Memory amp Cognition2003 31 (1) 1-14

For people over the age of 40 information obtainedduring adolescence and early adulthood is rememberedbetter than information obtained during the surroundingperiods of life (see Rubin Rahhal amp Poon 1998 for areview) This ldquobumprdquo has been found in studies on word-cued memories (Conway amp Haque 1999 Hyland amp Ack-erman 1988 Jansari amp Parkin 1996 Rubin amp Schulkind1997a 1997b Rubin Wetzler amp Nebes 1986 Schraufamp Rubin 1998) by asking for subjectsrsquo most vivid mem-ories (Cohen amp Faulkner 1988 Fitzgerald 1988) theirmost important memories (Fitzgerald 1996 Rubin ampSchulkind 1997a 1997b) and their life narratives (From-holt amp Larsen 1991 1992) A bump has also been foundin some studies addressing factual information acquiredduring different periods of life such as knowledge of his-torical political and cultural events (Belli Schuman ampJackson 1997 Holmes amp Conway 1999 Rubin et al1998 Schuman amp Rieger 1992)

Surprisingly the bump is not found for all classes ofemotionally charged memories Recently Berntsen andRubin (2002) asked a sample of 1241 respondents be-tween the ages of 20 and 93 how old they were during their

most important their happiest their saddest and theirmost traumatic experiences A clear difference was foundfor the positive and negative memories For respondentsover 40 there was a clear bump in the 20s for the mostimportant and happiest memories in contrast the datafor the saddest and most traumatic memories could beaccounted for by a monotonically decreasing retentionfunction The distributions for happiest saddest andmost important memories for respondents in their 60s areshown in Figure 1 to illustrate this pattern

Berntsen and Rubin (2002) argued that standard ac-counts of the bump as given by Rubin et al (1998) needto be modified to account for these findings They ar-gued that three different theoretical frameworks can ex-plain the dissociation between emotionally positive andemotionally negative memories a cognitive frameworka narrativeidentity framework and an account based onlife scripts The first two frameworks are based on earlieraccounts of the bump modified by clinical and socialpsychological theory to account for the reduced recall ofremote negative memories whereas the life script ac-count was introduced by Berntsen and Rubin

All three explanations center on the observation thatduring the period covered by the bump substantial lifetransitions are expected to take place (eg Erikson1950 Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976 Rutter 1989) Forpeople living a prototypical life in a western culture theperiod between the ages of 15 and 30 is when peopleleave home finish their educations get a first job getmarried and start a family According to a cognitive ex-planation based on the principles of verbal learning

1 Copyright 2003 Psychonomic Society Inc

We thank Jonas Giersing and his colleagues at Gallup Public Den-mark for their help and Martin Conway Harvey Marmurek and Har-ald Merckelbach for their comments The study was supported by agrant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities NIA GrantAG 16340 helped fund the data analysis and writing of this article Cor-respondence should be addressed to D C Rubin Department of Psycho-logical and Brain Science Duke University Durham NC 27708-0086(e-mail davidrubindukeedu)

Life scripts help to maintain autobiographicalmemories of highly positive but not highly

negative events

DAVID C RUBINDuke University Durham North Carolina

and

DORTHE BERNTSENUniversity of Aarhus Risskov Denmark

A representative sample of 1307 respondents between the ages of 20 and 94 was asked how old theywere when they felt most afraid most proud most jealous most in love and most angry They werealso asked when they had experienced their most important event and whether this event was positiveor negative In general there was a reminiscence ldquobumprdquo for positive but not negative events To pro-vide data on life scripts 87 psychology students answered the same questions for a hypothetical 70-year-old The undergraduates were more confident in dating positive than in dating negative events andwhen they were confident the distribution of responses predicted the survey data The results supportthe idea of culturally shared life scripts for positive but not negative events which structure retrievalprocesses and spaced practice

2 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(Rubin et al 1998) such consequential events followedby relative stability are more distinctive and more re-hearsed than are events from earlier and subsequent lifeperiods and thus are better remembered In a modifiedversion of this framework the absence of a bump fornegative events might be due to a reduced rehearsal ofnegative events in conversations owing to social censure(Harber amp Pennebaker 1992) or to the fact that negativeevents are followed by more instability than are positiveevents (Berntsen amp Rubin 2002 Ruch Chandler ampHarder 1980 Ruch amp Holmes 1971)

Narrativeidentity accounts often take as their startingpoint Eriksonrsquos (1950) theory of psychosocial develop-ment according to which young adulthood is seen as acritical period for the formation of an adult identity Cog-nitive theorists who follow this view assume that mem-ories from this period have a privileged position in thelife narrative because these memories help maintain a sta-ble sense of identity According to this view the bump isdue to a ldquopreferential retention of events from a period ofconsolidating of the self rdquo (Conway amp Pleydale-Pearce2000 p 280) The dissociation between positive andnegative events shown by Berntsen and Rubin (2002)can be explained as a result of repression or similar de-fense mechanisms working in the service of an enduringego or self

The two previous accounts center on mechanismswithin the individual In contrast in an account based onlife scripts the retrieval of autobiographical memories isgoverned by culturally shared representations of the pro-totypical life cycle that locate the majority of importanttransitional events in young adulthood and favor positiveevents Our notion of a life script combines the conceptof script as developed by Schank and Abelson (1977)

and the idea of the life cycle and culturally sanctionedage norms from research on life-course development(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) The notionof life script has many similarities with the concepts ofprescriptive time tables (Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976)and timing norms (Shai 2002) A script is a series ofevents that unfolds in a specific order with each eventenabling the events that follow composing a stereotypi-cal episode such as eating in a restaurant (Schank 19821999 Schank amp Abelson 1977) In the same way a lifescript represents a series of events that takes place in aspecific order and represents a prototypical life coursewithin a certain culture In addition to expectations aboutevent sequences life scripts come with age normsmdashthatis each transitional event in the life course is assumed totake place within a certain age range Technological po-litical and economic changes or major historical eventsare likely to affect the age-related organization of a so-ciety and can either delay or bring forward specific tran-sitional events (Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976 Shai2002) Thus cohort differences are likely to exist on thecontent and composition of life scripts

Though a life script might help to structure individuallife narratives the two concepts are distinct Life scriptsare generic whereas a life narrative deals with the indi-vidual life as actually lived reconstructed and narratedby an individual Life scripts are nonpersonal and applynormatively to all members of the culture whereas a lifenarrative is personal Life scripts represent shared pub-lic knowledge whereas a life narrative refers to privateknowledge that is shared with only a few people Lifescripts deal with a fixed temporal order of events whereaslife narratives deal with a lived temporal order Lifescripts are a form of semantic knowledge whereas lifenarratives represent episodicautobiographical knowledgeThough life scripts might help to structure an individuallife story the two representations can conflict with oneanother (Luborsky 1993 Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976)People know the life script of their society independentlyof the timing of transitional events in their own lives(Shai 2002)

Why do we expect life scripts to produce a bump Ina study of life scripts Settersten and Hagestad (1996a1996b) asked 319 American adults in the Chicago met-ropolitan area to estimate by what age 11 important lifetransitions should occur They reported six family tran-sitions (with the mean ages) which were leaving home(22) marrying (27) returning home (28) entering par-enthood (29) completing child bearing (41) and enter-ing grandparenthood (52) They reported five educa-tional and work transitions (with the mean ages) whichwere entry into full-time work (22) exit from full-timeschooling (26) settling on careerjob (29) reaching thepeak of the work trajectory (41) and entering retirement(60) Seven of the 11 transitions were expected to be ac-complished between the ages of 20 and 30 This supportsour assumption that some of the findings of the bump

Figure 1 The distribution of the saddest happiest and mostimportant memories for participants in their 60s from Berntsenand Rubin (in press)

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 3

may reflect retrieval of autobiographical memories guidedby life scripts

Why do we expect life scripts to be only about positiveevents Although a real life and a truthful life narrativemay contain many negative events a life script does notA truthful life story will tell about onersquos struggling andperhaps onersquos failing to overcome obstacles to desirablegoals whereas life scripts deal with transition points thatare desirable according to cultural norms One may bepersonally unhappy at the day of onersquos wedding but theact of marrying is a positive event according to culturalnorms Likewise postpartum depression exists but thebirth of a child in normative terms is a positive event Asa consequence negative events do not have a particulartime slot in the culturally expected sequence of eventsThis agrees with the fact that few of the 11 events con-sidered as normative transitions points in Settersten andHagestadrsquos (1996a 1996b) studies could be viewed asnegative Similarly Neugarten and Hagestad (1976) ar-gued that role transitions that occur within the expectedtime period are unlikely to be experienced as traumaticInstead they argue that major stresses can be caused byevents that violate the life script (eg the loss of a par-ent in childhood) in that such off-time events can causeproblems of adjustment (Shai 2002) This agrees withJanoff-Bulmanrsquos (1988) observation that highly negativeevents usually contradict our basic assumptions aboutthe world

How do life scripts influence retrieval of emotionalevents Life scripts provide search descriptions for timeswhen one is most likely to have experienced the emotionSo for ldquohappyrdquo or ldquoin loverdquo there is a time period duringwhich one is most likely to have such emotions accord-ing to shared cultural norms Even though sadness andanger may be as expected and as common as being happyand in love over the overall life time there is no particu-lar time period to search for these emotions If no spe-cific time slot in a life script is allocated to certain typesof events they will not benefit from a life script that sup-ports and structures their retrieval and thus by defaultshould show the monotonically decreasing retention func-tion of normal forgetting consistent with Berntsen andRubinrsquos (2002) findings for saddest and most traumaticmemories

The present work extends Berntsen and Rubin (2002)in an attempt to test the life script explanation In con-trast to the cognitive and the narrativeidentity explana-tions the life script account has the potential to makehighly specific testable predictions because it is possi-ble to measure life script knowledge We have been un-able to find any empirical studies that have examinedpeoplersquos life scripts for differently charged emotionalevents Therefore our Study 2 examines the life scriptfor the classes of events that Berntsen and Rubin used inaddition to the classes of events that we are using in ourStudy 1 If the views presented here are correct requestsfor positive but not negative events should form abump our participants will be much more confident and

in better agreement about the dating of positive versusnegative events and when they are confident they willbe better at predicting the recall data

STUDY 1

In Study 1 we asked a large stratified sample rangingin age from 20 to 94 years how old they were when theyhad felt most afraid most proud most jealous most inlove and most angry In addition we asked how old theywere when they experienced their most important eventand whether this event was positive negative or mixedWe do not address the frequency of positive versus nega-tive memories or the differences in their intensity (Matlinamp Stang 1978) Also we do not separate retention of theemotion from the retention of the rest of the event Thusit is not possible here to decide whether the intensities ofthe different emotions fade at the same rate (WalkerRodney amp Thompson 1997) Emotions might vary withrespect to a number of dimensions other than valence Inthe present context the most important dimensions toconsider are whether the emotions are basic or complex(eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) whether the emo-tions are associated with higher or lower levels of arousal(eg Smith amp Ellsworth 1985) whether their durationis typically long or short (eg Poulsen 1991) and whetherthey address the personrsquos self (Lewis Sullivan Stangeramp Weiss 1989) To ensure that none of these dimensionsseriously confounded our data on valence the selectionof positive and negative events that we used covers emo-tions that vary on these dimensions

MethodParticipants A representative sample of the Danish population

above the age of 16 participated The respondents were selectedfrom all geographic areas of Denmark except Greenland and theFaroe Islands as part of an omnibus survey by Gallup Public Den-mark All respondents were able to speak and understand DanishIn each household 1 or 2 respondents were randomly selected viaa combined criterion based on number of household membersabove the age of 16 and their birthdays The response rate for theentire omnibus was 56 To exclude minors and to provide con-ventional decade boundaries only respondents above the age of 19were included in the present study Table 1 shows the number ofmale and female respondents sorted by decade of life and by thenumber of participants in each age group who answered each ques-tion by giving a date or by explicitly stating that they had no mem-ory of that type No dates were provided in response to any of thefive questions requesting a date by 71 of our 1307 respondents

Procedure The data were collected by 120 interviewers viaface-to-face interviews in the respondentsrsquo homes The questions ofrelevance for the present study were preceded only by demographicquestions in the omnibus The interviews were conducted in Dan-ish An English version of the set of questions for the present studyis presented in Appendix A Half of the respondents were asked thequestions in the same order as in Appendix A For the other half theorder of questions was reversed except that Questions 6 and 6awere presented last in both versions Response options for Ques-tions 1ndash6 were as follows (1) ldquoI was around [age in event] years oldrdquo(2) ldquoI have no memories in which I feel very afraidproudjealousmuch in loveangryno memories of epoch-making eventsrdquo and(3) ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo Response options for Question 6a were

4 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(1) ldquopositiverdquo (2) ldquonegativerdquo (3) ldquomixedrdquo and (4) ldquoI donrsquot want toanswerrdquo

The interviewer recorded responses on a laptop computer To en-sure understanding each question and the response options for eachquestion were printed on a demonstration card that was shown tothe respondent while the question was being asked If the respon-dent preferred he or she could read the questions and response op-tions directly from the computer screen If the respondent foundone or more questions too intimate he or she was offered the op-portunity of typing his or her responses directly into the computerwhile the screen of the computer was turned away from the inter-viewer

The questions for Study 1 were introduced by a brief explanationclarifying that the questions were about memories from the re-spondentrsquos personal life It was stressed that the respondent did nothave to answer the questions if he or she found them to be too pri-vate It was also stressed that the purpose of the study was scientificand that no political or financial interest was involved

ResultsReports of no memories Table 2 shows the rank order

of the proportion of respondents who reported no mem-ories in response to each of the emotion questions and toeach of the other questions For the sake of comparisonthis table also includes the proportions of no reportsfrom Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

The most striking finding was that more than half ofthe respondents (55) stated that they had no memoriesof being very jealous By comparison only 10 statedthat they had no memories of being much in love and41 stated that they had no traumatic memories Ratherthan reflecting the actual frequencies of experiences ofjealousy in our respondentsrsquo lives the high number of noreports is likely a reflection of a bias in reporting ormemory The same is most likely true for the high num-ber of no reports on anger and fear Both emotions areclassif ied as basic emotions with innate neural sub-strates innate facial expressions and distinct feelingstates (eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) Thus thelikelihood that intense fear and anger were never experi-enced by 30ndash 40 of a representative sample of Danesseems very small It should be noted that a response op-tion worded as ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo was offered forall questions This option was used with the same fre-quency across the questionsmdashnamely by around 50 ofthe 1307 respondents (4) Thus when a participantchose to answer that he or she had no memory of the par-

ticular event in question we should expect this answer toreflect a genuine experience of being unable to easily re-trieve a memory for an event in which they were extremelyjealous angry or afraid and not an unwillingness to an-swer the bias appears to be in memory rather than in re-porting Therefore some mechanism such as a life scriptis needed to explain a decreased accessibility of memo-ries associated with jealousy anger and fear as com-pared with memories associated with other emotions

The distribution of emotionally charged memoriesFigures 2ndash4 present the basic results of Study 1 Eachpanel shows the separate results for participants in their20s 30s 40s 50s 60s and those in their 70s and aboveTo present all groups in one panel for each questioneach younger group was offset by 02 so that the curveswould not overlap Thus the participants in their 60s had02 added to their scores the participants in their 50s04 the participants in their 40s 06 the participants intheir 30s 08 and the participants in their 20s 10 Be-cause this causes the y-axis to go from 0 to 18 instead offrom 0 to 06 the figure compresses the visual differ-ences by a factor of three For all figures the proportionof memories occurring in the most recent decade wascorrected for the fact that the participants in that decadehad on the average lived through only about half of thedecade In order to do this the mean number of years

Table 1Description of Participant Population and Number of Participants With Dated Memories and With No Memory

Participants Responding Explicitly With Date or No Memory of That Type

Fear Pride Jealousy Love Anger Importance

Age Range n Women Age Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None

20ndash29 234 109 2484 151 80 192 39 119 109 210 15 160 69 178 5230ndash39 270 143 3456 192 75 223 41 147 118 253 12 175 91 218 4940ndash49 255 146 4400 172 73 192 55 123 121 222 23 153 87 201 4350ndash59 204 109 5443 138 59 137 56 177 116 177 20 116 76 147 4860ndash69 158 85 6432 92 57 91 59 40 112 123 26 70 79 103 4870ndash99 186 128 7803 87 87 92 80 33 137 134 31 60 108 99 74

Total 1307 720 4633 832 431 927 330 539 713 1119 127 734 510 946 314

Table 2Cues Rank Ordered by Proportion of Respondents Reporting

No Memory of That Type

Cue p SE

Emotion CuesMost jealous 55 014Most angry 39 013Most fear 33 013Most pride 25 012Saddest 13 009Most in love 10 008Happiest 10 009

Other CuesMost traumatic 41 014Involuntary 38 014Most important 24 012Most important 24 012

NotemdashValues from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) are in bold

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 5

lived past the decade boundary was calculated as themean age of the participants in that group plus 6 months(because the participants who reported their ages as nyears old on the average actually had lived n and a halfyears) minus the decade boundary This number was di-vided into 10 (the number of years in the decade) andwas multiplied by the number of memories observed inthat decade before the proportions shown in the figureswere calculated For instance the average age of the par-ticipants in their 40s was 4400 years They produced 26memories of pride in their 40s We multiplied 26 310(400 + 050) in order to infer that there would havebeen 58 memories in the decade if all the participantshad been tested the day before their 50th birthday

Figures 2ndash4 present the probability of a memoryrsquosbeing reported in each decade of life along with a stan-dard error bar calculated by Ouml[ p(12p)n] Given thelarge number of participants the standard errors aresmall (05 or less in all cases for anger fear love andpride and 08 or less in all cases for importance positivenegative and jealousy) and therefore at times are hid-den behind the dots indicating the means The results arerobust Within each figure the differences we mentionare usually greater than two standard errors and moreimportantly unless specifically noted they vary in in-cremental systematic ways for the six age groups shownin each figure The possibility of such patterns occurringby chance is exceedingly small

Of the most important memories (Question 6 in Ap-pendix A) 481 were rated as positive 266 as negativeand 197 as mixed Thus roughly half of the most impor-tant memories were rated as positive This proportionheld for each age group with 49 53 49 5349 and 52 of the participants between the ages of 20and 70 rating their most important memories as positiverespectively In the top panel of Figure 2 are shown thedata for the participantsrsquo memories of their most posi-tive important event There was a peak in the 20s for allparticipants which was more pronounced in the olderparticipants A radically different pattern is seen in thebottom panel which presents the distributions of re-spondentsrsquo most important memories when the emo-tional content was classified as negative or mixed Nobump was detected for any of the age groups For all agegroups a slow increase in the number of memories wasfound from the most remote to the most recent decadesof life though the curves are somewhat noisy The datapattern resembles the data for respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories reported by Berntsen andRubin (2002) and adds support to their main finding thata bump was present only for emotionally positive mem-ories Moreover since the respondents in the presentstudy were asked to rate the emotional content after theyhad retrieved and dated the memory a deliberate searchfor positive versus negative memories could not have ledto the differences between the positive and negative im-portant memories

Figure 3 presents the data for peoplersquos memory of thetwo positive emotions and both are similar to the posi-

tive important events shown in Figure 2 However thebump for most in love was located earlier than the bumpfor memories of most important positive and most proudmemories and the bump for happiest memories reportedby Berntsen and Rubin (2002) Even though positive va-lence plays a crucial role for the presence of a bump thespecific emotional content is able to affect its temporallocation

Figure 4 presents the data for memories of the threenegative emotions The top panel shows the ages duringwhich respondents felt most jealous Although consis-tent evidence was found for a bump its location variedIn the middle panel which shows the ages during whichrespondents felt most angry a clear increase can be seenin responses regarding the most recent decades of life Inaddition there is an indication of a bump in the teens forrespondents above the age of 40 However the size ofthis bump is small and except for that for respondents intheir 70s it is lower than the increase of memories from

Figure 2 The distribution of the most important autobio-graphical memories The top panel shows important memoriesthat were rated as positive the bottom panel those rated as neg-ative or mixed Each decade age group is labeled by the youngestage included and is offset by 020 from the next oldest age groupto make all plots visible Standard errors are shown for all plots

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

2 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(Rubin et al 1998) such consequential events followedby relative stability are more distinctive and more re-hearsed than are events from earlier and subsequent lifeperiods and thus are better remembered In a modifiedversion of this framework the absence of a bump fornegative events might be due to a reduced rehearsal ofnegative events in conversations owing to social censure(Harber amp Pennebaker 1992) or to the fact that negativeevents are followed by more instability than are positiveevents (Berntsen amp Rubin 2002 Ruch Chandler ampHarder 1980 Ruch amp Holmes 1971)

Narrativeidentity accounts often take as their startingpoint Eriksonrsquos (1950) theory of psychosocial develop-ment according to which young adulthood is seen as acritical period for the formation of an adult identity Cog-nitive theorists who follow this view assume that mem-ories from this period have a privileged position in thelife narrative because these memories help maintain a sta-ble sense of identity According to this view the bump isdue to a ldquopreferential retention of events from a period ofconsolidating of the self rdquo (Conway amp Pleydale-Pearce2000 p 280) The dissociation between positive andnegative events shown by Berntsen and Rubin (2002)can be explained as a result of repression or similar de-fense mechanisms working in the service of an enduringego or self

The two previous accounts center on mechanismswithin the individual In contrast in an account based onlife scripts the retrieval of autobiographical memories isgoverned by culturally shared representations of the pro-totypical life cycle that locate the majority of importanttransitional events in young adulthood and favor positiveevents Our notion of a life script combines the conceptof script as developed by Schank and Abelson (1977)

and the idea of the life cycle and culturally sanctionedage norms from research on life-course development(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) The notionof life script has many similarities with the concepts ofprescriptive time tables (Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976)and timing norms (Shai 2002) A script is a series ofevents that unfolds in a specific order with each eventenabling the events that follow composing a stereotypi-cal episode such as eating in a restaurant (Schank 19821999 Schank amp Abelson 1977) In the same way a lifescript represents a series of events that takes place in aspecific order and represents a prototypical life coursewithin a certain culture In addition to expectations aboutevent sequences life scripts come with age normsmdashthatis each transitional event in the life course is assumed totake place within a certain age range Technological po-litical and economic changes or major historical eventsare likely to affect the age-related organization of a so-ciety and can either delay or bring forward specific tran-sitional events (Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976 Shai2002) Thus cohort differences are likely to exist on thecontent and composition of life scripts

Though a life script might help to structure individuallife narratives the two concepts are distinct Life scriptsare generic whereas a life narrative deals with the indi-vidual life as actually lived reconstructed and narratedby an individual Life scripts are nonpersonal and applynormatively to all members of the culture whereas a lifenarrative is personal Life scripts represent shared pub-lic knowledge whereas a life narrative refers to privateknowledge that is shared with only a few people Lifescripts deal with a fixed temporal order of events whereaslife narratives deal with a lived temporal order Lifescripts are a form of semantic knowledge whereas lifenarratives represent episodicautobiographical knowledgeThough life scripts might help to structure an individuallife story the two representations can conflict with oneanother (Luborsky 1993 Neugarten amp Hagestad 1976)People know the life script of their society independentlyof the timing of transitional events in their own lives(Shai 2002)

Why do we expect life scripts to produce a bump Ina study of life scripts Settersten and Hagestad (1996a1996b) asked 319 American adults in the Chicago met-ropolitan area to estimate by what age 11 important lifetransitions should occur They reported six family tran-sitions (with the mean ages) which were leaving home(22) marrying (27) returning home (28) entering par-enthood (29) completing child bearing (41) and enter-ing grandparenthood (52) They reported five educa-tional and work transitions (with the mean ages) whichwere entry into full-time work (22) exit from full-timeschooling (26) settling on careerjob (29) reaching thepeak of the work trajectory (41) and entering retirement(60) Seven of the 11 transitions were expected to be ac-complished between the ages of 20 and 30 This supportsour assumption that some of the findings of the bump

Figure 1 The distribution of the saddest happiest and mostimportant memories for participants in their 60s from Berntsenand Rubin (in press)

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 3

may reflect retrieval of autobiographical memories guidedby life scripts

Why do we expect life scripts to be only about positiveevents Although a real life and a truthful life narrativemay contain many negative events a life script does notA truthful life story will tell about onersquos struggling andperhaps onersquos failing to overcome obstacles to desirablegoals whereas life scripts deal with transition points thatare desirable according to cultural norms One may bepersonally unhappy at the day of onersquos wedding but theact of marrying is a positive event according to culturalnorms Likewise postpartum depression exists but thebirth of a child in normative terms is a positive event Asa consequence negative events do not have a particulartime slot in the culturally expected sequence of eventsThis agrees with the fact that few of the 11 events con-sidered as normative transitions points in Settersten andHagestadrsquos (1996a 1996b) studies could be viewed asnegative Similarly Neugarten and Hagestad (1976) ar-gued that role transitions that occur within the expectedtime period are unlikely to be experienced as traumaticInstead they argue that major stresses can be caused byevents that violate the life script (eg the loss of a par-ent in childhood) in that such off-time events can causeproblems of adjustment (Shai 2002) This agrees withJanoff-Bulmanrsquos (1988) observation that highly negativeevents usually contradict our basic assumptions aboutthe world

How do life scripts influence retrieval of emotionalevents Life scripts provide search descriptions for timeswhen one is most likely to have experienced the emotionSo for ldquohappyrdquo or ldquoin loverdquo there is a time period duringwhich one is most likely to have such emotions accord-ing to shared cultural norms Even though sadness andanger may be as expected and as common as being happyand in love over the overall life time there is no particu-lar time period to search for these emotions If no spe-cific time slot in a life script is allocated to certain typesof events they will not benefit from a life script that sup-ports and structures their retrieval and thus by defaultshould show the monotonically decreasing retention func-tion of normal forgetting consistent with Berntsen andRubinrsquos (2002) findings for saddest and most traumaticmemories

The present work extends Berntsen and Rubin (2002)in an attempt to test the life script explanation In con-trast to the cognitive and the narrativeidentity explana-tions the life script account has the potential to makehighly specific testable predictions because it is possi-ble to measure life script knowledge We have been un-able to find any empirical studies that have examinedpeoplersquos life scripts for differently charged emotionalevents Therefore our Study 2 examines the life scriptfor the classes of events that Berntsen and Rubin used inaddition to the classes of events that we are using in ourStudy 1 If the views presented here are correct requestsfor positive but not negative events should form abump our participants will be much more confident and

in better agreement about the dating of positive versusnegative events and when they are confident they willbe better at predicting the recall data

STUDY 1

In Study 1 we asked a large stratified sample rangingin age from 20 to 94 years how old they were when theyhad felt most afraid most proud most jealous most inlove and most angry In addition we asked how old theywere when they experienced their most important eventand whether this event was positive negative or mixedWe do not address the frequency of positive versus nega-tive memories or the differences in their intensity (Matlinamp Stang 1978) Also we do not separate retention of theemotion from the retention of the rest of the event Thusit is not possible here to decide whether the intensities ofthe different emotions fade at the same rate (WalkerRodney amp Thompson 1997) Emotions might vary withrespect to a number of dimensions other than valence Inthe present context the most important dimensions toconsider are whether the emotions are basic or complex(eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) whether the emo-tions are associated with higher or lower levels of arousal(eg Smith amp Ellsworth 1985) whether their durationis typically long or short (eg Poulsen 1991) and whetherthey address the personrsquos self (Lewis Sullivan Stangeramp Weiss 1989) To ensure that none of these dimensionsseriously confounded our data on valence the selectionof positive and negative events that we used covers emo-tions that vary on these dimensions

MethodParticipants A representative sample of the Danish population

above the age of 16 participated The respondents were selectedfrom all geographic areas of Denmark except Greenland and theFaroe Islands as part of an omnibus survey by Gallup Public Den-mark All respondents were able to speak and understand DanishIn each household 1 or 2 respondents were randomly selected viaa combined criterion based on number of household membersabove the age of 16 and their birthdays The response rate for theentire omnibus was 56 To exclude minors and to provide con-ventional decade boundaries only respondents above the age of 19were included in the present study Table 1 shows the number ofmale and female respondents sorted by decade of life and by thenumber of participants in each age group who answered each ques-tion by giving a date or by explicitly stating that they had no mem-ory of that type No dates were provided in response to any of thefive questions requesting a date by 71 of our 1307 respondents

Procedure The data were collected by 120 interviewers viaface-to-face interviews in the respondentsrsquo homes The questions ofrelevance for the present study were preceded only by demographicquestions in the omnibus The interviews were conducted in Dan-ish An English version of the set of questions for the present studyis presented in Appendix A Half of the respondents were asked thequestions in the same order as in Appendix A For the other half theorder of questions was reversed except that Questions 6 and 6awere presented last in both versions Response options for Ques-tions 1ndash6 were as follows (1) ldquoI was around [age in event] years oldrdquo(2) ldquoI have no memories in which I feel very afraidproudjealousmuch in loveangryno memories of epoch-making eventsrdquo and(3) ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo Response options for Question 6a were

4 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(1) ldquopositiverdquo (2) ldquonegativerdquo (3) ldquomixedrdquo and (4) ldquoI donrsquot want toanswerrdquo

The interviewer recorded responses on a laptop computer To en-sure understanding each question and the response options for eachquestion were printed on a demonstration card that was shown tothe respondent while the question was being asked If the respon-dent preferred he or she could read the questions and response op-tions directly from the computer screen If the respondent foundone or more questions too intimate he or she was offered the op-portunity of typing his or her responses directly into the computerwhile the screen of the computer was turned away from the inter-viewer

The questions for Study 1 were introduced by a brief explanationclarifying that the questions were about memories from the re-spondentrsquos personal life It was stressed that the respondent did nothave to answer the questions if he or she found them to be too pri-vate It was also stressed that the purpose of the study was scientificand that no political or financial interest was involved

ResultsReports of no memories Table 2 shows the rank order

of the proportion of respondents who reported no mem-ories in response to each of the emotion questions and toeach of the other questions For the sake of comparisonthis table also includes the proportions of no reportsfrom Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

The most striking finding was that more than half ofthe respondents (55) stated that they had no memoriesof being very jealous By comparison only 10 statedthat they had no memories of being much in love and41 stated that they had no traumatic memories Ratherthan reflecting the actual frequencies of experiences ofjealousy in our respondentsrsquo lives the high number of noreports is likely a reflection of a bias in reporting ormemory The same is most likely true for the high num-ber of no reports on anger and fear Both emotions areclassif ied as basic emotions with innate neural sub-strates innate facial expressions and distinct feelingstates (eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) Thus thelikelihood that intense fear and anger were never experi-enced by 30ndash 40 of a representative sample of Danesseems very small It should be noted that a response op-tion worded as ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo was offered forall questions This option was used with the same fre-quency across the questionsmdashnamely by around 50 ofthe 1307 respondents (4) Thus when a participantchose to answer that he or she had no memory of the par-

ticular event in question we should expect this answer toreflect a genuine experience of being unable to easily re-trieve a memory for an event in which they were extremelyjealous angry or afraid and not an unwillingness to an-swer the bias appears to be in memory rather than in re-porting Therefore some mechanism such as a life scriptis needed to explain a decreased accessibility of memo-ries associated with jealousy anger and fear as com-pared with memories associated with other emotions

The distribution of emotionally charged memoriesFigures 2ndash4 present the basic results of Study 1 Eachpanel shows the separate results for participants in their20s 30s 40s 50s 60s and those in their 70s and aboveTo present all groups in one panel for each questioneach younger group was offset by 02 so that the curveswould not overlap Thus the participants in their 60s had02 added to their scores the participants in their 50s04 the participants in their 40s 06 the participants intheir 30s 08 and the participants in their 20s 10 Be-cause this causes the y-axis to go from 0 to 18 instead offrom 0 to 06 the figure compresses the visual differ-ences by a factor of three For all figures the proportionof memories occurring in the most recent decade wascorrected for the fact that the participants in that decadehad on the average lived through only about half of thedecade In order to do this the mean number of years

Table 1Description of Participant Population and Number of Participants With Dated Memories and With No Memory

Participants Responding Explicitly With Date or No Memory of That Type

Fear Pride Jealousy Love Anger Importance

Age Range n Women Age Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None

20ndash29 234 109 2484 151 80 192 39 119 109 210 15 160 69 178 5230ndash39 270 143 3456 192 75 223 41 147 118 253 12 175 91 218 4940ndash49 255 146 4400 172 73 192 55 123 121 222 23 153 87 201 4350ndash59 204 109 5443 138 59 137 56 177 116 177 20 116 76 147 4860ndash69 158 85 6432 92 57 91 59 40 112 123 26 70 79 103 4870ndash99 186 128 7803 87 87 92 80 33 137 134 31 60 108 99 74

Total 1307 720 4633 832 431 927 330 539 713 1119 127 734 510 946 314

Table 2Cues Rank Ordered by Proportion of Respondents Reporting

No Memory of That Type

Cue p SE

Emotion CuesMost jealous 55 014Most angry 39 013Most fear 33 013Most pride 25 012Saddest 13 009Most in love 10 008Happiest 10 009

Other CuesMost traumatic 41 014Involuntary 38 014Most important 24 012Most important 24 012

NotemdashValues from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) are in bold

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 5

lived past the decade boundary was calculated as themean age of the participants in that group plus 6 months(because the participants who reported their ages as nyears old on the average actually had lived n and a halfyears) minus the decade boundary This number was di-vided into 10 (the number of years in the decade) andwas multiplied by the number of memories observed inthat decade before the proportions shown in the figureswere calculated For instance the average age of the par-ticipants in their 40s was 4400 years They produced 26memories of pride in their 40s We multiplied 26 310(400 + 050) in order to infer that there would havebeen 58 memories in the decade if all the participantshad been tested the day before their 50th birthday

Figures 2ndash4 present the probability of a memoryrsquosbeing reported in each decade of life along with a stan-dard error bar calculated by Ouml[ p(12p)n] Given thelarge number of participants the standard errors aresmall (05 or less in all cases for anger fear love andpride and 08 or less in all cases for importance positivenegative and jealousy) and therefore at times are hid-den behind the dots indicating the means The results arerobust Within each figure the differences we mentionare usually greater than two standard errors and moreimportantly unless specifically noted they vary in in-cremental systematic ways for the six age groups shownin each figure The possibility of such patterns occurringby chance is exceedingly small

Of the most important memories (Question 6 in Ap-pendix A) 481 were rated as positive 266 as negativeand 197 as mixed Thus roughly half of the most impor-tant memories were rated as positive This proportionheld for each age group with 49 53 49 5349 and 52 of the participants between the ages of 20and 70 rating their most important memories as positiverespectively In the top panel of Figure 2 are shown thedata for the participantsrsquo memories of their most posi-tive important event There was a peak in the 20s for allparticipants which was more pronounced in the olderparticipants A radically different pattern is seen in thebottom panel which presents the distributions of re-spondentsrsquo most important memories when the emo-tional content was classified as negative or mixed Nobump was detected for any of the age groups For all agegroups a slow increase in the number of memories wasfound from the most remote to the most recent decadesof life though the curves are somewhat noisy The datapattern resembles the data for respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories reported by Berntsen andRubin (2002) and adds support to their main finding thata bump was present only for emotionally positive mem-ories Moreover since the respondents in the presentstudy were asked to rate the emotional content after theyhad retrieved and dated the memory a deliberate searchfor positive versus negative memories could not have ledto the differences between the positive and negative im-portant memories

Figure 3 presents the data for peoplersquos memory of thetwo positive emotions and both are similar to the posi-

tive important events shown in Figure 2 However thebump for most in love was located earlier than the bumpfor memories of most important positive and most proudmemories and the bump for happiest memories reportedby Berntsen and Rubin (2002) Even though positive va-lence plays a crucial role for the presence of a bump thespecific emotional content is able to affect its temporallocation

Figure 4 presents the data for memories of the threenegative emotions The top panel shows the ages duringwhich respondents felt most jealous Although consis-tent evidence was found for a bump its location variedIn the middle panel which shows the ages during whichrespondents felt most angry a clear increase can be seenin responses regarding the most recent decades of life Inaddition there is an indication of a bump in the teens forrespondents above the age of 40 However the size ofthis bump is small and except for that for respondents intheir 70s it is lower than the increase of memories from

Figure 2 The distribution of the most important autobio-graphical memories The top panel shows important memoriesthat were rated as positive the bottom panel those rated as neg-ative or mixed Each decade age group is labeled by the youngestage included and is offset by 020 from the next oldest age groupto make all plots visible Standard errors are shown for all plots

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 3

may reflect retrieval of autobiographical memories guidedby life scripts

Why do we expect life scripts to be only about positiveevents Although a real life and a truthful life narrativemay contain many negative events a life script does notA truthful life story will tell about onersquos struggling andperhaps onersquos failing to overcome obstacles to desirablegoals whereas life scripts deal with transition points thatare desirable according to cultural norms One may bepersonally unhappy at the day of onersquos wedding but theact of marrying is a positive event according to culturalnorms Likewise postpartum depression exists but thebirth of a child in normative terms is a positive event Asa consequence negative events do not have a particulartime slot in the culturally expected sequence of eventsThis agrees with the fact that few of the 11 events con-sidered as normative transitions points in Settersten andHagestadrsquos (1996a 1996b) studies could be viewed asnegative Similarly Neugarten and Hagestad (1976) ar-gued that role transitions that occur within the expectedtime period are unlikely to be experienced as traumaticInstead they argue that major stresses can be caused byevents that violate the life script (eg the loss of a par-ent in childhood) in that such off-time events can causeproblems of adjustment (Shai 2002) This agrees withJanoff-Bulmanrsquos (1988) observation that highly negativeevents usually contradict our basic assumptions aboutthe world

How do life scripts influence retrieval of emotionalevents Life scripts provide search descriptions for timeswhen one is most likely to have experienced the emotionSo for ldquohappyrdquo or ldquoin loverdquo there is a time period duringwhich one is most likely to have such emotions accord-ing to shared cultural norms Even though sadness andanger may be as expected and as common as being happyand in love over the overall life time there is no particu-lar time period to search for these emotions If no spe-cific time slot in a life script is allocated to certain typesof events they will not benefit from a life script that sup-ports and structures their retrieval and thus by defaultshould show the monotonically decreasing retention func-tion of normal forgetting consistent with Berntsen andRubinrsquos (2002) findings for saddest and most traumaticmemories

The present work extends Berntsen and Rubin (2002)in an attempt to test the life script explanation In con-trast to the cognitive and the narrativeidentity explana-tions the life script account has the potential to makehighly specific testable predictions because it is possi-ble to measure life script knowledge We have been un-able to find any empirical studies that have examinedpeoplersquos life scripts for differently charged emotionalevents Therefore our Study 2 examines the life scriptfor the classes of events that Berntsen and Rubin used inaddition to the classes of events that we are using in ourStudy 1 If the views presented here are correct requestsfor positive but not negative events should form abump our participants will be much more confident and

in better agreement about the dating of positive versusnegative events and when they are confident they willbe better at predicting the recall data

STUDY 1

In Study 1 we asked a large stratified sample rangingin age from 20 to 94 years how old they were when theyhad felt most afraid most proud most jealous most inlove and most angry In addition we asked how old theywere when they experienced their most important eventand whether this event was positive negative or mixedWe do not address the frequency of positive versus nega-tive memories or the differences in their intensity (Matlinamp Stang 1978) Also we do not separate retention of theemotion from the retention of the rest of the event Thusit is not possible here to decide whether the intensities ofthe different emotions fade at the same rate (WalkerRodney amp Thompson 1997) Emotions might vary withrespect to a number of dimensions other than valence Inthe present context the most important dimensions toconsider are whether the emotions are basic or complex(eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) whether the emo-tions are associated with higher or lower levels of arousal(eg Smith amp Ellsworth 1985) whether their durationis typically long or short (eg Poulsen 1991) and whetherthey address the personrsquos self (Lewis Sullivan Stangeramp Weiss 1989) To ensure that none of these dimensionsseriously confounded our data on valence the selectionof positive and negative events that we used covers emo-tions that vary on these dimensions

MethodParticipants A representative sample of the Danish population

above the age of 16 participated The respondents were selectedfrom all geographic areas of Denmark except Greenland and theFaroe Islands as part of an omnibus survey by Gallup Public Den-mark All respondents were able to speak and understand DanishIn each household 1 or 2 respondents were randomly selected viaa combined criterion based on number of household membersabove the age of 16 and their birthdays The response rate for theentire omnibus was 56 To exclude minors and to provide con-ventional decade boundaries only respondents above the age of 19were included in the present study Table 1 shows the number ofmale and female respondents sorted by decade of life and by thenumber of participants in each age group who answered each ques-tion by giving a date or by explicitly stating that they had no mem-ory of that type No dates were provided in response to any of thefive questions requesting a date by 71 of our 1307 respondents

Procedure The data were collected by 120 interviewers viaface-to-face interviews in the respondentsrsquo homes The questions ofrelevance for the present study were preceded only by demographicquestions in the omnibus The interviews were conducted in Dan-ish An English version of the set of questions for the present studyis presented in Appendix A Half of the respondents were asked thequestions in the same order as in Appendix A For the other half theorder of questions was reversed except that Questions 6 and 6awere presented last in both versions Response options for Ques-tions 1ndash6 were as follows (1) ldquoI was around [age in event] years oldrdquo(2) ldquoI have no memories in which I feel very afraidproudjealousmuch in loveangryno memories of epoch-making eventsrdquo and(3) ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo Response options for Question 6a were

4 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(1) ldquopositiverdquo (2) ldquonegativerdquo (3) ldquomixedrdquo and (4) ldquoI donrsquot want toanswerrdquo

The interviewer recorded responses on a laptop computer To en-sure understanding each question and the response options for eachquestion were printed on a demonstration card that was shown tothe respondent while the question was being asked If the respon-dent preferred he or she could read the questions and response op-tions directly from the computer screen If the respondent foundone or more questions too intimate he or she was offered the op-portunity of typing his or her responses directly into the computerwhile the screen of the computer was turned away from the inter-viewer

The questions for Study 1 were introduced by a brief explanationclarifying that the questions were about memories from the re-spondentrsquos personal life It was stressed that the respondent did nothave to answer the questions if he or she found them to be too pri-vate It was also stressed that the purpose of the study was scientificand that no political or financial interest was involved

ResultsReports of no memories Table 2 shows the rank order

of the proportion of respondents who reported no mem-ories in response to each of the emotion questions and toeach of the other questions For the sake of comparisonthis table also includes the proportions of no reportsfrom Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

The most striking finding was that more than half ofthe respondents (55) stated that they had no memoriesof being very jealous By comparison only 10 statedthat they had no memories of being much in love and41 stated that they had no traumatic memories Ratherthan reflecting the actual frequencies of experiences ofjealousy in our respondentsrsquo lives the high number of noreports is likely a reflection of a bias in reporting ormemory The same is most likely true for the high num-ber of no reports on anger and fear Both emotions areclassif ied as basic emotions with innate neural sub-strates innate facial expressions and distinct feelingstates (eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) Thus thelikelihood that intense fear and anger were never experi-enced by 30ndash 40 of a representative sample of Danesseems very small It should be noted that a response op-tion worded as ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo was offered forall questions This option was used with the same fre-quency across the questionsmdashnamely by around 50 ofthe 1307 respondents (4) Thus when a participantchose to answer that he or she had no memory of the par-

ticular event in question we should expect this answer toreflect a genuine experience of being unable to easily re-trieve a memory for an event in which they were extremelyjealous angry or afraid and not an unwillingness to an-swer the bias appears to be in memory rather than in re-porting Therefore some mechanism such as a life scriptis needed to explain a decreased accessibility of memo-ries associated with jealousy anger and fear as com-pared with memories associated with other emotions

The distribution of emotionally charged memoriesFigures 2ndash4 present the basic results of Study 1 Eachpanel shows the separate results for participants in their20s 30s 40s 50s 60s and those in their 70s and aboveTo present all groups in one panel for each questioneach younger group was offset by 02 so that the curveswould not overlap Thus the participants in their 60s had02 added to their scores the participants in their 50s04 the participants in their 40s 06 the participants intheir 30s 08 and the participants in their 20s 10 Be-cause this causes the y-axis to go from 0 to 18 instead offrom 0 to 06 the figure compresses the visual differ-ences by a factor of three For all figures the proportionof memories occurring in the most recent decade wascorrected for the fact that the participants in that decadehad on the average lived through only about half of thedecade In order to do this the mean number of years

Table 1Description of Participant Population and Number of Participants With Dated Memories and With No Memory

Participants Responding Explicitly With Date or No Memory of That Type

Fear Pride Jealousy Love Anger Importance

Age Range n Women Age Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None

20ndash29 234 109 2484 151 80 192 39 119 109 210 15 160 69 178 5230ndash39 270 143 3456 192 75 223 41 147 118 253 12 175 91 218 4940ndash49 255 146 4400 172 73 192 55 123 121 222 23 153 87 201 4350ndash59 204 109 5443 138 59 137 56 177 116 177 20 116 76 147 4860ndash69 158 85 6432 92 57 91 59 40 112 123 26 70 79 103 4870ndash99 186 128 7803 87 87 92 80 33 137 134 31 60 108 99 74

Total 1307 720 4633 832 431 927 330 539 713 1119 127 734 510 946 314

Table 2Cues Rank Ordered by Proportion of Respondents Reporting

No Memory of That Type

Cue p SE

Emotion CuesMost jealous 55 014Most angry 39 013Most fear 33 013Most pride 25 012Saddest 13 009Most in love 10 008Happiest 10 009

Other CuesMost traumatic 41 014Involuntary 38 014Most important 24 012Most important 24 012

NotemdashValues from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) are in bold

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 5

lived past the decade boundary was calculated as themean age of the participants in that group plus 6 months(because the participants who reported their ages as nyears old on the average actually had lived n and a halfyears) minus the decade boundary This number was di-vided into 10 (the number of years in the decade) andwas multiplied by the number of memories observed inthat decade before the proportions shown in the figureswere calculated For instance the average age of the par-ticipants in their 40s was 4400 years They produced 26memories of pride in their 40s We multiplied 26 310(400 + 050) in order to infer that there would havebeen 58 memories in the decade if all the participantshad been tested the day before their 50th birthday

Figures 2ndash4 present the probability of a memoryrsquosbeing reported in each decade of life along with a stan-dard error bar calculated by Ouml[ p(12p)n] Given thelarge number of participants the standard errors aresmall (05 or less in all cases for anger fear love andpride and 08 or less in all cases for importance positivenegative and jealousy) and therefore at times are hid-den behind the dots indicating the means The results arerobust Within each figure the differences we mentionare usually greater than two standard errors and moreimportantly unless specifically noted they vary in in-cremental systematic ways for the six age groups shownin each figure The possibility of such patterns occurringby chance is exceedingly small

Of the most important memories (Question 6 in Ap-pendix A) 481 were rated as positive 266 as negativeand 197 as mixed Thus roughly half of the most impor-tant memories were rated as positive This proportionheld for each age group with 49 53 49 5349 and 52 of the participants between the ages of 20and 70 rating their most important memories as positiverespectively In the top panel of Figure 2 are shown thedata for the participantsrsquo memories of their most posi-tive important event There was a peak in the 20s for allparticipants which was more pronounced in the olderparticipants A radically different pattern is seen in thebottom panel which presents the distributions of re-spondentsrsquo most important memories when the emo-tional content was classified as negative or mixed Nobump was detected for any of the age groups For all agegroups a slow increase in the number of memories wasfound from the most remote to the most recent decadesof life though the curves are somewhat noisy The datapattern resembles the data for respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories reported by Berntsen andRubin (2002) and adds support to their main finding thata bump was present only for emotionally positive mem-ories Moreover since the respondents in the presentstudy were asked to rate the emotional content after theyhad retrieved and dated the memory a deliberate searchfor positive versus negative memories could not have ledto the differences between the positive and negative im-portant memories

Figure 3 presents the data for peoplersquos memory of thetwo positive emotions and both are similar to the posi-

tive important events shown in Figure 2 However thebump for most in love was located earlier than the bumpfor memories of most important positive and most proudmemories and the bump for happiest memories reportedby Berntsen and Rubin (2002) Even though positive va-lence plays a crucial role for the presence of a bump thespecific emotional content is able to affect its temporallocation

Figure 4 presents the data for memories of the threenegative emotions The top panel shows the ages duringwhich respondents felt most jealous Although consis-tent evidence was found for a bump its location variedIn the middle panel which shows the ages during whichrespondents felt most angry a clear increase can be seenin responses regarding the most recent decades of life Inaddition there is an indication of a bump in the teens forrespondents above the age of 40 However the size ofthis bump is small and except for that for respondents intheir 70s it is lower than the increase of memories from

Figure 2 The distribution of the most important autobio-graphical memories The top panel shows important memoriesthat were rated as positive the bottom panel those rated as neg-ative or mixed Each decade age group is labeled by the youngestage included and is offset by 020 from the next oldest age groupto make all plots visible Standard errors are shown for all plots

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

4 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

(1) ldquopositiverdquo (2) ldquonegativerdquo (3) ldquomixedrdquo and (4) ldquoI donrsquot want toanswerrdquo

The interviewer recorded responses on a laptop computer To en-sure understanding each question and the response options for eachquestion were printed on a demonstration card that was shown tothe respondent while the question was being asked If the respon-dent preferred he or she could read the questions and response op-tions directly from the computer screen If the respondent foundone or more questions too intimate he or she was offered the op-portunity of typing his or her responses directly into the computerwhile the screen of the computer was turned away from the inter-viewer

The questions for Study 1 were introduced by a brief explanationclarifying that the questions were about memories from the re-spondentrsquos personal life It was stressed that the respondent did nothave to answer the questions if he or she found them to be too pri-vate It was also stressed that the purpose of the study was scientificand that no political or financial interest was involved

ResultsReports of no memories Table 2 shows the rank order

of the proportion of respondents who reported no mem-ories in response to each of the emotion questions and toeach of the other questions For the sake of comparisonthis table also includes the proportions of no reportsfrom Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

The most striking finding was that more than half ofthe respondents (55) stated that they had no memoriesof being very jealous By comparison only 10 statedthat they had no memories of being much in love and41 stated that they had no traumatic memories Ratherthan reflecting the actual frequencies of experiences ofjealousy in our respondentsrsquo lives the high number of noreports is likely a reflection of a bias in reporting ormemory The same is most likely true for the high num-ber of no reports on anger and fear Both emotions areclassif ied as basic emotions with innate neural sub-strates innate facial expressions and distinct feelingstates (eg Ekman 1992 Panksepp 1992) Thus thelikelihood that intense fear and anger were never experi-enced by 30ndash 40 of a representative sample of Danesseems very small It should be noted that a response op-tion worded as ldquoI donrsquot want to answerrdquo was offered forall questions This option was used with the same fre-quency across the questionsmdashnamely by around 50 ofthe 1307 respondents (4) Thus when a participantchose to answer that he or she had no memory of the par-

ticular event in question we should expect this answer toreflect a genuine experience of being unable to easily re-trieve a memory for an event in which they were extremelyjealous angry or afraid and not an unwillingness to an-swer the bias appears to be in memory rather than in re-porting Therefore some mechanism such as a life scriptis needed to explain a decreased accessibility of memo-ries associated with jealousy anger and fear as com-pared with memories associated with other emotions

The distribution of emotionally charged memoriesFigures 2ndash4 present the basic results of Study 1 Eachpanel shows the separate results for participants in their20s 30s 40s 50s 60s and those in their 70s and aboveTo present all groups in one panel for each questioneach younger group was offset by 02 so that the curveswould not overlap Thus the participants in their 60s had02 added to their scores the participants in their 50s04 the participants in their 40s 06 the participants intheir 30s 08 and the participants in their 20s 10 Be-cause this causes the y-axis to go from 0 to 18 instead offrom 0 to 06 the figure compresses the visual differ-ences by a factor of three For all figures the proportionof memories occurring in the most recent decade wascorrected for the fact that the participants in that decadehad on the average lived through only about half of thedecade In order to do this the mean number of years

Table 1Description of Participant Population and Number of Participants With Dated Memories and With No Memory

Participants Responding Explicitly With Date or No Memory of That Type

Fear Pride Jealousy Love Anger Importance

Age Range n Women Age Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None Date None

20ndash29 234 109 2484 151 80 192 39 119 109 210 15 160 69 178 5230ndash39 270 143 3456 192 75 223 41 147 118 253 12 175 91 218 4940ndash49 255 146 4400 172 73 192 55 123 121 222 23 153 87 201 4350ndash59 204 109 5443 138 59 137 56 177 116 177 20 116 76 147 4860ndash69 158 85 6432 92 57 91 59 40 112 123 26 70 79 103 4870ndash99 186 128 7803 87 87 92 80 33 137 134 31 60 108 99 74

Total 1307 720 4633 832 431 927 330 539 713 1119 127 734 510 946 314

Table 2Cues Rank Ordered by Proportion of Respondents Reporting

No Memory of That Type

Cue p SE

Emotion CuesMost jealous 55 014Most angry 39 013Most fear 33 013Most pride 25 012Saddest 13 009Most in love 10 008Happiest 10 009

Other CuesMost traumatic 41 014Involuntary 38 014Most important 24 012Most important 24 012

NotemdashValues from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) are in bold

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 5

lived past the decade boundary was calculated as themean age of the participants in that group plus 6 months(because the participants who reported their ages as nyears old on the average actually had lived n and a halfyears) minus the decade boundary This number was di-vided into 10 (the number of years in the decade) andwas multiplied by the number of memories observed inthat decade before the proportions shown in the figureswere calculated For instance the average age of the par-ticipants in their 40s was 4400 years They produced 26memories of pride in their 40s We multiplied 26 310(400 + 050) in order to infer that there would havebeen 58 memories in the decade if all the participantshad been tested the day before their 50th birthday

Figures 2ndash4 present the probability of a memoryrsquosbeing reported in each decade of life along with a stan-dard error bar calculated by Ouml[ p(12p)n] Given thelarge number of participants the standard errors aresmall (05 or less in all cases for anger fear love andpride and 08 or less in all cases for importance positivenegative and jealousy) and therefore at times are hid-den behind the dots indicating the means The results arerobust Within each figure the differences we mentionare usually greater than two standard errors and moreimportantly unless specifically noted they vary in in-cremental systematic ways for the six age groups shownin each figure The possibility of such patterns occurringby chance is exceedingly small

Of the most important memories (Question 6 in Ap-pendix A) 481 were rated as positive 266 as negativeand 197 as mixed Thus roughly half of the most impor-tant memories were rated as positive This proportionheld for each age group with 49 53 49 5349 and 52 of the participants between the ages of 20and 70 rating their most important memories as positiverespectively In the top panel of Figure 2 are shown thedata for the participantsrsquo memories of their most posi-tive important event There was a peak in the 20s for allparticipants which was more pronounced in the olderparticipants A radically different pattern is seen in thebottom panel which presents the distributions of re-spondentsrsquo most important memories when the emo-tional content was classified as negative or mixed Nobump was detected for any of the age groups For all agegroups a slow increase in the number of memories wasfound from the most remote to the most recent decadesof life though the curves are somewhat noisy The datapattern resembles the data for respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories reported by Berntsen andRubin (2002) and adds support to their main finding thata bump was present only for emotionally positive mem-ories Moreover since the respondents in the presentstudy were asked to rate the emotional content after theyhad retrieved and dated the memory a deliberate searchfor positive versus negative memories could not have ledto the differences between the positive and negative im-portant memories

Figure 3 presents the data for peoplersquos memory of thetwo positive emotions and both are similar to the posi-

tive important events shown in Figure 2 However thebump for most in love was located earlier than the bumpfor memories of most important positive and most proudmemories and the bump for happiest memories reportedby Berntsen and Rubin (2002) Even though positive va-lence plays a crucial role for the presence of a bump thespecific emotional content is able to affect its temporallocation

Figure 4 presents the data for memories of the threenegative emotions The top panel shows the ages duringwhich respondents felt most jealous Although consis-tent evidence was found for a bump its location variedIn the middle panel which shows the ages during whichrespondents felt most angry a clear increase can be seenin responses regarding the most recent decades of life Inaddition there is an indication of a bump in the teens forrespondents above the age of 40 However the size ofthis bump is small and except for that for respondents intheir 70s it is lower than the increase of memories from

Figure 2 The distribution of the most important autobio-graphical memories The top panel shows important memoriesthat were rated as positive the bottom panel those rated as neg-ative or mixed Each decade age group is labeled by the youngestage included and is offset by 020 from the next oldest age groupto make all plots visible Standard errors are shown for all plots

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 5

lived past the decade boundary was calculated as themean age of the participants in that group plus 6 months(because the participants who reported their ages as nyears old on the average actually had lived n and a halfyears) minus the decade boundary This number was di-vided into 10 (the number of years in the decade) andwas multiplied by the number of memories observed inthat decade before the proportions shown in the figureswere calculated For instance the average age of the par-ticipants in their 40s was 4400 years They produced 26memories of pride in their 40s We multiplied 26 310(400 + 050) in order to infer that there would havebeen 58 memories in the decade if all the participantshad been tested the day before their 50th birthday

Figures 2ndash4 present the probability of a memoryrsquosbeing reported in each decade of life along with a stan-dard error bar calculated by Ouml[ p(12p)n] Given thelarge number of participants the standard errors aresmall (05 or less in all cases for anger fear love andpride and 08 or less in all cases for importance positivenegative and jealousy) and therefore at times are hid-den behind the dots indicating the means The results arerobust Within each figure the differences we mentionare usually greater than two standard errors and moreimportantly unless specifically noted they vary in in-cremental systematic ways for the six age groups shownin each figure The possibility of such patterns occurringby chance is exceedingly small

Of the most important memories (Question 6 in Ap-pendix A) 481 were rated as positive 266 as negativeand 197 as mixed Thus roughly half of the most impor-tant memories were rated as positive This proportionheld for each age group with 49 53 49 5349 and 52 of the participants between the ages of 20and 70 rating their most important memories as positiverespectively In the top panel of Figure 2 are shown thedata for the participantsrsquo memories of their most posi-tive important event There was a peak in the 20s for allparticipants which was more pronounced in the olderparticipants A radically different pattern is seen in thebottom panel which presents the distributions of re-spondentsrsquo most important memories when the emo-tional content was classified as negative or mixed Nobump was detected for any of the age groups For all agegroups a slow increase in the number of memories wasfound from the most remote to the most recent decadesof life though the curves are somewhat noisy The datapattern resembles the data for respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories reported by Berntsen andRubin (2002) and adds support to their main finding thata bump was present only for emotionally positive mem-ories Moreover since the respondents in the presentstudy were asked to rate the emotional content after theyhad retrieved and dated the memory a deliberate searchfor positive versus negative memories could not have ledto the differences between the positive and negative im-portant memories

Figure 3 presents the data for peoplersquos memory of thetwo positive emotions and both are similar to the posi-

tive important events shown in Figure 2 However thebump for most in love was located earlier than the bumpfor memories of most important positive and most proudmemories and the bump for happiest memories reportedby Berntsen and Rubin (2002) Even though positive va-lence plays a crucial role for the presence of a bump thespecific emotional content is able to affect its temporallocation

Figure 4 presents the data for memories of the threenegative emotions The top panel shows the ages duringwhich respondents felt most jealous Although consis-tent evidence was found for a bump its location variedIn the middle panel which shows the ages during whichrespondents felt most angry a clear increase can be seenin responses regarding the most recent decades of life Inaddition there is an indication of a bump in the teens forrespondents above the age of 40 However the size ofthis bump is small and except for that for respondents intheir 70s it is lower than the increase of memories from

Figure 2 The distribution of the most important autobio-graphical memories The top panel shows important memoriesthat were rated as positive the bottom panel those rated as neg-ative or mixed Each decade age group is labeled by the youngestage included and is offset by 020 from the next oldest age groupto make all plots visible Standard errors are shown for all plots

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

6 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

the most recent decades In the bottom panel whichshows most afraid memories all distributions are rela-tively flat although an increase in memories from themost recent 1ndash2 decades is seen in most cases Only re-spondents in their 70s showed a bump in their 20s Thusthe data for memories of feeling most angry and mostafraid followed the same pattern as the data reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) on respondentsrsquo saddest andmost traumatic memories A clear bump was not foundin any of these datasets the distributions were relativelyflat and there was an increase in memories from themost recent decades of life

To summarize the distributions of memories for im-portant events rated positivemdashfor being most in love andfor being most proudmdashwere similar in that they all

showed a clear bump between the ages of 10 and 30 butthe location of this bump occurred in the teens for mem-ories of being most in love and in the 20s for the othertwo classes of positive memories The distributions ofmemories for important events rated negativemdashbeingmost angry and most afraidmdashwere similar to one anotherbut differed from the distributions of the positive eventsshowing at most a small bump between the ages of 10and 30 and either curves that were relatively flat or curvesthat could be described as monotonically decreasing re-tention functions The distribution of memories of beingmost jealous had a bump but it occurred in differentdecades

War and peace An examination of the figures pre-sented here and in our earlier study (Berntsen amp Rubin2002) reveals that the 70-year-old respondents oftenshowed a bump for negative events and might have alarger bump for all events as compared with the youngergroups There are two classes of explanation for this ap-parent effect The first based on the age of the respon-dents is that although the bump exists in a host of con-ditions for people as young as 40 it increases later inlife perhaps as a part of life review (Butler 1964Fitzgerald 1996) The second explanation is based onhistorical time Denmark was occupied by Germanyfrom April 1940 to May 1945 At the time of the surveyin 2001 respondents in the 50-year-old group or youngerhad not yet been born during the occupation those in the60-year-old group would have been between 0 and 13years old and those in the 70-year-old group which in-cluded respondents from 70 to 94 would have been be-tween 9 and 38 years old Thus the events experiencedduring the occupation could be what is causing the bumpfor negative events for the 70-year-old respondents andan increase in the first decade of life for fear for the 60-year-old respondents To compare these two explana-tions we did two types of analysis The first which wasused to investigate the possibility of increased reminis-cence with age was based on the age of the respondentsthe second which was used to investigate historical in-fluences was based on the reported calendar date of thememory Both analyses are shown in Table 3

If the bump is larger in the 70-year-old respondentsthe probability of a memory of an eventrsquos occurring intheir 20s should be greater We calculated this for Study 1and for the data from Berntsen and Rubin (2002) As canbe seen in Table 3 the effect was in the right direction forall cues except the request for the involuntary memoriesHowever when individual questions were consideredonly questions regarding most trauma and most fearemotions that one might associate most with a foreigninvasion reached significance

For the historical analysis all memories were con-verted from the reported-age-of-the-respondent-at-the-time-of-the-event measure used throughout the rest ofthis article to calendar year We used three 4-year peri-ods before (1936ndash1939) during (1941ndash1944) and after(1946ndash1949) the occupation removing the transition

Figure 3 The distribution of autobiographical memories forpositive emotions The top panel is for events in which partici-pants were most proud the bottom panel is for events in whichthey were most in love Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 7

years of 1940 and 1945 from the initial analysis becausethese included both occupation and no occupation In thedata reported in Study 1 there were 261 respondents bornby 1936 and 511 born by 1949 (For Berntsen amp Rubin2002 these values were 273 and 518 respectively)Thus there were about twice as many individuals whocould have had a memory for the later than for the ear-lier years being considered

Because we did not want to reduce the range of agesof the respondents during the war years for an analysisintended to contrast age and historical time we did notwant to include only the 261 respondents who were alivefor the whole period We therefore normalized the fre-quencies of memories for each year as if there were 500respondents alive in each year We did this by multiply-ing the observed number or memories in a given year by500 and dividing by the number of respondents whowere born by then For example there were eight fearmemories recorded for 1942 and 363 respondents hadbeen born by 1942 We therefore recorded 8(500363) or1102 fear memories for 1942 instead of the raw value of8 The total number of normalized memories for eachcue for the three periods is presented in Table 3 For fearand trauma memories the two cues that had significantdifferences in the analysis based on the age of the re-spondents there were twice as many memories for thetime period during the occupation as for the surroundingperiods We plot these data using two-year intervals andincluding 1940 and 1945 in Figure 5 Frequencies fortwo other memories changed in a clear fashion with thebeginning and end of the occupation of Denmark thesaddest and happiest memories Saddest memories fol-lowed the pattern of fear and trauma memories but lessdramatically Happiest memories increased for the timeperiod after the occupation In the years from 1936 to1944 there were always between 0 and 5 happy memo-ries reported in the raw data In 1945 and 1946 the rawfrequencies jumped to 14 and 13 respectively

We cannot rule out the hypothesis that reminiscenceincreases with age but the two questions that show sig-nificant difference with the age of the respondents alsoshow clear and very large effects of the occupation ofDenmark The occupation of Denmark provides ties fromindividual history to cultural history and may reflect theoperation of a life script developed specifically for theldquowar generationrdquo When asked for their most traumatic andfearful memories this group used the war period as asearch description because this period of their life is cul-turally agreed on as having been traumatic

DiscussionThe main results were consistent with Berntsen and

Rubinrsquos (2002) findings Memories associated with pos-itive emotions showed a bump for young adulthoodwhereas with the exception of jealousy memories asso-ciated with negative emotions did not or did so to a muchsmaller degree Thus the present study replicates the re-duced recall of remote negative events Moreover the

Figure 4 The distribution of autobiographical memories fornegative emotions The top middle and bottom panels are forevents in which participants were most jealous most angry andmost afraid respectively Each decade age group is labeled by theyoungest age included and is offset by 020 from the next oldestage group to make all plots visible Standard errors are shownfor all plots

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

8 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

three classes of memories associated with the highestnumber of no reports all dealt with negative emotions(jealousy anger and fear) which further supports that theaccess to emotionally unpleasant memories is reduced

However the results also show that even though posi-tive valence plays a crucial role for the presence of abump the specific emotional content is able to affect itstemporal location Memories of being most in love camemostly from the period between the ages of 10 and 20whereas memories for other highly positive events formeda bump with a peak between the ages of 20 and 30 Alsonot all memories of highly negative events showed a mo-notonically decreasing retention function as the one re-ported by Berntsen and Rubin (2002) for memories ofthe most traumatic and the saddest events In the presentstudy such a pattern was found for memories of most im-portant events rated as neutral or negative and for mem-ories of being most angry and most afraid whereas mem-ories of being most jealous showed a different pattern

The present findings are consistent with the assumptionthat the retrieval of emotionally charged events is formedby respondentsrsquo life scripts Many negative events wouldnot be part of the respondentsrsquo life scripts and thereforeshow a monotonically decreasing retention function con-sistent with the findings The fact that memories for feel-ing most in love derived from the respondentsrsquo teen yearswhereas memories for other highly positive events peakedin the 20s seems to be in perfect agreement with norma-tive expectations of the course of life in a modern westernsociety The finding that memories for being most jealoushad a peak between the ages of 10 and 30 for five out ofsix age groups could indicate a search based on knowl-edge of the temporal slot for love combined with variableestimations of when in life the stormy heights of roman-tic love are most likely to cause conflict and jealousy Thehigh number of no reports of memories of being most jeal-ous most angry and most afraid might reflect that suchevents are not included in most Danesrsquo life scripts so that

no life script is available to help the retrieval of suchevents Obviously these interpretations are post hoc andspeculative Because we have been unable to locate anyempirical studies that have investigated peoplersquos lifescripts for differently charged emotional events we con-ducted Study 2 in order to provide such data

STUDY 2

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on lifescripts that could guide retrieval There are at least twoways of conceptualizing the process of retrieval and nar-ration of the personal past One is based on cognitive andemotional structures of a particular personrsquos life whichcan be conceptualized as life time periods and generalevents (Conway amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) landmarkevents (Shum 1998) or turning points (Clausen 1995)Such structures have in common that their actual contentis particular to the individual since it derives from his orher life Another type of retrieval process is based onshared ideas within a given culture of what is expected forpeople in general such as the types of events that are ex-pected to happen at certain times in peoplersquos livesmdashfor ex-ample graduation first employment marriage and child-birth (eg Bluck amp Habermas 2000 Neugarten ampHagestad 1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) Alife script is a schema of such culturally expected eventsHow should one go about collecting empirical data onsuch shared knowledge structures A standard way to ob-tain a schema independent of the recall of actual instancesis to have people generate imaginary instances (Rubin ampKontis 1983 Rubin Stolzfus amp Wall 1991 Rubin Wal-lace amp Houston 1993)mdashthat is to simulate the behaviorof imagined older adults (Baltes amp Goulet 1971) We do

Figure 5 The distribution of autobiographical memories formost traumatic and most fearsome memories plotted by calendaryear

Table 3Memories Before During and After the Occupation of Denmark

Proportion in 20s WW II Occupation

Emotion Age 70 Age 60 c2 Before During After

Berntsen and Rubin (2002)

Happiest 55 45 172 19 23 38Saddest 19 12 155 10 22 13Most important 37 33 010 5 17 14Most traumatic 18 06 425 5 22 9Involuntary 10 15 019 17 14 14

Experiment 2Most fear 24 11 463 19 43 18Most pride 38 33 021 5 9 8Most jealous 36 29 017 0 8 7Most in love 40 37 016 25 40 42Most angry 23 11 247 7 12 9Most important 36 24 262 7 12 18

NotemdashThe frequencies for the last three columns were normalized byassuming that there were 500 respondents alive during the years 1936ndash1949 p lt 05

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 9

so here in what we believe to be the first empirical studyof peoplersquos life scripts for emotional events

MethodParticipants To construct a life script the participants had to be

able to understand the task and have an idea of cultural norms ifthey existed but not be old enough to make the judgments with re-spect to their own lives We therefore chose 87 undergraduate psy-chology majors at the University of Aarhus (68 females 19 malesmean age 262 years range 21ndash 41)

Procedure The participants were informed that the purpose ofthe study was to obtain information about cultural norms and ex-pectations regarding the distribution of emotional events across thelife span They were asked to imagine an average 70-year-old maleor female and to estimate this personrsquos age during each of a seriesof emotionally charged events The instructions were read aloud bythe experimenter and printed on the first page of the questionnaireTranslated into English they are as follows

This study deals with cultural norms and expectations aboutthe distribution of emotional events across the life span Imag-ine an average 70 year old who is looking back at his or herlife thinking about a range of different events Your task is togive an estimate of this personrsquos age at the time when each ofthese events took place For each question please write whatyou think is the most likely age in years (do not use ranges) andafterward rate on the scale how confident you are that your es-timate is in the right decade of life (ie how confident you arethat it is correct plusmn5 years) If you have no idea as to when anevent is most likely to have occurred use your best guess andfill in each blank There are no correct or incorrect answersWe are interested in your intuition about when each of theseevents is most likely to occur for a typical person

English versions of the questions are presented in Appendix B Foreach question the participants filled in the estimated age After-ward they rated how confident they were that their estimate was inthe right decade of the imagined personrsquos life The scale had sevenpoints (1 = I have absolutely no confidence 7 = I am totally confi-dent) Half of the participants were asked the questions in the sameorder as those in Appendix B For the other half the order of ques-tions was reversed The phrases used in these questions matchedthe questions in Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (in press)The participants were instructed not to think of a particular personwhose life they knew

Results and DiscussionTable 4 presents the results for the questions rank or-

dered by mean confidence in the estimated dates indi-

cating the extent to which the events were dated as partof a life script Confidence ratings for the estimated ageswere higher for the important and positive events com-pared with those for the negative events the mean con-fidence ratings for the three positive events versus thefive negative events were 438 versus 352 [t(86) = 770p lt 0001] In addition there was a significant negativecorrelation between the mean confidence ratings and thestandard deviations of the estimated ages as evidencedby a Spearman rankndashorder correlation (R = 272 p lt05) the more confidence there was in the age estimatesthe closer the estimates were to their mean This supportsthe claim that the confidence ratings can measure the ex-tent to which the dated events are allocated a specificslot in a life script when individual participants weremore confident of their estimated dates the dates weremore similar across participants The difference betweenthe confidence ratings of the dating of positive and neg-ative events therefore supports our prediction that highlypositive events are an integrated part of the participantsrsquolife script to a much larger extent than are highly nega-tive events

Table 4 also shows the number of the events distrib-uted across the 7 decades of life The top three events onthe confidence scale peaked in the 20s with 51 of theevents located in this decade The pattern was less clearfor feeling most proud and for the five negative eventsTo compare these distributions with the actual memorydistributions found in Study 1 and those in Berntsen andRubin (2002) Figure 6 shows the distribution of eachevent type together with the relevant memory distribu-tion from the previous survey studies for the respondentsin their 60s This age group was selected because theparticipants in the present study were instructed to imag-ine the life course of a person at the end of this decadeThe life script distributions are presented with dottedlines The purpose of each comparison was to see towhat extent the memory data in the survey studies werepredicted by the life script data obtained in the presentstudy and whether the accuracy of predictions varied asa function of the confidence ratings The figures are pre-sented in the same order as the rank order of the confi-dence ratings in Table 4

Table 4The Life Script as Indicated by the Number of Participants

Who Dated an Event in Each Decade

Decade of Life

Question Confidence Rating SD in Age 0s 10s 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s

Most in love 477 462 0 37 47 2 1 0 0Most important 459 861 0 7 47 26 4 0 3Happiest 426 1121 1 4 40 31 2 2 7Proudest 413 1226 1 12 24 27 12 9 2Saddest 406 1602 0 5 5 7 17 19 34Most jealous 385 1033 3 27 37 7 11 1 1Most fear 372 2067 28 18 9 10 5 7 10Most trauma 307 1447 5 17 21 20 14 6 4Most anger 297 1418 2 18 7 28 18 8 6

NotemdashQuestions ordered by confidence ratings

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

10 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

The life script data obtained in the present study to alarge extent matches the distributions of the survey datafor the most important memories and for memories ofbeing most in love happiest proudest and saddestThese events also obtained the highest confidence rat-ings on the estimated dates for their occurrence The lifescript data were more poorly matched to the distributionsof memories of being most jealous and most afraid andthe data formed a poor match for the respondentsrsquo mosttraumatic memories and their memories of being mostangry The latter two events had the lowest confidenceratings on the estimated dates In short the ability of lifescript data to predict the distributions of memoriesacross the life span varied as a function of the partici-pantsrsquo confidence ratings of the estimated dates

In addition the life script data put the estimates forbeing most in love happiest and proudest later than inthe survey studies The peak for most in love in the sec-ond decade of life was present also in the memory dis-tribution for the same age group (respondents in their20s) in Study 1 The peak of proudest and happiestevents in the thirties could reflect an idea among the un-dergraduates in Study 2 that the best experiences are stillto comemdashan expectancy that sadly is not confirmed bythe respondents in the survey

The distribution of the age estimates for saddestevents showed a slow increase over life span with fewersad events being in the first decade of life and most beingin the most recent decade These estimates suggest thatthe frequency of highly sad events increases over the life

Figure 6 A comparison of the distributions of autobiographical memories from survey participants in their 60s with the dis-tribution of autobiographical memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old person according to the estimates of undergraduates Theemotions are shown in the same decreasing confidence order as that in Table 4 Standard errors are shown for all plots

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 11

span If so the monotonically decreasing curve found inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) for respondentsrsquo saddestmemories is not a retention function but simply a reflec-tion of the way life ismdashit gets sadder and sadder withage This view is similar to earlier but now rejected the-ories on the development of affect across life Recentstudies show that negative affect is reported and ob-served less often in older adults than in younger adults(see Charles Reynolds amp Gatz 2001 de Vries BlandoSouthhard amp Bubeck 2001 Mroczek 2001 for re-views) Since the distribution matches the distribution ofmemories for saddest events in the survey this could betaken to indicate the operations of an underlying lifescript in both cases However this interpretation is con-tradicted by the relatively low confidence ratings andhigh standard deviations for the undergraduatesrsquo esti-mates of saddest events (cf Table 5)

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The findings show the existence of scripts for the ex-pected temporal locations of highly important and highlypositive events but not of highly negative events InStudy 2 the estimated dates of when an average 70-year-old had felt happiest most in love and most proud wereassociated with significantly higher confidence ratingsthan were the estimated dates of when the same imag-ined average person had felt saddest most jealous mostafraid most angry and experienced his or her most trau-matic event Moreover the mean ratings of confidencecorrelated negatively with the standard deviations whichshows that the individual confidence ratings increasedwith increasing agreement across participants as to thetemporal location of the imagined events This suggeststhat a common underlying culturally shared conception(ie a life script) was reflected in the individual confi-dence ratings The life script data obtained in Study 2followed the distributions of the memory data obtainedin Study 1 and those in Berntsen and Rubin (2002) forimportant and highly positive events whereas the samedata to a much less extent explained the distributions foremotionally negative events and were very poor for thosenegative events for which confidence ratings on the es-timated dates were lowest The bump of positive and im-portant memories in young adulthood in Study 1 and inBerntsen and Rubin (2002) can thus be explained interms of retrieval via life scripts according to the resultsobtained in Study 2 The high number of no reports ofmemories of being most jealous most angry and mostafraid might similarly reflect a lack of life script to sup-port the retrieval of such events

In addition to structuring retrieval by providing searchdescriptions life scripts can also function as a mecha-nism of maintenance by repeatedly structuring retrievalover time and thus can form the basis for spaced practiceof the types of events included in the script The monot-onically decreasing retention functions for most of thenegative memories can simply reflect ordinary forgettingin the absence of life scripts to form search descriptions

for and to maintain the accessibility of remote events ofthis type According to this account if no life script ex-ists for highly positive and important events similar mo-notonically decreasing curves would be found for suchmemories Life scripts as a vehicle for maintenance viaspaced practice can also explain why only important pos-itive memories formed a bump in the 20s in Study 1whereas important memories that were rated negative ormixed showed ordinary forgetting The same is true ofthe differences between the life span distributions ofpositive and negative involuntary memories reported byBerntsen and Rubin (2002) In short retrieval and main-tenance via a life script can explain most of the reducedrecall of remote negative events discovered by Berntsenand Rubin (2002) and in Study 1

Cognitive psychologists tend to focus on the level ofthe individual in providing explanations for their dataand developing models of organization (Wallach amp Wal-lach 1983) This has also been the case for theories ofthe bump So far the prevalent explanations of this phe-nomenon have concerned special encoding or consoli-dation processes in young adulthood that are due to ei-ther the formation of an adult identity or the increasednumber of landmark events in this time period (seeRubin et al 1998 for a review) According to the pres-ent findings however the bump might primarily be a re-sult of retrieval processes and spaced practice structuredby culturally shared scripts on the temporal location ofdifferent types of life events This explanation is moreparsimonious than the previous ones Any theory on thelife course needs to include the conception of life script(eg Foner amp Kertzer 1979 Neugarten amp Hagestad1976 Settersten amp Hagestad 1996a 1996b) as does anaccount of the findings of Berntsen and Rubin (2002)and Study 1 It is on the other hand not clear whether adefense mechanism or extraordinary encoding in the ser-vice of a self is needed Thus explanations centering onthe individual might be superfluous

As argued in the introduction knowledge of the con-tent and timing of transitional events is a powerful regu-lator of behavior in all societies The present findings in-dicate that this knowledge also provides importantstructures for autobiographical memory Societies aresegmented into domains such as work and family eachwith its own transition points along the life course sothat a multiplicity of time tables exists (Neugarten ampHagestad 1976) Thus life scripts can be seen to pro-vide both a temporal and thematic organization for auto-biographical memory and thus enable individuals tothink of their personal lives in terms of thematically dis-tinct but temporally overlapping life time periods (Con-way amp Pleydell-Pearce 2000) However according tothe present view such themes derive primarily from theway shared cultural knowledge is organized and not fromthe way an individualmdashconsidered as an independentunified selfmdashchooses to compose his or her life narra-tive Cultural knowledge provides powerful constraintsfor individual memory Luborsky (1993) suggested thatcultural age norms should be considered a default struc-

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

12 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

ture in the organization of individual life stories Ac-cording to his findings depressed individuals tell lifestories that focus on deviations from the expected lifecourse pattern and use such deviations as ldquoidioms of dis-tressrdquo (p 450) whereas nondepressed people tend to de-scribe their life stories as consistent with the expectedlife course pattern Thus a life story reflecting a life scriptis a way of expressing satisfaction with life whereas de-viations are used to draw attention to problems unhappi-ness or things that did not work out In both casesknowledge of shared cultural norms is needed for one tounderstand the stories and their implications

As argued earlier the dissociation between positiveand negative memories in relation to the bump is alsoconsistent with a cognitive account modified by for ex-ample social censure or with a narrativeidentity accountmodified by defense mechanisms However the presentexplanation based on culturally shared life scripts has theadvantage of being more parsimonious making specificpredictions about each tested emotion and draws uponthe well-defined psychological construct of script aswell as central concepts in fields outside of psychology

REFERENCES

Baltes P B amp Goulet L R (1971) Exploration of developmentalvariables by manipulation and simulation of age differences in be-havior Human Development 14 149-170

Belli R F Schuman H amp Jackson B (1997) Autobiographicalmisremembering John Dean is not alone Applied Cognitive Psy-chology 11 187-209

Berntsen D amp Rubin D C (2002) Emotionally charged memoriesacross the life span The recall of happy sad traumatic and involun-tary memories Psychology Aging 17 636-652

Bluck S amp Habermas T (2000) The life story schema Motivationamp Emotion 24 121-145

Butler R N (1964) The life review An interpretation of reminis-cence in the aged In R Kastenbaum (Ed) New thoughts on old age(pp 265-280) New York Springer-Verlag

Charles S T Reynolds C A amp Gatz M (2001) Age related dif-ferences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 yearsJournal of Personality amp Social Psychology 80 136-151

Clausen J A (1995) Gender contexts and turning points in adultsrsquolives In P Moen G Elder amp K Luschen (Eds) Examining lives incontext Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp 365-398) Washington DC American Psychological Association

Cohen G amp Faulkner D (1988) Life span changes in autobio-graphical memory In M M Gruenberg P E Morris amp R N Sykes(Eds) Practical aspects of memory Current research and issuesVol 1 Memory in everyday life (pp 277-282) New York Wiley

Conway M A amp Haque S (1999) Overshadowing the reminiscencebump Memories of a struggle for independence Journal of AdultDevelopment 6 35-44

Conway M A amp Pleydell-Pearce C W (2000) The constructionof autobiographical memories in the self-memory system Psycho-logical Review 107 261-288

de Vries B Blando J Southhard P amp Bubeck C (2001) Thetimes of our lives In G Kenyon P Clark amp B de Vries (Eds) Nar-rative gerontology Theory research and practice (pp 137-158)New York Springer-Verlag

Ekman P (1992) Are there basic emotions Psychological Review 99550-553

Erikson E (1950) Childhood and society New York NortonFitzgerald J M (1988) Vivid memories and the reminiscence phe-

nomenon The role of a self narrative Human Development 31 261-273

Fitzgerald J M (1996) Intersecting meanings of reminiscence inadult development and aging In D C Rubin (Ed) Remembering ourpast Studies in autobiographical memory (pp 360-383) CambridgeCambridge University Press

Foner A amp Kertzer D I (1979) Intrinsic and extrinsic sources ofchange in life-course transitions In M W Riley (Ed) Aging frombirth to death Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp 121-126) BoulderCO Westview Press

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1991) Autobiographical memory innormal aging and primary degenerative dementia (dementia of theAlzheimer type) Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences46 85-91

Fromholt P amp Larsen S F (1992) Autobiographical memory andlife-history narratives in aging and dementia (Alzheimer type) InM A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W Wagenaar (Eds) The-oretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp 413-426)Dordrecht Kluwer

Harber K D amp Pennebaker J W (1992) Overcoming traumaticmemories In S-Aring Christianson (Ed) The handbook of emotion andmemory Research and theory (pp 359-387) Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Holmes A amp Conway M A (1999) Generation identity and thereminiscence bump Memories for public and private events Journalof Adult Development 6 21-34

Hyland D T amp Ackerman A M (1988) Reminiscence and auto-biographical memory in the study of the personal past Journals of Gerontology Psychological Sciences amp Social Sciences 43 35-39

Janoff-Bulman R (1988) Assumptive worlds and the stress of trau-matic events Applications of the schema construct Social Cogni-tion 7 113-136

Jansari A amp Parkin A J (1996) Things that go bump in your lifeExplaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory Psy-chology amp Aging 11 85-91

Lewis M Sullivan M W Stanger C amp Weiss M (1989) Selfdevelopment and self-conscious emotions Child Development 60146-156

Luborsky M R (1993) The romance with personal meaning in geron-tology Cultural aspects of life themes The Gerontologist 33 445-452

Matlin M amp Stang D (1978) The Pollyanna principle Selectivityin language memory and thought Cambridge MA Schenkman

Mroczek D K (2001) Age and emotion in adulthood Current Di-rections in Psychological Science 10 87-90

Neugarten B L amp Hagestad G O (1976) Age and the life courseIn R Binstock amp E Shanas (Eds) Handbook of aging and socialsciences (pp 35-55) New York Van Nostrand Reinhold

Panksepp J (1992) A critical role for ldquoaffective neurosciencerdquo in re-solving what is basic about basic emotions Psychological Review99 554-560

Poulsen H (1991) Conations Aarhus Denmark Aarhus UniversityPress

Rubin D C amp Kontis T C (1983) A schema for common centsMemory amp Cognition 11 335-341

Rubin D C Rahhal T A amp Poon L W (1998) Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best Memory amp Cognition 26 3-19

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997a) The distribution of auto-biographical memories across the lifespan Memory amp Cognition 25859-866

Rubin D C amp Schulkind M D (1997b) The distribution of im-portant and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20 35 and 70year-old adults Psychology amp Aging 12 524-535

Rubin D C Stolzfus E R amp Wall K L (1991) The abstractionof form in semantic categories Memory amp Cognition 19 1-7

Rubin D C Wallace W T amp Houston B C (1993) The begin-nings of expertise for ballads Cognitive Science 17 435-462

Rubin D C Wetzler S E amp Nebes R D (1986) Autobiographi-cal memory across the adult lifespan In D C Rubin (Ed) Autobio-graphical memory (pp 202-221) Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress

Ruch L O Chandler S M amp Harder R A (1980) Life changeand rape impact Journal of Health amp Social Behavior 21 248-260

REDUCED RECALL OF REMOTE NEGATIVE EVENTS 13

Ruch L O amp Holmes T H (1971) Scaling of life change Compar-ison of direct and indirect methods Journal of Psychosomatic Re-search 15 221-227

Rutter M (1989) Pathways from childhood to adult life Journal ofChild Psychology and Psychiatry 30 23-51

Schank R C (1982) Dynamic memory New York Cambridge Uni-versity Press

Schank R C (1999) Dynamic memory revisited New York Cam-bridge University Press

Schank R C amp Abelson R P (1977) Scripts plan and knowledge InP N Johnson-Laird amp P C Wason (Eds) Thinking Readings in cog-nitive science (pp 421-435) Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Schrauf R W amp Rubin D C (1998) Bilingual autobiographicalmemory in older adult immigrants A test of cognitive explanationsof the reminiscence bump and the linguistic encoding of memoriesJournal of Memory amp Language 39 437-457

Schuman H amp Rieger C (1992) Collective memory and collectivememories In M A Conway D C Rubin H Spinnler amp W A Wage-naar (Eds) Theoretical perspectives on autobiographical memory(pp 323-336) Dordrecht Kluwer

Settersten R A amp Hagestad G O (1996a) Whatrsquos the latest Cul-tural age deadlines for family transitions The Gerontologist 36 178-188

Settersten R A amp Hagestad G O (1996b) Whatrsquos the latest IICultural age deadlines for educational and work transitions TheGerontologist 36 602-613

Shai D (2002) Working womencloistered men A family develop-ment approach to marriage arrangements among ultra-orthodoxJews Journal of Comparative Family Studies 33 97-115

Shum M S (1998) The role of temporal landmarks in the autobio-graphical memory processes Psychological Bulletin 124 423-442

Smith C A amp Ellsworth P C (1985) Patterns of cognitive ap-praisal in emotion Journal of Personality amp Social Psychology 48813-838

Walker R W Rodney J V amp Thompson C P (1997) Autobio-graphical memory Unpleasantness fades faster than pleasantnessover time Applied Cognitive Psychology 11 399-413

Wallach M A amp Wallach L (1983) Psychologyrsquos sanction forselfishness The error of egoism in theory and therapy San FranciscoFreeman

APPENDIX A

Questions for Study 11 At some point in their lives many people have experienced an event in which they were extremely afraid

and which they recall with fear If you have at least one memory in which you feel very afraid how old areyou in the memory when you feel most afraid

2 At some point in their lives many people have experienced an event in which they were extremely proudof something that they did themselves and which they recall with pride If you have at least one memory inwhich you feel very proud how old are you in the memory when you feel most proud

3 At some point in their lives many people have experienced an event in which they were extremely jeal-ous and which they recall with jealousy If you have at least one memory in which you feel very jealous howold are you in the memory when you feel most jealous

4 At some point in their lives many people have experienced an event in which they felt extremely in loveand which they recall with love If you have at least one memory in which you feel much in love how old areyou in the memory when you feel most in love

5 At some point in their lives many people have experienced an event in which they were extremely angryand which they recall with anger If you have at least one memory in which you feel very angry how old areyou in the memory when you feel most angry

6 At some point in their lives many people have had an extremely important experience which made bigchanges in their lives or outlooks and which they recall as an epoch-making event If you have at least one mem-ory of an epoch-making event how old were you when your most epoch-making event took place

6a If an age is given in Question 6 was this epoch-making event positive negative or mixed

(Continued on next page)

14 RUBIN AND BERNTSEN

APPENDIX B

Questions for Study 21 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an extremely happy event that

he or she recalls with much happiness and warmth How old do you think he or she is in his or her happiestmemory

2 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an extremely sad event that heor she recalls with much sadness and sorrow How old do you think he or she is in his or her saddest memory

3 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has had an extremely important experience thatmade big changes in his or her life or outlook and that he or she recalls as an epoch-making event How olddo you think he or she was when his or her most epoch-making event took place

4 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced a traumatic event in which he orshe or someone else was seriously injured his or her own life or the life of someone else was in serious dan-ger and he or she was feeling deeply shocked helpless very afraid and did not know what to do For exam-ple traumas might include serious accidents assaults abuse the sudden death of somebody life-threateningdiseases military combat torture etc How old do you think he or she is in his or her most traumatic memory

5 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an event in which he or she wasextremely angry and which he or she recalls with anger How old do you think he or she is in the memory whenhe or she feels most angry

6 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an event in which he or she feltextremely in love and which he or she recalls with love How old do you think he or she is in the memory whenhe or she feels most in love

7 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an event in which he or she wasextremely jealous and which he or she recalls with jealousy How old do you think he or she is in the memorywhen he or she feels most jealous

8 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an event in which he or she wasextremely proud of something that he or she did themselves and which he or she recalls with pride How olddo you think he or she is in the memory when he or she feels most proud

9 At some point in his or her life this 70-year-old person has experienced an event in which he or she wasextremely afraid and which he or she recalls with fear How old do you think he or she is in the memory inwhich he or she feels most afraid

(Manuscript received April 23 2002revision accepted for publication August 4 2002)