Lifespan effects of current age and of age at the time of remembered events on the affective tone of life narrative memories: Early adolescence and older age are more negative.

The affective tone of autobiographical memories may be influenced by age in two ways-by the current age of the remembering individual and by the age of the remembered self at the time of the remembered event. While aging has been associated with more positive autobiographical memories, young adulthood is remembered more positively than other parts of life. We tested whether these effects also show in life story memories and how they act jointly on affective tone; also, we wanted to explore their effects on remembered lifetimes other than early adulthood. We tested effects of current age and age at event on affective tone with brief entire life narratives provided up to five times across 16 years by 172 Germans of both genders, ages 8 to 81 years. Multilevel analyses found an unexpected negativity effect of aging for current age and confirmed a "golden 20s" effect of remembered age. In addition, women told more negative life stories, and affective tone dipped in early adolescence for current age and was remembered as such up to mid-adulthood. Thus, the affective tone of life story memories is jointly influenced by current and remembered age. The absence of a positivity effect in aging is explained by the specific requirements of telling an entire life. We suggest the turmoil of puberty as a reason for the early adolescence dip. Gender differences are potentially explained by differences in narrative style, in depression rates, and in real-life challenges.

Individual differences in revising the life story-Personality and event characteristics influence change in the autobiographical meaning of life events.

OBJECTIVE: Repeated autobiographical narratives have recently received increased attention as measures of the stability of narrative identity. We propose that one way to map change in life narratives is to rate the degree to which the autobiographical meaning of renarrated events changes. We aimed to test the influence of age, traits (openness, extraversion), and event characteristics on how much autobiographical meaning changes. METHOD: In waves 3 and 4 of the MainLife study, 123 participants (15-72 years) narrated their lives twice, 4 years apart. Life events that were told both times were rated for change in autobiographical meaning (n = 531). Multilevel models tested individual and event characteristics as predictors. RESULTS: Autobiographical meaning changed more the more individuals were open to experience, the more recently the events had happened, and the more negative emotions the event narratives contained. It was unrelated to extraversion and to the use of autobiographical arguments. A decrease in change with age was due to older individuals narrating older events. CONCLUSION: Our findings add to understanding how traits and life story are related and underscore the need to further study the role of event characteristics for stability and change in narrative identity.

Measuring Implicit Motives with the Picture Story Exercise (PSE): Databases of Expert-Coded German Stories, Pictures, and Updated Picture Norms.

We present two openly accessible databases related to the assessment of implicit motives using Picture Story Exercises (PSEs): (a) A database of 183,415 German sentences, nested in 26,389 stories provided by 4,570 participants, which have been coded by experts using Winter's coding system for the implicit affiliation/intimacy, achievement, and power motives, and (b) a database of 54 classic and new pictures which have been used as PSE stimuli. Updated picture norms are provided which can be used to select appropriate pictures for PSE applications. Based on an analysis of the relations between raw motive scores, word count, and sentence count, we give recommendations on how to control motive scores for story length, and validate the recommendation with a meta-analysis on gender differences in the implicit affiliation motive that replicates existing findings. We discuss to what extent the guiding principles of the story length correction can be generalized to other content coding systems for narrative material. Several potential applications of the databases are discussed, including (un)supervised machine learning of text content, psychometrics, and better reproducibility of PSE research.