Personal and Intergenerational Narratives of Transgression and Pride in Emerging Adulthood: Links to Gender and Well‐Being

Abstract

Intergenerational narratives, stories parents share with children about their own youthful experiences, may facilitate the understanding of challenging life experiences and be related to psychological well-being; yet, little research has examined what young people know of their parents' self-challenging and self-enhancing experiences and how they interpret them. Research examining intergenerational narratives has observed relations between adolescents' narratives and their psychological well-being, but these relations may depend upon gender and narrative type. In the current study, 94 college students provided intergenerational and personal narratives of transgression and pride experiences. Narratives were coded for emotional, cognitive, and evaluative content. Results show that transgression and pride narratives differed in content, and that women provided more interpretative content than men. Stories about mothers contained more interpretative content than fathers, but this pattern varied by participant gender. Finally, relations to well-being were observed, especially for cognitive content in stories of participants' same-gender parent.

Functions of personal and vicarious life stories: identity and empathy

“…We examined gender differences using a series of t-tests. As summarized in Table 1, girls identified significantly more chapters in both personal and vicarious life stories compared to boys (see also Fivush, Haden, & Adam, 1995;Merrill, Srinivas, & Fivush, 2017;Zaman & Fivush, 2013 for similar gender differences). Girls also scored significantly higher than men on empathy, which is consistent with previous findings (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004;Lawrence et al, 2004).…”

Functions of Parental Intergenerational Narratives Told by Young People

“…For intergenerational transgression narratives, participants were asked to write about a time when each parent was young and felt he or she had done something wrong. For pride narratives, participants wrote about a time when each parent was young and did something of which that parent was proud (see Merrill et al., , for details). Thus, each participant wrote a total of four intergenerational narratives (i.e., a transgression and pride narrative for each parent).…”

“…Parents play a key role in guiding their children to explore the self (Schacter & Venture, ), and intergenerational narratives may be among the tools that parents use to help young people through the process of identity development. For example, knowledge of family history and taking the perspective of family members when telling intergenerational narratives are related to well‐being and identity development in adolescents (Fivush et al., ; Merrill, Srinivas, & Fivush, ; Fivush & Zaman, ).…”

“…The second and third datasets, collected from emerging adults—here college students—focused on narratives of prompted topics designed to elicit interpretive content and encourage the narrator to draw conclusions about the meaning of the experience. The second dataset consists of parental transgression and pride narratives (Merrill et al., in press), whereas the third dataset consists of self‐defining intergenerational narratives (Merrill, ). We frame our description around two key issues:…”

My partner’s stories: relationships between personal and vicarious life stories within romantic couples

“…A definitive version was subsequently published in Memory, 26 (10), 1416-1429. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2018.1485947 6 decisions and problem solving (Pillemer et al, 2015), make meaning from personal memories, and bond with others through sharing (McLean, 2016), as well as to support identity development and well-being (Duke, Lazarus, & Fivush, 2008;Fivush, Bohanek, & Zaman, 2011;Merrill, Srinivas, & Fivush, 2017;Lind & Thomsen, 2018).…”