Is friendship quality reflected in memory narratives?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the link between friendship quality and content and structure of autobiographical narratives about friends. Gender differences were investigated as well. A total of 93 Italian undergraduates (51 males and 42 females) were asked to recall memories about their friends. Then, they were requested to write in detail one of their recalled memories. The Network of Relationships Inventory was used to measure the participants’ friendship dimensions. The results showed that males and females express their memories differently depending on the degree to which their friendship relationships are positive or negative. Authors interpret these results in terms of a mirror metaphor because linguistic characteristics of narratives about friends reflect qualitative features of their friendships.

The Language of Memory: Narrating Memories of Parents and Friends

“…Thus, the difference in number of words between groups was not a factor. In terms of the linguistic characteristics of the narratives, as we hypothesized and has been found by others [8,55], women's narratives were longer than men's. However, in Tani et al, only narratives about friends were investigated.…”

“…These researchers, along with Williams-Baucom, Atkins, Sevier, Eldridge, and Christesen [37], concluded that proportionately greater use of 'We' and lesser use of 'I' seem to be linguistic indicators of higher quality and stability of a couple's relationship. Differential use of 'I' and 'We' has also been found to be associated with quality of friendship relationships [8]. When young women were asked to write a detailed narrative about a memory that involved their best friend, those with more qualitatively positive friendship relationships used proportionately fewer first person singular ('I') and more first person plural ('We') pronouns.…”

“…This is a more differentiated look at affect because a particular memory narrative could contain multiple emotion labels as well as a mixture of different types of emotions. Tani et al [8] have done such a detailed analysis of specific emotion words in young adults' memory narratives about their best friends. Using the Language Inquiry and Word Count procedure (LIWC) developed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis [45] which provides a lexical analysis of text, Tani et al [8] found that both males and females used more negative emotion words in their memory narratives about their best friends when their friendship relationships were characterized by an unequal power balance in the friendship.…”

“…Tani et al [8] have done such a detailed analysis of specific emotion words in young adults' memory narratives about their best friends. Using the Language Inquiry and Word Count procedure (LIWC) developed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis [45] which provides a lexical analysis of text, Tani et al [8] found that both males and females used more negative emotion words in their memory narratives about their best friends when their friendship relationships were characterized by an unequal power balance in the friendship. However, to our knowledge no one has applied such a lexical analysis of emotion words to memory narratives of parents, nor compared narratives of parents versus friends.…”

“…We expected there to be differences in the ratios of emotion words to all words between parent and friend narratives, and that the valence of these emotion words would differ. We predicted that narratives about parents would have more negative emotion words because Tani et al [8] found that the number and emotional valence of emotion words are related to relationship quality, at least for friendships. Although they did not assess narratives about parents, it makes sense that emotion words in narratives about parents versus friends would differ since short memory reports (elicited by a memory fluency task) about parents are more negative than those about friends from this period of an individual's life [14].…”