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2006, Vol. 42, No. 5, 798–808
Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association
Adult Age Differences in Autobiographical Reasoning in Narratives
Monisha Pasupathi and Emma Mansour
University of Utah
Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal
experiences. In Study 1 (
n
63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in
their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to
the speaker’s sense of self, that is, to show autobiographical reasoning. This increase was primarily
evident in young adulthood and midlife. In Study 2 (
n
115), adults provided written narratives about
heterogeneous autobiographical experiences. Age was associated with linear increases in the likelihood
of autobiographical reasoning. The results are discussed in terms of narrative approaches to self-
development across the life span.
Keywords:
autobiographical memory, self, narrative, meaning making, life span development
How do people maintain a sense of unity and coherence in their
sense of self? For many self-researchers working with more tra-
ditional measures of self-concept, the issue has been one of unity
across different, equivalently abstract self-conceptions separated
by domain or relationship (Campbell et al., 1996; Donahue, 1994;
Harter & Monsour, 1992; Higgins, 1996; Markus & Wurf, 1987).
In the present article, we address an alternative aspect of unity and
coherence—one that resonates with long-standing philosophical
concerns with identity (Locke, 1690/1996). Specifically, we ex-
plore how people construct a sense of unity across their lives by
creating connections between their experiences and self-views. In
doing so, we take a narrative approach to self-development.
relationships (e.g., spouse, child), or across actual and possible
selves. The emphasis of such approaches is twofold. First, re-
searchers explore how individuals integrate currently evident dis-
crepancies, for example, by identifying higher order abstractions
that can explain differences in the self in different contexts (Harter
& Monsour, 1992). Second, people may set goals that, if attained,
will bring their actual self more in line with their desired possible
selves (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1987).
In contrast, our approach was grounded in life story and narra-
tive approaches to the study of self (Erikson & Erikson, 1997;
Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1993). Such approaches
emphasize that the development of the self consists of the integra-
tion of autobiographical experiences into a coherent life story. The
life story is defined as a selective set of autobiographical experi-
ences that, together with interpretations of those events, explain
how a person came to be who he or she is and projects a sense of
purpose and meaning into the future. Within their life stories,
people articulate how they have changed and stayed the same
across major life events (McAdams, 1996). The life story serves to
create unity across time and experiences, thus enabling a sense of
personal continuity across time. That kind of continuity has long
been viewed as a major issue, both from philosophical views
(Locke, 1690/1996) and from the views of modern cognitive
scientists (Neisser, 1988). It is, however, distinct from the type of
unity emphasized in traditional approaches, although one can draw
links between this temporal continuity and relations between ac-
tual and possible selves.
From a life story perspective, the process of creating such unity
requires that people engage in what Bluck and Habermas (Bluck &
Habermas, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000) have termed
autobio-
graphical reasoning
or the ability to link the self to experiences.
Much of this work has focused on how people’s narratives about
their actual and their once-possible lives construct changes. How-
ever, McAdams (1993) and others (Pals, 2006a; Pasupathi, Man-
sour, & Brubaker, 2006; Pasupathi & Rich, 2005) noted that
autobiographical reasoning also can construct and highlight ways
that one stays similar across time. Regardless of whether similarity
or change is constructed in remembering, both types of construc-
tion achieve a sense of continuity in the self, or, in Locke’s
Self, the Life Story, and Autobiographical Reasoning
The self is traditionally conceptualized as a knowledge structure
involving beliefs and evaluations about one’s characteristics, roles,
and capabilities, both current and possible (Harter, 1998; Higgins,
1996; Markus & Nurius, 1987). Such conceptualizations regard the
self as distinct from autobiographical memory in general, although
they acknowledge relationships between memory and self (see also
Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; McAdams, 1996). These views
tend to focus on how people may integrate varied aspects of
themselves, across different domains (e.g., work, family), different
Monisha Pasupathi and Emma Mansour, Department of Psychology,
University of Utah.
Study 1 data collection was supported by National Institute on Aging
Grant R01AG08816 (Laura Carstensen, principal investigator). Study 2
data collection was supported by a University Research Grant from the
University of Utah and a Proposal Initiative Grant from the College of
Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Utah (Monisha Pasu-
pathi, principal investigator). We thank Laura Carstensen for her support of
data collection for Study 1. Cindy Berg, Kate McLean, Michelle Skinner,
and Jack Bauer provided helpful comments on drafts of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mon-
isha Pasupathi, Department of Psychology, University of Utah, 390
South 1530 East, BEH-S 502, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. E-mail:
pasupath@psych.utah.edu
798
Developmental Psychology
0012-1649/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.5.798
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING IN NARRATIVES
799
(1690/1996) terms, a sense of personal identity. In the present
studies, we focused on life span developmental change in autobio-
graphical reasoning reflected in the construction of narratives
about personal experiences.
People can draw connections between experiences and self in
narratives in many ways, and researchers have explored many
more specific types of autobiographical reasoning. One prominent
approach has been to examine lessons and insights (Blagov &
Singer, 2004; McLean & Thorne, 2004, 2006; Thorne, McLean, &
Lawrence, 2004). Lessons are defined as something people have
learned from an experience that narrowly generalizes to similar
future experiences, such as “I learned it’s probably not a good idea
to spit at people from bridge tops.” Insights are broader inferences
that link an event to insights about oneself or one’s relationships
with others.
Others have explored ways that people find benefits and oppor-
tunities to grow from difficult personal experiences (Bauer &
Bonanno, 2001; Bauer & McAdams, 2005; Davis, Nolen-
Hoeksema, & Larson, 1998; King & Patterson, 2000; King &
Raspin, 2004; King & Smith, 2004; Pals, 2006a, 2006b). Such
approaches may be thought of as looking at more particular types
of insights than the overarching concept noted above. These re-
searchers have explored features of narratives such as self-
transformation (Pals, 2006a, 2006b), accommodative change
(King & Patterson, 2000), integrative themes (Bauer & McAdams,
2005), life themes (Bluck & Glueck, 2004), the linking of ongoing
activities to beliefs about the self (Bauer & Bonanno, 2001), and
biographical coherence markers or self–event connections (Haber-
mas & Paha, 2001; Pasupathi et al., 2006). The latter are defined
as statements within a narrative that draw some type of connection
between the event narrated and the person’s beliefs about him- or
herself in terms of traits, characteristics, and preferences. Note that
these elements of narrative are not the same as other aspects of
narrative coherence such as whether a story is sufficiently elabo-
rated and internally consistent; they refer specifically to coherence
between the narrative and an external construct—the self-concept
or the life story of the individual.
In the present study, we focused on self–event connections as an
important type of autobiographical reasoning for the integration of
self across experiences and time. That is, because self–event
connections make explicit links between the events of one’s life
and the development of one’s characteristics and capabilities, they
are a type of autobiographical reasoning that is fundamental to
resolving the problem of unity in one’s self across time.
1993; Nelson, 1991; Reese & Brown, 2000), although children
increase the sophistication and elaboration of their stories across
time. Basic knowledge about the self begins to develop very early
in life (Rochat, 2001), and by middle childhood, most children
have at least some sense of self in knowledge-structure terms
(Harter, 1998; Marsh, Parada, & Ayotte, 2004).
The life story, on the other hand, is believed to emerge only
during adolescence and early adulthood (Habermas & Bluck,
2000). The late emergence of the life story is attributable to its
dependence on the development of other capacities during adoles-
cence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha, 2001;
Thorne, 2000). For example, in work explicitly focusing on self–
event connections, middle and older adolescents but not early
adolescents are able to narrate experiences in ways that reflect how
the self caused that experience to occur or how the experience may
have changed the self (Habermas & Paha, 2001). It is interesting
that both middle and older adolescents articulated how their own
characteristics caused experiences to occur, but only older adoles-
cents drew links between the events of their lives and how those
events had changed their characteristics.
Development of Autobiographical Reasoning:
Adolescence and Beyond
There are both theoretical and empirical reasons to expect
development in autobiographical reasoning beyond adolescence.
Theoretical approaches emphasize motivational changes across
adulthood that may influence the way people construct narratives
about personal experience. For example, Eriksonian and related
views of adult development have emphasized the importance of
reviewing one’s life in late adulthood, in order to come to terms
with the life that was lived, rather than the life that might have
been (Butler, 1963; Erikson & Erikson, 1997). Empirically, the
process of life review is most adaptive when it includes qualities
that integrate autobiographical recollections with the remember-
er’s identity (Wong & Watt, 1991).
Carstensen (1993) proposed in her theory of socioemotional
selectivity that late life renders endings highly salient and that this
results in an increased importance for meaningful emotional ex-
perience. Empirically, the importance of meaningful emotional
experience is reflected in different preferences for social partners
(Carstensen, 1992; Fung, Carstensen, & Lutz, 1999; Fung, Lai, &
Ngu, 2001; Lang & Carstensen, 2002) as well as in changes in
emotional experience and emotion regulation (Carstensen, Pasu-
pathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000; Gross et al., 1997). It is also
reflected in changes in the emotional experience of autobiograph-
ical remembering (Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003). Speculatively,
connecting experiences with one’s sense of self during remember-
ing could render those experiences more meaningful and positive,
though this has not been tested.
Direct tests of adult age differences in autobiographical reason-
ing are evident from two studies. Bauer and McAdams (2005), in
a fairly small sample of adults ranging from 30 to 72, found that
older adults are more likely to narrate important and transitional
life experiences with themes of growth and integration. They did
not code for self–event connections specifically, but the types of
statements that they would have viewed as reflecting growth
through integration overlap substantially with our notion of self–
event connections. For example, integration themes were reflected
Development of Autobiographical Reasoning Across the
Life Span: Childhood to Adolescence
For a person to engage in autobiographical reasoning when
constructing a personal narrative, at least two prerequisites apply.
First, the person must be able to tell the story of an event. Second,
the individual must have some sense of self, whether one defines
that in terms of knowledge structures or in terms of a rudimentary
or emerging life story. Taken together, these two requirements
suggest that we will not see abundant autobiographical reasoning
in personal narratives until adolescence, as is the case.
The ability to construct simple stories about single episodes
emerges between 18 months and 3 years, roughly (Fivush &
Schwarzmueller, 1989; Harley & Reese, 1999; Howe & Courage,
800
PASUPATHI AND MANSOUR
in statements that connected experiences with the person’s self-
views. A second study done by Bluck and Glueck (2004) com-
pared adolescent (aged 15–20), younger adult (aged 30–40), and
older adult (aged 60 and over) narratives about times when par-
ticipants felt they had demonstrated wisdom. Younger and older
adults, in comparison with adolescents, were especially likely to
narrate experiences of wisdom in ways that connected the experi-
ence to their own larger life themes or philosophies, again, one
type of autobiographical reasoning. The two adult groups did not
differ significantly from one another. Thus, one of these studies
suggests continued adult age change in the likelihood of displaying
autobiographical reasoning, whereas the other suggests change
across early to middle adulthood, followed by stability.
Two other sets of empirical findings indirectly suggest adult age
differences in autobiographical reasoning. First, some findings
suggest that older adults show selected improvements in storytell-
ing ability (James, Burke, Austin, & Hulme, 1998; Kemper,
Kynette, Rash, O’Brien, & Sprott, 1989; Kemper, Rash, Kynette,
& Norman, 1990; Mergler & Goldstein, 1983; Pratt & Robins,
1991), by using a more subjective, interpretive way of storytelling
(Adams, 1991; Gould & Dixon, 1993; Pratt & Robins, 1991).
Autobiographical reasoning is one subset of interpretive story
content. The reasons for changes in storytelling ability are not clear
and may involve motivation (e.g., Adams, Smith, Pasupathi, &
Vittolo, 2002), increased skill (Mergler & Goldstein, 1983), or
actually be linked to decline in surprising ways (James et al.,
1998).
In addition to storytelling changes, researchers working within
traditional approaches to self-development have shown curvilinear
changes in the complexity of self-conceptions across adulthood,
with middle-aged adults showing the most complex, individuated,
and integrated self-conceptions (Diehl, Hastings, & Stanton, 2001;
Labouvie-Vief, Chiodo, Goguen, Diehl, & Orwoll, 1995). Devel-
opment of the self in this work is viewed as resulting from
age-related increases in the ability to integrate emotional and
cognitive aspects of experience but also from age-related declines
in fluid intellectual abilities in later adulthood. The same two
factors might result in similar patterns of age differences in auto-
biographical reasoning across adulthood.
port the existence of age differences in autobiographical reasoning
across adulthood.
Study 1: Turning Points and Crises
Study 1 examined memories of significant events and periods in
life, elicited in an interview context. Many narrative researchers
believe it is more important to integrate these types of events with
the self than more mundane and everyday events (McAdams,
Hoffman, Mansfield, & Day, 1996; Pals, 1999; Singer & Salovey,
1993). We chose two types of significant events that we believed
to differ in the ease with which they could be integrated with the
self: turning points and crises. Turning points are by definition part
of the life story—that is, they form part of people’s autobiograph-
ical understanding of how they have become the person they
currently are. Crises are events that rattle people’s views of them-
selves and the world, thus presenting greater challenges for linking
those experiences to their beliefs about themselves. We wanted to
explore whether older adults were more likely to integrate expe-
riences with the self across different types of experiences or
whether age differences were more localized within one of these
types of events.
Method
Participants
Participants in this study were drawn from a larger study of emotion
and aging (Carstensen et al., 2000). The larger study included 184
participants recruited by a survey research company, with equal num-
bers of men and women ranging across the entire adult life span.
Sampling was restricted to African Americans and European Americans
and was designed to overrepresent African Americans at about one third
of the total sample. In addition, sampling was restricted so that the
entire age range would be equally represented. Participants were tele-
phoned by the survey company, and if they agreed to participate, were
scheduled for an initial session either at the survey company’s offices
or at Stanford University.
From this larger sample, we randomly assigned 63 participants to com-
plete a brief interview about turning points and crises in the initial session
of the study. The remaining participants completed other tasks during that
time. The subsample used in the present study ranged in age from 18 to 86
(
M
Summary and Overview of the Present Studies
The major goal of the present studies was to document a
developmental phenomenon for which prior findings had been
somewhat equivocal. We hoped to document this phenomenon
with a broader and more continuous age sample than in previous
studies and across different types of events and modalities of
narration than had previously been explored. On the basis of the
findings reviewed above, we hypothesized age differences across
adulthood in the extent to which people’s autobiographical narra-
tives exhibited autobiographical reasoning. We focused on the
presence of explicit self–event connections in participants’ narra-
tives as indicators of autobiographical reasoning. We examined
both linear and curvilinear patterns of age differences, as Bluck
and Glueck (2004) found curvilinear change and Bauer and Mc-
Adams (2005) found linear change. In the first study, we focused
on major life events, narrated in an interview context. In the
second study, we focused on a wide-ranging sample of heteroge-
neous memories elicited by written narratives. Both studies sup-
23.1); approximately 52% of the sample was under age
65, and the remainder were older than 65. Approximately half (
n
30)
were male, two thirds (
n
42) were European American, and the remain-
ing 20 participants were African American. According to the survey
company’s classification, 53% were white collar, and the remainder were
blue collar. Blue collar participants reported an average of 14.5 years of
education (
SD
2.7). Those participants who completed the turning points
and crises interview did not differ significantly from the overall sample in
age, gender, or ethnicity. One participant was missing a turning points
interview because of an audiotaping failure.
Procedure
The larger study focused on experience sampling and involved a 2-hr
initial session in which participants learned how to operate the pagers that
were part of the larger project and completed measures of personality, basic
55.4,
SD
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING IN NARRATIVES
801
Table 1
Examples of No-Connection, Stable, and Change Narratives From Study 2
Category
Example narrative
No connection
In July 1997, I took a raft trip on the middle fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. This was a self-guided trip
without “guides.” The trip preparation was uneventful, but from the time we left Boise, it was anything but on
the way to the launch site one of the vehicles.
Stable self explains–is illustrated
by event
Late last year, a close friend hosted a Christmas party at a rental in Park City.
She knew that I was a pretty
good cook and invited me to cater it.
My friend (we’ll call her Lois) is around my mother’s age, so I didn’t
really expect to be invited at all. Therefore, I was flattered when she included me, if only as the help. Lois
provided some of the recipes and asked me to come up with some of my own. She gave me the credit card
and sent me to the market for the ingredients. Eight hours later, the guests began arriving just as I dished up
the last menu item. Things went even better than expected.
Event changes self
I’ve always wanted to write my autobiography but never found the time, and when I did, I discovered I was not
sure I wanted to expose my families secrets, sadness, failing, and unhappiness. I finally decided to go ahead
but not tell anyone in my family. At first I wrote in a superficial manner—that was 5 years ago—now, I’m
able to go more in depth, and
as I write, I’ve found more compassion for those people who shaped my life
.”
Note.
Underlining indicates the relevant text that led to the coding decision.
demographics, cognitive functioning, and social support networks.
1
In that
initial session, participants randomly drawn for the present study com-
pleted a brief interview. The interview took place after the participants had
spent substantial time with the experimenter and consisted of two seg-
ments: a turning points segment and a crisis segment. The order of the
segments was counterbalanced and did not influence the results reported
below. Interviewers were all college-aged women who went through a
standardized training procedure that included videotaped interviews and
feedback. The prompts used were nonverbal encouragers such as “mm-
mmm” and “uh-huh” and (for cases in which participants paused) “Is there
anything more you can tell me?” We did not standardize prompts beyond
providing these prompts on the interviewer’s script. Neither the particular
interviewer nor the number of prompts given were related to the findings
reported here.
For turning points, participants were asked first to think about and list
turning points in their lives. Participants were then asked to select one
turning point and talk about it in more detail: “Can you tell me everything
about this particular turning point?” For crises, participants were asked if
they had ever experienced something like a crisis “or a time when you
doubted yourself” and again were asked to select one such crisis to discuss
in more detail. Aside from the initial request to talk about a selected turning
point–crisis, interviewers were instructed to provide nonspecific prompts
and back channels, until the participant indicated there was nothing more
to say. At the end of each segment, participants were asked to talk more
explicitly about their emotions at the time. Each participant generated two
interview narratives, one regarding a turning point and one regarding a
crisis. A wide range of experiences was nominated, from deaths, divorces,
and abuse experiences to dilemmas about applying to medical school and
the rewards of pursuing one’s own business.
Following the interview and the end of the first session, participants
provided 1 week of experience-sampling data and returned for a debriefing
session. Participants were compensated $100 for participation in the entire
protocol. The present study focused only on the interview data and demo-
graphics data gathered in Session 1.
revealed a preexisting but previously unrecognized quality of myself, and
(e) no connection to self. Each narrative was coded as belonging to one and
only one category, and coders relied on the presence of very explicit
statements by the participant. This coding scheme is primarily independent
of other aspects of narrative such as coherence and elaboration. Note that
a narrative could vary considerably in terms of narrative coherence but still
contain self–event connections. Moreover, narratives could be impover-
ished in detail but still contain self–event connections and vice versa. This
is important, because we were focused here on the issue of integration of
self and experience, as assessed within narratives, but we were not focused
on capturing the relative coherence or elaboration of the narratives
themselves.
Because some of our categories (dismiss and reveal) were extremely
infrequent in the interviews, we collapsed these five codes into three: no
connection to the self, a stability relation (which included the explain–
illustrate category and the extremely infrequent dismiss category), and a
change relation (which included both cause and reveal relations). Our
rationale for this was fairly straightforward: Dismissals explicitly take up
the issue of a self–event connection and deny that one exists, thus main-
taining a stable sense of self. Reveal connections also explicitly note
change in the self-view but view that change as being due to the event
causing a shift in perspective on the self. Emma Mansour served as the
primary coder and provided the codes used in analyses reported below;
Monisha Pasupathi served as the reliability coder for Study 1. During
coding, Emma Mansour was blind to the primary hypotheses of the study
and had no access to data on participants’ ages or other characteristics.
Reliabilities for 30 stories (25% of the total sample) across the three
collapsed codes was good, with coders agreeing 83% of the time (
Measures
Narrative coding for autobiographical reasoning.
Autobiographical
reasoning is broadly defined as the construction of connections that link
experiences to the person’s sense of self. Our initial coding scheme
(Pasupathi et al., 2006) involved five possible types of connections: (a) the
event is explained by or illustrates a preexisting quality of the self, (b) the
event appears to indicate some new quality but should be dismissed or
ignored, (c) the event caused a change in my self-views, (d) the event
1
Age was significantly associated with cognitive performance, as indi-
cated by the Wais digit-symbol test and a verbal fluency task (see
Carstensen et al., 2000), but inclusion of these variables did not change any
of the results reported above.
.74),
t
(29)
5.6,
p
.01. Examples of the three categories are provided in
Table 1; the relevant text that led to the coding decision is underlined.
Validity.
This is a novel way to assess autobiographical reasoning and
may be understood as an expansion of initial work by Habermas and Paha
(2001). In their approach, they collected life story narratives from a small
sample of adolescents and identified the number of self–event connections
in which the self caused an experience and in which the experience
changed the self. Their work suggests that these types of connections are
quite rare and increase with age during adolescence, providing some
 802
PASUPATHI AND MANSOUR
preliminary validity of the developmental changes expected in this mea-
sure. A further validity issue is the extent to which our coding scheme
captured the way participants themselves think about the experience when
prompted. Elsewhere, we have collected validity data on the coding
scheme by comparing our coding of written narratives and participants
probed responses elicited after they produced their written narrative (Pa-
supathi & Mansour, 2003). Autobiographical reasoning indicators coded
from participants’ unprompted narratives are typically consistent with what
participants say when asked explicitly to create such connections. Across
96 responses, participants’ responses to direct autobiographical reasoning
probes seldom conflicted with our coding of their initial narrative (for
stability connections, only 6 of 96 participants, and for change connections,
only 9 of 96 participants reported probed responses that conflicted with
their narratives).
For our analyses, both change and stability connections reflected the
presence of explicit autobiographical reasoning. So, for our primary anal-
yses, we collapsed across stability and change connections and contrasted
narratives involving either type of connection, with narratives involving no
connection.
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
-20
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Age in Years
Results and Discussion
Figure 1.
The percentage of participants at each age (represented by dots)
whose crisis narratives reflected self–event connections in Study 1. The
line represents the quadratic relationship between age and self–event
connections.
We first examined whether gender or ethnicity was related to the
likelihood of self–event connections either independently or in
interaction with age. They were not, and these factors are not
considered further. Overall, 62% of turning points and 70% of
crises were narrated with no self–event connections, and this is
typical of work with narratives (McLean & Thorne, 2004; Thorne
et al., 2004). Looking only at those participants who did express
self–event connections, such connections were descriptively more
prevalent for turning points (
n
32) than for crises (
n
20).
Across both types of events, self–event connections in which the
event changed the self were more prevalent than those that invoked
stability: For turning points, 22% (
n
7 of 32) used stability-
promoting connections, and for crises, 40% did so (
n
8 of 20).
To explore whether age was significantly associated with
whether participants included any self–event connections in their
narratives, we computed two logistic regressions, one for turning
points and one for crises. In each case, we included both linear and
quadratic effects of age in the model. For turning points, age had
no impact on the likelihood of self–event connections, with the
overall model,
(2,
N
62)
1.7,
p
.40, and the linear and
quadratic age factors failing to attain statistical significance.
For crises, in contrast, age was significantly related to self–
event connections,
2
For those under 60, this correlation was significant and positive
(
r
.38,
p
.05). For those over 60, this correlation was negative
but smaller in magnitude and not statistically significant (
r
–.12,
p
.50). The same pattern is evident when other cutpoints, such
as 50 or 70, are used. The correlational results cannot be taken as
equivalent to post hoc tests but do suggest that the quadratic
pattern observed may be asymptotic rather than an inverted
U
.
These results suggest that there are changes across adulthood in
the likelihood of explicit autobiographical reasoning, differences
that are primarily evident in crises, rather than in turning points.
They further suggest that this pattern is curvilinear in nature, with
increases in the likelihood of such reasoning from young adult-
hood into middle adulthood, followed either by a leveling off of
those increases or by the beginnings of declines. Finally, this
pattern was consistent across men and women and across two
different ethnic groups.
2
(2,
N
63)
6.2,
p
.05, and the nature
of this relationship was nonlinear. The linear effect of age was
positive, suggesting that with increasing participant age, self–
event connections were more likely (
B
.21), Wald’s
Study 2: Heterogeneous Events and Written Narratives
2
(1,
N
63)
4.7,
p
.03. The quadratic effect of age was negative (
B
–.002), Wald’s
The major purpose of Study 2 was to replicate and extend
findings from Study 1 with a more heterogeneous set of events and
a different remembering modality—writing. These changes ad-
dress two limitations of the data used in Study 1. First, more
heterogeneous events allowed for greater variability in the self-
implications of the recalled experiences than was the case in Study
1, which limited the selection of events to those that clearly had
self-relevant implications. The extension to a written mode of
recall addresses the possibility that interviewers in Study 1, all of
whom were young adult college students, responded differently to
older adults than to younger adults, thus eliciting different content,
or that older adults responded differently to the intergenerational
task of talking to our younger adult interviewers than did younger
adult participants.
In Study 2, we also obtained additional information about the
events narrated, including their importance and emotionality. This
2
(1,
N
63)
4.4,
p
.04. In order to better
illustrate the data, we show in Figure 1 the percentage of people in
each age group whose crisis narrative contained a self–event
connection. Examination of Figure 1 suggests that one way to
interpret these findings is that age is related to increases in the
likelihood of self–event connections in narratives through middle
age, but this increase then levels off, such that the primary arena
for change occurs between young adulthood and middle age (the
peak of the curve occurs between the ages of 50 and 70 years). In
order to descriptively illustrate the findings, we computed corre-
lations between age and self–event connections separately for
participants under 60 (
n
32) and over 60 (
n
31) years of age.
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