The recollective qualities of adolescents’ and adults’ narratives about a long-ago tornado

ABSTRACT

The recollective qualities of autobiographical memory are thought to develop over the course of the first two decades of life. We used a 9-year follow-up test of recall of a devastating tornado and of non-tornado-related events from before and after the storm, to compare the recollective qualities of adolescents’ (n = 20, ages 11 years, 11 months to 20 years, 8 months) and adults’ (n = 14) autobiographical memories. At the time of the tornado, half of the adolescents had been younger than age 6. Nine years after the event, all participants provided evidence that they recall the event of the tornado. Adults also had high levels of recall of the non-tornado-related events. Adolescents recalled proportionally fewer non-tornado-related events; adolescents younger than 6 at the time of the events recalled the fewest non-tornado-related events. Relative to adolescents, adults produced longer narratives. With narrative length controlled, there were few differences in the recollective qualities of adolescents’ and adults’ narrative reports, especially in the case of the tornado; the recollective qualities were stronger among adolescents older at the time of the events. Overall, participants in both age groups provided evidence of the qualities of recollection that are characteristic of autobiographical memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• autobiographical memory
• development
• narratives
• recollective qualities

Acknowledgements

The authors thank members of the Memory at Emory Laboratory at Emory University; the Stark Research Laboratory at Minnesota State University, Mankato; the Memory and Cognition Laboratory at Gustavus Adolphus College; and the Family Narratives Laboratory at Emory University, for their help at various stages of the research. They also thank the children, adolescents, and adults who so generously gave of their time to share some of the experiences of their lives, not once, not twice, but three times, thus making this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Given that the participants had taken part in conversations nine years previously, it might be expected that measures from the earlier conversations would be used as predictors at the nine-year follow-up. We did not conduct cross-lagged analyses because the earlier data were based on conversations between mothers and their children, rather than individual memory reports. Use of the conversations as predictors would have required the same data to be used to predict outcomes for adolescents and their mothers. As well, one of the primary measures of interest—narrative thematic coherence—could not be evaluated at the level of a conversation; it is a measure at the level of an individual narrative. We also had concerns that the amount of time that had elapsed between the data collection points was too long for unequivocal interpretation of any cross-lagged relations that might obtain. Over nine years between data collection points, the participants had a large number of individual and joint experiences that could reasonably be expected to function as unmeasured third variables in cross-lagged analyses. For these reasons, we did not conduct longitudinal analyses of the data.

2. The transcripts could not be coded for the context dimension of narrative coherence because contextual information was provided by the interviewer to initiate the memory reports. Although chronological coherence could be coded, because it is not informative of the primary motivating questions of the present research, we do not report information on coding or analysis of this dimension. The information is available from the first author.

3. The total possible number of non-tornado related events for the adults was 33 (rather than 28: 14 adults × 2 events) due to the fact that at the time of initial data collection 4 and 10 months after the storm, 5 adults had talked about 3 rather than 2 non-tornado related events, because they had more than 1 child in the study and they talked about some different events with each child.