Disturbed identity is one of the defining characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder manifested in a broad spectrum of dysfunctions related to the self, including disturbances in meaning-generating self-narratives. Autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that provide crucial building-blocks in our construction of a life-story, self-concept, and a meaning-generating narrative identity. The cultural life script represents culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture. It is used to organize one's autobiographical memories. Here, 17 BPD-patients, 14 OCD-patients, and 23 non-clinical controls generated three important autobiographical memories and their conceptions of the cultural life script. BPD-patients reported substantially more negative memories, fewer of their memories were of prototypical life script events, their memory narratives were less coherent and more disoriented, and the overall typicality of their life scripts was lower as compared with the other two groups.

Berntsen, D. (2015). The frequency and functions of involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories across the day.

Involuntary episodic memories are memories of past events that come to mind with no preceding attempt of retrieval. Such memories have received little attention in relation to aging compared with voluntary episodic memories (i.e., intentionally retrieved memories of past events). It is well documented that older compared with younger adults have reduced access to episodic memories, when retrieval is voluntary, but little is known about their involuntary episodic recall. Recent evidence suggests that involuntary autobiographical memories are at least as frequent as voluntary autobiographical memories in daily life, but this research has been limited to younger adults. Here older and younger adults recorded involuntary and voluntary episodic memories in relation to a film of a simulated event (Study 1) and during a normal day in their lives (Study 2). Across both studies, no age differences were found regarding the frequency of involuntary episodic memories, whereas older adults showed slower (Study 1) and less frequent (Study 2) voluntary remembering compared with younger adults. The findings suggest that involuntary relative to voluntary episodic remembering is enhanced in older adults, consistent with reduced executive functioning and increased processing of task irrelevant information with aging. Involuntary episodic remembering may provide an adaptive compensation for reductions in strategic retrieval in later adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record

No abstract

Research has shown that identity in adolescence takes the shape of a coherent life story that integrates the past with the present self and provides meaning and purpose in the person's life. One stable feature of narrative identity identified in adults is emotional tone. Here, the development of emotional tone in life stories was investigated across childhood and adolescence. A total of 142 adolescents aged 10 to 14 years wrote about their past weekend, their past and future life stories and generated a cultural life script. Across age groups, adolescents told past life stories that were overall mixed (both positive and negative) or moderately positive in emotional tone, and future life stories that were positive or highly positive. In relation to life story development, we replicated findings on age-related development of life story coherence in both past and future life stories in 10-14-year-olds. Lastly, the study highlights the link between life story coherence and cultural life script abilities. Cultural life script typicality was linked to life story coherence for both past and future life stories and across all age groups, and a majority of events mentioned in future life stories overlapped with cultural life script events.