RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Language of Memory: Narrating Memories of Parents and Friends
Andrea Smorti1, *, Carole Peterson2, Franca Tani3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 9
First Page: 95
Last Page: 110
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-9-95
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101609010095
Article History:
Received Date: 16/3/2016Revision Received Date: 20/7/2016
Acceptance Date: 29/8/2016
Electronic publication date: 30/09/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to compare narrated memories of parents and friends, recounted by both males and females. A total of 177 Italian undergraduates were asked to recall and to write in detail one relevant memory regarding their relationship with either parents or friends during adolescence. Half of the participants wrote a narrative about parents and half about friends. Narratives were examined using both a content and a lexical linguistic method of analysis.
The results showed that the language of memories was substantially influenced by the identity of the social partners that were part of the remembered events. In particular the ratio of negative emotion words to all words and the use of 'I' personal pronouns were higher when participants recounted memory narratives about parents rather than friends, and 'We' was used more in narratives about friends. Gender differences were found as well. The authors interpret the results as suggesting that the language of memory is affected by the type of interpersonal relationship that exists between the narrator and the other participants in the remembered events as well as by the gender of the narrator. In other words, memory narratives both reflect and are influenced by the relationships within which an individual is embedded.
