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

The current study examines cross‐cultural differences in the reminiscence bump between samples of 119 African American and 106 European American adults aged 40 and up. Participants reported 10 word‐cued and 10 important autobiographical memories. For each, participants provided a description, the age at occurrence, and a rating of emotional valence. In total, 4225 autobiographical memories were reported. Like previous findings, results showed that the reminiscence bumps of both groups occurred earlier for word‐cued than important memories and that they occurred for positive but not negative events. Small cross‐cultural differences were observed in the shapes of the distributions and the proportions of memories within the reminiscence bumps for word‐cued, important, positive, and negative memories, and all memories combined. The findings support the cross‐cultural stability of effects associated with the reminiscence bump, while simultaneously demonstrating smaller cross‐cultural differences in the lifespan distributions within those broader patterns.

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