Three classes of evidence demonstrate the existence of life scripts, or culturally shared representations of the timing of major transitional life events. First, a reanalysis of earlier studies on age norms shows an increase ...

A sample of 124 words were used to cue autobiographical memories in 120 adults varying in age from 20 to 73 years. Individual words reliably cued autobiographical memories of different ages with different speeds. For all ...

In contrast to most research on bilingual memory that focuses on how words in either lexicon are mapped onto memory for objects and concepts, we focus on memory for events in the personal past. Using a word-cue technique ...

For word-cued autobiographical memories, older adults had an increase, or bump, from the ages 10 to 30. All age groups had fewer memories from childhood than from other years and a power-function retention for memories from ...

College students generated autobiographical memories from distinct emotional categories that varied in valence (positive vs. negative) and intensity (high vs. low). They then rated various perceptual, cognitive, and emotional ...

On September 12, 2001, 54 Duke students recorded their memory of first hearing about the terrorist attacks of September 11 and of a recent everyday event. They were tested again either 1, 6, or 32 weeks later. Consistency ...

Participants with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and participants with a trauma but without PTSD wrote narratives of their trauma and, for comparison, of the most-important and the happiest events that occurred within ...

One hundred fifteen undergraduates rated 15 word-cued memories and their 3 most negatively stressful, 3 most positive, and 7 most important events and completed tests of personality and depression. Eighty-nine also recorded ...

To provide the three-way comparisons needed to test existing theories, we compared (1) most-stressful memories to other memories and (2) involuntary to voluntary memories (3) in 75 community dwelling adults with and 42 without ...

Reactions to stressful negative events have long been studied using approaches based on either the narrative interpretation of the event or the traits of the individual. Here, we integrate these 2 approaches by ...