Autobiographical narratives move beyond simple memory of what happened to include explanations and emotional evaluations, in order to create meaning of personal past. Despite the many researches collecting life narratives, few studies have been conducted exploring the role of emotions in autobiographical recounts of life events in adolescence. Since both coherence of life stories and emotional competence increase dramatically at this age, we focused on emotional narratives. Studies on emotional socialization in children reveal interesting gender differences regarding maternal language and children’s talk. We predicted to find gender differences in the type and valence of autobiographical emotional narratives, and in the variety of episodes as well. Participants were 174 Italian adolescents from Milan, (14-19 years old; d.s.: 1.5) with typical development, equally divided by gender, forming two age groups (early vs late adolescence). A narrative tool (EAM-Task) was administered to collect, for each subject, three episodes of a special kind of personal memory called ‘an emotional autobiographical memory’. Content analysis was performed on 484 transcripts of emotional narratives. The coding scheme was based on theory and findings from the research on autobiographical memory and emotions, and on the themes emerging from reading the texts. Two coders read the narratives and independently coded the texts, applying the categories regarding volume of narration, emotion type, emotional valence, episode, context and time. Then, they compared their coding and reached full inter-rater agreement by discussion. A global descriptive analysis and three subsections of analysis controlling gender, age, and their interaction were carried out. Significant differences were found by gender (e.g., males reporting more positive emotions than females: p=.002; and more anger and mixed episodes: p=.02).The effect is higher in early adolescence than in late adolescence.
Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V. (2009). Autobiographical memory and emotional narratives: gender differences in adolescence. In Acts of XIVth European Conference on Developmental psychology (pp.69-69). Vilnius : Advertising Company.
Autobiographical memory and emotional narratives: gender differences in adolescence
GRAZZANI, ILARIA;ORNAGHI, VERONICA MARIA
2009
Abstract
Autobiographical narratives move beyond simple memory of what happened to include explanations and emotional evaluations, in order to create meaning of personal past. Despite the many researches collecting life narratives, few studies have been conducted exploring the role of emotions in autobiographical recounts of life events in adolescence. Since both coherence of life stories and emotional competence increase dramatically at this age, we focused on emotional narratives. Studies on emotional socialization in children reveal interesting gender differences regarding maternal language and children’s talk. We predicted to find gender differences in the type and valence of autobiographical emotional narratives, and in the variety of episodes as well. Participants were 174 Italian adolescents from Milan, (14-19 years old; d.s.: 1.5) with typical development, equally divided by gender, forming two age groups (early vs late adolescence). A narrative tool (EAM-Task) was administered to collect, for each subject, three episodes of a special kind of personal memory called ‘an emotional autobiographical memory’. Content analysis was performed on 484 transcripts of emotional narratives. The coding scheme was based on theory and findings from the research on autobiographical memory and emotions, and on the themes emerging from reading the texts. Two coders read the narratives and independently coded the texts, applying the categories regarding volume of narration, emotion type, emotional valence, episode, context and time. Then, they compared their coding and reached full inter-rater agreement by discussion. A global descriptive analysis and three subsections of analysis controlling gender, age, and their interaction were carried out. Significant differences were found by gender (e.g., males reporting more positive emotions than females: p=.002; and more anger and mixed episodes: p=.02).The effect is higher in early adolescence than in late adolescence.
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