1This explorative content-analytic study completes earlier studies on the lifespan distributions of number and affect of past and future life-events, collected by means of the Life-line Interview Method (LIM), for three age groups of men and women (young, middle and late adulthood). LIM events were classified into 40 subcategories divided over 9 categories: Relations, School, Work, Health, Growth, Home, Birth, Death and Other. Compression of the full data set by age group, gender, affect, decade, and time perspective, disclosed various patterns of events underlying the human life-course, e.g., the 'bump,' 'rosy view' and 'gender phase contrast' patterns. The compressed data set provided detailed material for the composition of three written group portraits of life, reflecting the modal life story of young, middle-aged and older men and women. Patterns and portraits show a content shift of past memories and future expectations over the lifespan, supporting a more dynamic view on the human life-course.

This comparative study (i.e., three age groups, three measures) explores the distribution of retrospective and prospective autobiographical memory data across the lifespan, in particular the bump pattern of disproportionally higher recall of memories from the ages 10 to 30, as generally observed in older age groups, in conjunction with the well-known recency effect. The memory data patterns of the Life-line Interview Method (LIM, the measure of this study, were compared to the published data patterns of two other memory measures (i.e., the Time Line and Life event sorting task). The results of this comparative study confirm the universality of the bump for older adults, as well as the recency effect. From the LIM data patterns it is hypothesized that both bump and recency effects play a part not only in middle-aged and older adults but also in younger people. In search for an explanation of these patterns, a theoretical outline is presented for the study of autobiographical memory as a dynamic system of both retrospective and prospective memory, subject to continuous changes across the lifespan.

No abstract

In this exploratory study, life story data on the word patterns in the LIM (Life-line Interview Method) are reported for 98 men and women, almost equally divided over a younger (18-30), a middle-aged (31-55) and an older (56-84) age group. All respondents tell about their past in great detail, but have a short view of the future. In terms of word frequency are memories (past) and expectations (future) in the proportion of about five to one. As expected, older persons need more words for telling their past story than younger people; word counts of the future life story, however, do not yield in any difference between young, middle-aged and older men and women. In general, the word frequency for memories of negative and positive life events is in the proportion of about three to two. The significance of the LIM word patterns for practical interventions (reminiscence, life-review) is discussed briefly.