Brief Report
Meaning making during high and low point life story episodes predicts emotion regulation two years later: How the past informs the future

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.03.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Study examines link between life story meaning-making and emotion regulation.

  • Positive meaning predicts positive emotion regulation two years later.

  • Negative meaning predicts negative emotion regulation two years later.

  • Relationships hold while controlling for extraversion, neuroticism and word count.

Abstract

Memory processes are commonly thought to relate to a host of personality systems. The current study specifies a particular way that memory relates to personality. Highly-valenced, identity-rich memories – high and low point episodes in the life story – were analyzed to see if aspects of these memories predicted self-reports of emotion regulation two years later. Meaning making in high and low points predicted emotion regulation. Moreover, valence mattered. Positive meaning making in high and low point stories predicted positive emotion regulation while negative meaning making in low point stories predicted negative emotion regulation. These relationships held while controlling for baseline extraversion, neuroticism, and memory word count. Limitations due to study design are discussed.

Introduction

Research from personality, developmental, social, and cognitive psychology supports the claim that the way an individual constructs the personal past reveals current psychological functioning (e.g., Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000, McAdams, 2001). The remember-er is revealed by his or her rememberings. As one application of this general principle, researchers have recently turned their attention to the relationship between valenced memory and emotion regulation, the specific ways individuals respond to emotions once they arise (e.g. Denkova et al., 2012, Wisco and Nolen-Hokesema, 2010). The current study examines longitudinal associations between memories for emotionally intense scenes in one’s life story and self-report indices of emotion regulation.

The life story is a person’s internalized and evolving narrative of the self, integrating the reconstructed past with an imagined future (McAdams, 2001). Punctuating the life story are the recollections of especially significant scenes in one’s life, such as high points and low points. These emotionally valenced life story episodes often reveal important personality themes that relate to emotional processes and psychological well-being (McAdams & McLean, 2013).

High and low point stories typically express instances of autobiographical reasoning, the active process of deriving abstract meaning about the self from the recollection of concrete autobiographical scenes (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). In some instances, narrators derive positive meaning from specific autobiographical scenes, suggesting that the scene illustrates a positive trend in their own life or personality. In other instances, the meanings derived are decidedly negative, which, at times, suggest the narrator sees the episode as pointing to a negative trajectory in his or her life.

Like autobiographical reasoning, emotion regulation is also a valenced construct. Positive emotion regulation strategies indicate the ability to adaptively respond to negative emotional experiences, and include such skills as reframing a negative and refocusing on a positive. Negative emotion regulation strategies indicate a maladaptive response to negative emotional content that amplifies or prolongs the negative emotions, and include responses such as catastrophizing and rumination.

The current project investigates narrative meaning in the life story and emotion regulation in a longitudinal context and hypothesizes that valenced meaning making will predict valenced emotion regulation strategies. High and low point memories can be a cue for emotions in the present, e.g. the memory of the death of a loved one produces sadness in the current moment. How an individual makes sense of memory-induced emotions as he or she tells the story of the past event is an instance of online emotion regulation. For example, in constructing a low point story of the death of a loved one, an individual might respond to the memory-cued, current sadness by catastrophizing the consequences of the event, and in so doing attribute high levels of negative meaning to the episode. Alternatively, an individual’s ability to construct elaborate and positive meaning from a high point, might reflect a more general tendency to focus on positive attributes of a stimulus, an ability that in other scenarios would bolster positive emotion regulation efforts. In this way, constructing meaning in high and low point stories evinces emotion regulation in an identity-rich memory context. The ability to regulate emotions in life story construction might predict emotion regulation more generally.

In the present study, it is hypothesized that narrative meaning will predict emotion regulation skills two years later. In addition, the broad dispositions of extraversion, or positive emotionality, and neuroticism, or negative emotionality (McCrae & Costa, 2008), will be used as statistical controls. These controls will help test for a unique relationship between narrative meaning and emotion regulation beyond trait levels of positive and negative affect. Moreover, memory word count will also be used as a statistical control to rule out meaning making as simply a proxy for greater verbal elaboration.

Section snippets

Method

Sample and Procedure: Sample is a cohort of 164 Chicago-area adults ranging in age from 55 to 58 years at study inception. The sample is approximately 55% Caucasian-American and 43% African-American. 1 participant identified as inter-racial and 2 identified as “other.” Participants were recruited through a professional recruitment company, which employed mailers and advertisements. Upon entering the study, participants completed online self-report measures of the Big Five, among other

Results

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for study variables. 10 participants were lost to follow up at time 2. Independent samples t-tests revealed that these 10 participants, when compared with the 154 study completers, were higher on neuroticism (F(1, 161) = 6.86, p < .01; d = .13) and low point positive meaning (F(1, 161) = 10.08, p < .002; d = .55), but similar with respect to all other study variables.

Bi-variate relationships between narrative codes and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire

Discussion

Valenced meaning-making in high and low point memories from the life story was tested to see if it predicted self-reports of valenced, emotion regulation two years later. Positive meaning-making, in both high and low points, predicted positive emotion regulation, including such strategies as positive refocusing, positive reappraisal, and putting into perspective. Negative meaning-making in life story low points predicted negative emotion regulation, including self-blame and rumination.

Conclusion

Memory reveals not just what happened in the past but also the current and future functioning of the individual. The current study applied this maxim to the specific context of identity-rich, highly valenced life story memories and their relationship to emotion regulation. In high and low point stories, positive meaning predicted positive emotion regulation, while, in low point stories, negative meaning predicted negative emotion regulation. These relationships held while controlling for

Acknowledgment

The research was supported by a grant to Dan P. McAdams from the Foley Family Foundation to establish the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University.

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