Different routes to conversational influences on autobiographical memory

This review examines cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying social influence on autobiographical memory. We aim for this review to serve as a bridge between researchers who focus on veridicality (e.g., eyewitness memory) and those who give primacy to meaning, especially given the elusive nature of measuring veridicality in uncontrolled personal experiences. We assess whether mechanisms are similar for three aspects of memories, namely facts, interpretations, and autobiographical reasoning. We present a model of memory change in facts and interpretations that is incidental and time-bound, in contrast to change in autobiographical reasoning that is more deliberate and open to influence. We emphasize the empirical challenges of studying memory that is truly autobiographical alongside the compromise to experimental control required to answer certain questions. We finally argue that autobiographical memory represents a naturalistic domain where memory processes, reasoning processes, and conversational influences collide, with potential implications for applied research on veridicality

Running Head: HARMING FRIENDS AND SIBLINGS “Two for flinching”: Children’s and Adolescents ’ Narrative Accounts of Harming Their Friends and Siblings

This study investigated differences in children’s and adolescents ’ experiences of harming their siblings and friends. Participants (N = 101; 7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds) provided accounts of events when they hurt a younger sibling and a friend. Harm against friends was described as unusual, unforeseeable, and circumstantial. By contrast, harm against siblings was described as typical, ruthless, angry, and provoked, but also elicited more negative moral judgments and more feelings of remorse and regret. Whereas younger children were more self-oriented with siblings and other-oriented with friends, accounts of harm across relationships became somewhat more similar with age. Results provide insight into how these two relationships serve as distinct contexts for sociomoral development. HARMING FRIENDS AND SIBLINGS 3 “Two for flinching”: Children’s and Adolescents ’ Narrative Accounts of Harming Their Friends and Siblings It has long been recognized that children’s close relationships with other children are fundamental contexts for their moral development (Piaget, 1932; Sullivan, 1953). Through their shared histories with familiar others, children learn about moral concepts such as rights, justice

Selves creating stories creating selves: A process model of self development

This article is focused on the growing empirical emphasis on connections between narrative and self-development. The authors propose a process model of self-development in which storytelling is at the heart of both stability and change in the self. Specifically, we focus on how situated stories help develop and maintain the self with reciprocal impacts on enduring aspects of self, specifically self-concept and the life story. This article emphasizes the research that has shown how autobiographical stories affect the self and provides a direction for future work to maximize the potential of narrative approaches to studying processes of self-development. Keywords: self; identity; narrative; autobiographical memory The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms. —Rukeyser (1968) This excerpt from Rukeyser’s poem suggests that, as humans, our worlds are stories; we are made up of, engage in, and are surrounded by stories. The importance of stories is a proposition that is gaining prominence in empirical psychology, and we build on this trend by proposing a process model of narrative selfdevelopment that has at its heart the study of personal autobiographical narratives, or situated stories. We use the term situated stories to emphasize the fact that any narrative account of personal memory is created within a specific situation, by particular individuals, for particular audiences, and to fulfill particular goals. These facts about situated stories provide the backdrop for our major proposition, which is that situated stories are used to develop and maintain the self. We view self-development through situated stories as a lifespan process, beginning in early childhood and extending to old age, and that process is situated in a larger cultural milieu that holds expectations of what makes a healthy narrative and a healthy self. The ideas that stories and self are intimatel

Oral history interview of Monisha Pasupathi, conducted by Jamie Nakano (transcript)

Monisha Pasupathi, psychology professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Honors College at the University of Utah, discusses how the University of Utah responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in incorporating online classes and preparing for the 2020 fall semester. She details issues with technology and student engagement. In addition, she discusses how research has been changed as well as new opportunities

Oral history interview of Monisha Pasupathi, conducted by Jamie Nakano (video)

Monisha Pasupathi, psychology professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Honors College at the University of Utah, discusses how the University of Utah responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in incorporating online classes and preparing for the 2020 fall semester. She details issues with technology and student engagement. In addition, she discusses how research has been changed as well as new opportunities

The social construction of the personal past and its implications for adult development.

This article examines conversational recounting about experiences as a potential mechanism by which people socially construct themselves and their worlds over the life span and the resulting implications for understanding adult development. Two principles governing conversational recounting of past events are proposed: coconstruction (the joint influences of speakers and contexts on conversational reconstructions of past events) and consistency (the influence of a conversational reconstruction on subsequent memory). Operating together, the principles provide an account for how autobiographical memory is socially constructed. In addition, the principles may illuminate how conversations about the past can influence the development of identity in adulthood. Conversation is to be thought of as creating a social world just as causality generates a physical one. (Harr6, 1983, p. 65). We live our lives immersed in talk, providing others with stories of what happens to us and ideas about what we think our experi-ences mean. We all remember times when a conversation made a big difference in how we understood an experience, where our listener provided new insights or perspectives, or, in telling, we realized something about ourselves. We may be less aware of more subtle influences of social context on our everyday talk about experiences or of the ways that conversations we have about our experiences shape our memory for our own past (see Vorauer & Miller, 1997). In this article, I explore conversations about expe-riences as a way in which we socially construct our past and our identities. On a metatheoretical level, my goal is to accommodate both social constructivist and more traditional approaches within psy-chology while developing an account of autobiographical remem-bering and adult development. The resulting framework is rooted in research on memory and language (H. H. Clark, 1996; Engel