Browsing by Author "Janssen, Steve MJ"

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    Age Effects in Cultural Life Scripts.
    (Appl Cogn Psychol, 2011-03-01) Janssen, Steve MJ; Rubin, David C
    Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the timing of life events in an idealized life course. Because they are cultural semantic knowledge, they should be known by all adult age groups including those who have not lived through all events in the life script, but this has not been tested previously. Young, middle-aged and older adults from the Netherlands were therefore asked in this online study to imagine an ordinary Dutch infant and to name the seven most important events that were likely to take place in the life of this prototypical child. Participants subsequently answered questions about at what ages these events were expected to occur and about their prevalence, importance and valence. We found that the cultural life script was similar for young, middle-aged and older adults and for adults with different educational attainment.
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    The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona?
    (Q J Exp Psychol (Hove), 2012) Janssen, Steve MJ; Rubin, David C; Conway, Martin A
    The reminiscence bump is the tendency to recall more autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from adjacent lifetime periods. In this online study, the robustness of the reminiscence bump was examined by looking at participants' judgements about the quality of football players. Dutch participants (N = 619) were asked who they thought the five best players of all time were. The participants could select the names from a list or enter the names when their favourite players were not on the list. Johan Cruijff, Pelé, and Diego Maradona were the three most often mentioned players. Participants frequently named football players who reached the midpoint of their career when the participants were adolescents (mode = 17). The results indicate that the reminiscence bump can also be identified outside the autobiographical memory domain.
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    The temporal distribution of autobiographical memory: changes in reliving and vividness over the life span do not explain the reminiscence bump.
    (Mem Cognit, 2011-01) Janssen, Steve MJ; Rubin, David C; St Jacques, Peggy L
    When autobiographical memories are elicited with word cues, personal events from middle childhood to early adulthood are overrepresented compared to events from other periods. It is, however, unclear whether these memories are also associated with greater recollection. In this online study, we examined whether autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood are recollected more than memories from other lifetime periods. Participants rated personal events that were elicited with cue words on reliving or vividness. Consistent with previous studies, most memories came from the period in which the participants were between 6 and 20 years old. The memories from this period were not relived more or recalled more vividly than memories from other lifetime periods, suggesting that they do not involve more recollection. Recent events had higher levels of reliving and vividness than remote events, and older adults reported a stronger recollective experience than younger adults.