 92, 98; Micah’s family narrative 96–7; modelling narrative identity 125–7; Nicholas’s family narrative 97–8; Porter’s narrative as 91; role in identity and well-being 124–5; value of parental narratives 98; voice and silence in 153–4 Kagitcibasi, C. 135 Keller, H. 135 Kim-Gervey, C. 140 Kingston, M.H. 129 Lagattuta, K.H. 32 Laible, D.J. 82–3 Langley, H.A. 74 language: elaborative maternal reminiscing and 51–2, 69–71; role in the autobiographical self 33–5; role of in autobiographical memory 34–5 Leyva, D. 70 life narratives: the concept 105–11; examples of parental scaffolding 109;

Index   185

family reminiscing and the construction of 106; Habermas and colleagues’ research 108 life scripts, cultural 3, 21–2, 105 life story creation: John’s family narrative 109–10; Peter’s family narrative 110 literacy: early book reading and reminiscing as predictor of 70–1; elaborative maternal reminiscing as predictor of 5, 51–2, 69–71; examples of in the home 33–4 Marin, K.A. 90 master narratives: in American culture 132; and autobiography 20–2; crosscultural comparisons 133; examples of 22; function 22; gender differences in use of 132; identity-defining power 131; incorporation into personal stories 131–2; Israeli-Palestinian example 131; in Pamela’s narrative 22 maternal reminiscing style 39–56; Arlene’s narrative 39–40; attachment and 53–6; Charlie’s narrative 40; comparison with paternal style 59–60; correlation between elaboration and children’s memory responses 44; cross-cultural comparisons 133–7; cultural context of effect on child outcome 136; defining 41–3; elaboration as key dimension of 43 (see also elaborative maternal reminiscing); emotionally avoidant 151; individual differences 43; influencing factors 50, 151; Patty’s narrative 45–7, 48–9; Porter’s narrative 8–9; potential significance 43–50; Rebecca’s narrative 24–6; Reese and colleagues’ research 107; related child characteristics 51–2; related maternal characteristics 50–1; relationship between elaboration and attachment security 54; relationship with maltreatment 151; as risk factor in transmission of problems 150–1; Sarah’s narrative 35–7; socioeconomic considerations 50–1; stability over time 44–5; studies into role in child literacy 70–1; study methodology 41–3; see also elaborative maternal reminiscing McAdams, D.P. 132 McLean, K.C. 120, 125, 127–8, 131–2 Melzi, G. 136 memories, as core of autobiographical self 2

memory: correlation between elaboration and children’s memory responses 44; development across the first year of life 26–7; explicit vs implicit 10; newborn infants 26 memory skills, elaborative maternal reminiscing and 5, 71–5 mental state language, mothers’ use of in reminiscing behaviour 76 Merrill, N.A. 90 metamemory 71 mirror mark test 28–30 mother–adolescent reminiscing: gender differences in 108; research on 107–8 narrative: cultural perspectives 116–17, 130–2; role in the autobiographical self 33–5; value of coherence in 116–17 narrative identity: cross-cultural comparisons 137–40; focus of research on 159; modelling through family storytelling 125–7 narrative meaning-making: the concept 17; making sense of experiences of prejudice through 138; parents’ role in modelling 106; role of in well-being 111–17 narrative voice, and well-being 116–17 narratives: Abigail 61–2; Anna 86–7; April 93–4, 98; Arlene 39–40; Ava 113–14; Bao 139; Barry 84; Becca 98–9; Billy 54–6; Carly 80; Chad 148–9; Charlie 40; Charlotte 142–3; Chen 139; Conner 99–100; Dave 122–3; Debbie 73–4; definition and function 33; Deidre 102, 112; Ethan 72–3, 155–6; inherently social nature 20; Jasmine 89–90, 92, 98; Jason 59, 123; Jaxon 149–50; Jennifer 85; John 109–10; Leila 121–2, 158; Mandy 11–12, 17, 19, 103, 106, 109, 111–12, 132; Matthew 114–15; Megan 65–6; Micah 96–7; Michael 141–2; Nancy 121–2; Natalie 103, 106; Nicholas 97–8; Pamela 20–2, 111–12; Patty 45–7, 48–9; Paul 66; Peter 110; Porter 8–9, 19, 91; Rachel 58, 76–7, 80; Rebecca 24–6; Richard 112–13, 132; role of the listener 14; Sally 18–19; Sarah 35–7, 80; Sean 153–4; Sebastian 144–5; Tommy 55–6; Tony 15–17; Zoe 81

186   Index

negative emotions: cross-cultural comparisons of maternal regulation assistance 134; elaborative reminiscing about and social competence 93; influence of maternal focus with preschool children in later emotional understanding 107; regulating 83 negative experiences: the value of elaboration in discussing 93, 152, 154–5; value of reminiscing about 83, 93, 155–6; voiding cystourethrogram study 152 Neisser, U. 4 Nelson, K. 4, 29, 33 newborn infants, recognition memory displayed by 26 Niwa, E.Y. 140 non-elaborative reminiscing style, Jason’s narrative 59 nonhuman animals, information recall abilities 10 object sorting 72 Ornstein, P.A. 74 over-general memories, relationship with psychopathology 151 parent–adolescent reminiscing, research on 108 parental scaffolding, in construction of life narratives 109 parent-child reminiscing: beyond preschool years 61–3; and cognitive outcomes 69–78; and development of a sense of self 85–7; and emotional and social outcomes 79–88; gender comparisons 58–62, 63–5, 65–7 (see also gender comparisons of parent-child reminiscing); importance through middle childhood and early adolescence 93; mothers’ use of affiliative language 63–4; role of 37; see also elaborative maternal reminiscing parents, stories about see stories about parents Pasupathi, M. 66–7 paternal reminiscing style: comparison with maternal style 59–60; Jason’s narrative 59; see also gender comparisons of parent-child reminiscing personal narratives: adolescents’ internalization of parents’ moral “voice” in 126; childhood development of

gender differences 66; cross-cultural comparisons of function 135; gender differences 117, 123; relationship with well-being 125; silencing of culturally nonconforming narratives 131 Peterson, C. 126 Pleydell-Pearce, C.W. 12 positive cultural socialization, role of in self-esteem 140–1 Povinelli, D.J. 30 Pratt, M. 126 prejudice 143; making sense of experiences through narrative meaningmaking 138; see also discrimination preschool years: benefits of collaborative reminiscing training 71; development of a temporarily extended sense of self 32, 35; emotional regulation 79, 83; gender comparisons of emotional evaluation 65; gender comparisons of narrative skills and content 66; gender comparisons of parental reminiscing styles 70; role of elaborative maternal reminiscing in children’s understanding of emotion 82; sharing of stories 34; theory of mind research 31, 75–6; understanding of self 87; use of memory strategies 72 psychopathology, relationship of overgeneral memories with 151 racial discrimination 143; Bao’s narrative 139; Charlotte’s narrative 142–3; Chen’s narrative 139; cultural identity and experiences of 138; Michael’s narrative 141–2; and psychological distress 138 recognition memory, displayed by newborn infants 26 reconstruction, capacity of autobiographical memory for 12–14 The Red Tent: A Novel (Diamant) 146 redemption narrative, as cultural master narrative 22, 132 Reese, E. 44, 70, 77, 87, 107 reminiscing: changes in autobiographical reminiscing across childhood 108–11; children’s adoption of parents’ gendered ways of 60; cross-cultural comparisons of function 135; function of 70; Gigi example 8; non-elaborative 59; role of in transmitting risk of depression 150–1; role of the listener 14; see also elaborative maternal reminiscing

Index   187

reminiscing style: cross-cultural comparison 135–6; gender differences 67; maternal see maternal reminiscing style; parental differences in 115 resistance narratives, cultural identity and 131 retrieval, neural patterns of 13 Rogers, O. 131 Rovee-Collier, C.K. 26 Sales, J.M. 83 Salmon, K. 82, 151 same-sex sexual orientation, as example of changing narrative 131 Santos, C.E. 140 Sarbin, T.R. 130 scaffolded reminiscing 85, 87, 93, 106, 108, 118 Schröder, L. 135 secure attachment, maternal reminiscing style and 54–6 self, creating a narrative of 1 self-concept: Anna’s narrative 86–7; Jennifer’s narrative 85; Pamela’s narrative 20–1; role of gender in conversations about 86; role of parentchild reminiscing in development 85–7; see also sense of self self-esteem: cross-cultural comparison of intergenerational narratives and 144; elaborative maternal reminiscing as predictor of 87; family history knowledge and 127; role of elaborative reminiscing 93, 116; role of positive cultural socialization 140–1 semantic memory, definition 10 sense of self: linkage of present self to past self 30–1; mirror recognition 28–30; in the past 29–30; in the present 28–9; as requirement for autobiographical memory 28; see also self-concept sexual abuse 146, 152 silencing and imposition: Chad’s narrative 148–9; culturally nonconforming narratives 131; in family storytelling 147–8, 150, 152–4 Singer, J.A. 113 Smiley, J. 146, 149 Smith, A.M. 160 social competence: role of elaborative maternal reminiscing 87; role of elaborative reminiscing about negative emotions 93

social relationship function of autobiographical memory 17–19; Sally’s narrative 18–19 socioemotional competence, early book reading and reminiscing as predictor of 82 Sparks, A. 70 stories about parents: adolescents’ recounting style 120, 122–4; gender differences 122–3; Leila’s narrative 158; Nancy’s narrative 121–2 strategic memory, the concept 71 subjective perspective: the concept 17, 111; forms of 66; Mandy’s narrative 111; in maternal language 59; modelling of in early mother-child reminiscing 75, 79; Pamela’s narrative 111; role of in temporal understanding 30, 103–5, 110–11 supportive reminiscing, adolescents’ physical responses to 108 Syed, M. 131, 138–9 Taumoepeau, M. 77 temporal relations, age of understanding 105–6 temporal self-extension: Sarah’s narrative 35–7; skills requirements 30–1; social construction 35–8 temporal understanding: in early years development 29–30; Mandy’s narrative 103, 106; Natalie’s narrative 106 theory of mind: autobiographical self and the concept of 31–3; elaborative maternal reminiscing and 75–7; Rachel’s narrative 76–7 Thomsen, D.K. 126 Thorne, A. 132 A Thousand Acres (Smiley) 146 timeline creation: John’s family narrative 109–10; Peter’s family narrative 110 training, benefits of elaborative maternal reminiscing training 49, 71, 77, 82–3 transgender parents 159 transgression stories 6, 120, 153–4 trauma: intergenerational transmission of traumatic symptoms 147; role of collaborative reminiscing in dealing with 155–6 Tripp, G. 87 Tulving, E. 10 Valentino, K. 151 Vangelisti, A.L. 147

188   Index

vulnerability stories, consequences of telling for parents 128 Vygotsky, L.S. 33, 41 Wainryb, C. 66–7 Wang, Q. 133–5 Way, N. 140 well-being: family reminiscing and 100; relationship of elaboration to 19, 124,

126; relationship of personal narratives with 125; role of intergenerational narratives 124–5; role of narrative voice and identity 116–18 Wellman, H.M. 32, 75 The woman warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts (Kingston) 129 Zaman, W. 90