Life Scripts Across the Life Span Ali İ. Tekcan , Handan Odaman , & Burcu Kaya Kızılöz Bo ğ azi ç i University İ s

1. Life Scripts Across the Life Span Ali İ. Tekcan, Handan Odaman, & Burcu Kaya Kızılöz Boğaziçi University İstanbul, Turkey ali.tekcan@boun.edu.tr The Life Script Distribution of age estimates among the three groups as a function of emotional valence Life scripts refer to people’s expectations about the sequence of life events a typical person is likely to experience in a lifetime (Bertsen & Rubin, 2002). It is clearly established that life scripts are dominated by positive events and that a substantial portion of these events are expected to occur during one’s youth. Rubin & Berntsen (2003) argued that such life scripts provide a general framework to guide recall, leading to the “bump” observed in life-span retrieval of positive autobiographical memories. The Present Study Most data on the life scripts come from young adults, whereas the phenomenon it seeks to explain (“the bump”) is based on data from mostly middle-aged and older adults. The few studies addressing age differences found that the life scripts of young and older adults show similar bumps for positive events, but that the script of the older participants contain more negative events (Bohn, in press). It has also been reported that children are able to form life scripts by the age of fourteen (Bohn and Berntsen, 2008). In the present study, we investigated the life scripts of three groups of participants: adolescents, young adults, and older adults. Our main interest was the degree of overlap among the life scripts in terms of the events listed as well as the estimated ages for these events. We also explored the relationship between life script events and life events in terms of the expected and actual timing of these events. Positive events. There was a clear bump corresponding to mid 20s for all age groups for positive life script events. However, the bump was more pronounced for the older group than the other two groups and a second smaller bump emerged corresponding to mid 40s. The positive events leading to this bump in the older adult distribution were child’s marriage, acquiring property, and having grandchildren and being beneficial for the country. Negative events. For both the young and the adolescent groups, there was a decrease in the mention of negative events with increasing expected age. Interestingly, adolescents expect the teenage years to be dominated by negative events, whereas for the older adults this period contains fewer negative events. This bump for adolescents consisted of 17 negative life events. Method Participants. Ninety-eight adolescents (Mage= 14.04, SD= 0.20), 51 young adults (Mage= 20.61, SD= 1.79) and 42 older adults (Mage= 78.45, SD= 9.97) participated. Materials and Procedure. All participants filled out a life-script questionnaire (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004) which asks them to list the seven most important events that a typical newborn (of the same gender as the participant) would experience in a life time. Participants were informed that an event should refer to a specific instance that has a beginning and an end, and should not cover long time periods. Moreover, for each event, they were asked to estimate the frequency, importance, emotional valence of the event as well as the age at which the event is expected to occur. At the end of the questionnaire, participants were asked to report the actual age at which they experienced the events they listed in the life script (if they did experience it). Expected and actual ages for life script events actually experienced by the participants Older adults Young adults Results Adolescents Table 1. Frequency distribution of the top ten life script events among age groups Life script events among age groups Three of the top five life script events were common among the three groups:marriage, begin school and having children. First job/paycheck was also listed in the top five by both older adults and adolescents. Six of the top ten events were common among the three groups : first job/payment, falling in love and college(along with the three events mentioned above). Life scripts of the young adults and adolescents showed more overlap with eight common events among the top ten: high school qualifying exam and begin walking(in addition to the above six). Conclusions Adolescents are able to form life scripts resembling those by young and older adults. Although there was a bump for positive events during mid 20s for all groups, adolescents also showed a bump for negative events corresponding to teen years (their current age period), suggesting that their current concerns/experiences may be affecting the scripts. We also found strong correlations between the expected and actual age-at-event for all groups; but these correlations were much stronger for the positive events than for the negative events. The data from older adults hint at the possibility that the correlation between the expected and actual ages may start disappearing for events expected to occur after 40 years of age regardless of emotional valence. Figure 1. Distribution of 98 life script events among the three groups References Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2002). Emotionally charged autobiographical memories across the life span: The recall of happy, sad, traumatic, and involuntary memories. Psychology & Aging, 17, 632-652. Bohn, A. (in press). Generational differences in cultural life scripts and life story memories of younger and older adults. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Bohn, A., & Berntsen, D. (2008). Life story development in childhood: The development of life story coherence ablities and the acquisition of cultural life scripts from late middle childhood to adolescence. Developmental Psychology, 44, 1135-1147. Rubin, D. C., & Berntsen, D. (2003). Life scripts help to maintain autobiographical memories of highly positive, but not highly negative, events. Memory & Cognition, 31, 1-14. Correlation between “event order” and “estimated age” for the three age groups Older adults. r =.743, p<.01 Young adults. r =.536, p<.01 Adolescents. r =.416, p<.01 The order in which an event was listed was positively correlated with its expected age, suggesting that all groups follow a chronological pattern. It seems, however, that the correlations of the younger groups (especially the adolescents) are smaller. No main effect of condition on the primary task, F(2,14), MSE=.005,p<.148