No abstract

The authors investigated the relationship between the acquisition of cultural life scripts and the degree of coherence in children's and adolescents' life stories. Three groups of Danish school children aged 9 to 15 years participated. In 3 sessions, they wrote down a recently experienced single autobiographical event, their life story, and their cultural life script. Single-event and life stories were scored for coherence; life scripts were scored for normativity compared to an adult norm. Single-event stories and life stories were longer and more coherent in the older participants. Younger participants wrote significantly more coherent single-event stories than life stories. When controlling for age, single-event story coherence and global life story coherence did not correlate significantly, suggesting different developmental pathways. Life script normativity increased steadily across childhood and adolescence. Further, a significant relationship between the normativity of life scripts and the coherence of life stories, but not the coherence of single-event stories, was found.

Groups of younger and older participants produced cultural life scripts by listing the seven most important life events and the expected timing of these events for a hypothetical person. They also produced the seven most important life story memories from their own lives. Cultural life scripts and life story memories were rated on valence. Scales on depression, satisfaction with life, and the centrality of an event for identity and the life story were administered. A stable cultural life script was found across the two generations, with a clear bump for positive events in adolescence and early adulthood. However, older adults produced a more realistic, less idealized life script than younger adults. The overlap between life script events and life story memories increased with age. Having a negative event central to one's life story and identity was related to less life satisfaction and, in the young group, higher depression scores.

Flashbulb memories for the fall of the Berlin Wall were examined among 103 East and West Germans who considered the event as either highly positive or highly negative. The participants in the positive group rated their memories higher on measures of reliving and sensory imagery, whereas their memory for facts was less accurate than that of the participants in the negative group. The participants in the negative group had higher ratings on amount of consequences but had talked less about the event and considered it less central to their personal and national identity than did the participants in the positive group. In both groups, rehearsal and the centrality of the memory to the person's identity and life story correlated positively with memory qualities. The results suggest that positive and negative emotions have different effects on the processing and long-term retention of flashbulb memories.

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) refers to the negative affect associated with autobiographical events fading faster than the positive affect associated with such events, a reliable and valid valence effect established by researchers in the U.S.A. The present study examined the idea that the FAB is a ubiquitous emotion regulating phenomenon in autobiographical memory that is present in people from a variety of cultures. We tested for evidence of the FAB by sampling more than 2,400 autobiographical event descriptions from 562 participants in 10 cultures around the world. Using variations on a common method, each sample evidenced a FAB: Positive affect faded slower than negative affect did. Results suggest that in tandem with local norms and customs, the FAB may foster recovery from negative life events and promote the retention of the positive emotions, within and outside of the U.S.A. We discuss these findings in the context of Keltner and Haidt's (1999) levels of analysis theory of emotion and culture. Memory, epub ahead of print published online:14th February 2014, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09658211.2014 3 This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in A Pancultural Perspective on the Fading Affect Bias in Autobiographical MemoryThe human experience is replete with personal, emotional events. The emotions associated with life events can be positive or negative, fleeting or long lasting, disruptive or soothing. Emotions are constructed, in part, by biological and social mechanisms that moderate the affective experience and its expression. Much of the research on emotions has focused on immediate consequences for thought and behavior (Barrett, Niedenthal, & Winkielman, 2005;Damasio, 2003;Forgas, 2000). However, a growing body of research has begun to examine the fate of personal events' emotions over time ). This research suggests that many emotions evidence an overall pattern of affective fading. For many events, their associated emotions become less intense with the passage of time, some gradually, others abruptly (Gibbons, Lee, & Walker, 2011;Ritchie & Batteson, 2013). Importantly, this tendency for affective fading is biased such that negative emotions, on average, fade significantly faster than do positive emotions. This pattern of affect change is the Fading Affect Bias (FAB).The evidence for such a differential fading of positive and negative affect is robust and shows demonstratively that many adults evidence a FAB. Nonetheless, the majority of the early research on the FAB involved North American samples of university students, particularly those from the United States (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). There remains the possibility that the FAB represents a cultural phenomenon, such that it may only be present in the relatively homogeneous samples thus far examined, within the U.S. To our knowledge, no prior work has provided data that enable us to compare the FAB cross-culturally' thus, the possibility of a culture-specific effect remains open. F...