Transcript lifescript - Personal Web Pages

Rubin & Berntsen 2003: life scripts
• The reminiscence bump: people over 40
“remember information obtained during
adolescence and early adulthood” better than
other periods of life – but there is a clear
difference between positive and negative
memories: Berntsen & Rubin say this is keyed to
life transitions and can be explained by
• “a cognitive framework,
• a narrative/identity framework, and
• an account based on life scripts”
Rubin & Berntsen. 2003. Life scripts help to maintain autobiographical memories
of highly positive, but not highly negative, events. Memory & Cognition 31
Life scripts and life narratives
“Life scripts are generic, whereas a life narrative deals with
the individual life as actually lived, reconstructed, and
narrated by an individual. Life scripts are nonpersonal and
apply normatively to all members of the culture, whereas a
life narrative is personal. Life scripts represent shared
public knowledge, whereas a life narrative refers to private
knowledge that is shared with only a few people. Life
scripts deal with a fixed temporal order of events, whereas
life narratives deal with a lived temporal order. Life scripts
are a form of semantic knowledge, whereas life narratives
represent episodic/autobiographical knowledge (p. 2).”
In Berntsen & Rubin 2004, the authors claim that Cultural
life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory
(Memory & Cognition 32).
auto/biography
Autobiography and life story
• Autobiography can be seen as a way to understand one’s
life as a totality, and to explain that life to oneself and to
others
• Life story research is often a focus for gerontology,
narrative psychology, and literary and cultural theory. It
is one way of examining connections between aging and
autobiographical memory
• Life story research is concerned with the aging person’s
identity and self-continuity, as well as relationships and
social well-being, often organized by what the speaker
constructs with autobiographical memory
Thinking about autobiography
• We assume autobiography to be “a true story”:
can we have different truths?
• When we narrate our own lives, don’t we misrepresent historical truth without knowing it?
• Can we talk about everyone in our lives, and tell
their secrets as well as our own?
• Can we have different autobiographies for each
of our life-story roles?
“Perspective-taking”: assumptions about
what the other knows, wants, and believes
• Can the way I tell you my story cause you to
imagine me as somebody different?
• If I am telling you my story in order to
rationalize something I did, can you tell? How?
• What kinds of evidence do you want if you are to
believe my version of “what really happened?
• What will cause you to believe what I say? Or to
believe I sincerely think I am being accurate?
See Krauss & Fussell 1990 and subsequently; http://www.columbia.edu/~rmk7/HC/,
see also Johnstone 2000 Annual Review of Anthropology: Individual Voice