Family Narratives And The Development Of An Autobiographical Self

Stories are central to our world. We form our families, our communities, and our nations through stories. It is through stories of our everyday experiences that each of us constructs an autobiographical self, a narrative identity, that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives. In this volume, Robyn Fivush describes how this deeply personal autobiographical self is socially and culturally constructed. Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self demonstrates that, through participating in family reminiscing, in which adults help children learn the forms and functions of talking about the past, young children come to understand and evaluate their experiences, and create a sense of self defined through individual and family stories that provide an anchor for understanding self, others, and the world. Fivush draws on three decades of research, from her own lab and from others, to demonstrate the critical role that family stories and family storytelling play in child development and outcome. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in psychology, human development, and family studies.

Stories are central to our world. We form our families, our communities, and our nations through stories. It is through stories of our everyday experiences that each of us constructs an autobiographical self, a narrative identity, that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives. In this volume, Robyn Fivush describes how this deeply personal autobiographical self is socially and culturally constructed. Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self demonstrates that, through participating in family reminiscing, in which adults help children learn the forms and functions of talking about the past, young children come to understand and evaluate their experiences, and create a sense of self defined through individual and family stories that provide an anchor for understanding self, others, and the world. Fivush draws on three decades of research, from her own lab and from others, to demonstrate the critical role that family stories and family storytelling play in child development and outcome. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in psychology, human development, and family studies.

In this volume, Qi Wang traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. Wang combines rigorous research, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes into a state-of-the-art book. As a "marginal woman" who grew up in the East and works and lives in the West, Wang's analysis is unique, insightful, and approachable. Her accounts of her own family stories, extraordinarily careful and thorough documentation of research findings, and compelling theoretical insights together convey an unequivocal message: The autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture. Beginning with a perceptive examination of the form, content, and function of parent-child conversations of personal and family stories, Wang undertakes to show how the autobiographical self is formed in and shaped by the process of family storytelling situated in specific cultural contexts. By contrasting the development of autobiographical writings in Western and Chinese literatures, Wang seeks to demonstrate the cultural stance of the autobiographical self in historical time. She examines the autobiographical self in personal time, thoughtfully analyzing the form, structure, and content of everyday memories to reveal the role of culture in modulating information processing and determining how the autobiographical self is remembered. Focusing on memories of early childhood, Wang seeks to answer the question of when the autobiographical self begins from a cross-cultural perspective. She sets out further to explore some of the most controversial issues in current psychological research of autobiographical memory, focusing particularly on issues of memory representations versus memory narratives and silence versus voice in the construction of the autobiographical self appropriate to one's cultural assumptions. She concludes with historical analyses of the influences of the larger social, political, and economic forces on the autobiographical self, and takes a forward look at the autobiographical self as a product of modern technology.

This title provides a wide-ranging overview of how international law intersects with the domestic legal system of the United States, and points out various unresolved issues and areas of controversy. The book covers all of the principal forms of international law: treaties, decisions and orders of international institutions, customary international law, and jus cogens norms. It also explores a number of issues that are implicated by the intersection of U.S. law and international law.

Divided into three parts, this volume discusses: the development of autobiographical memory and self-understanding; cross-cultural variation in narrative environments and self-construal; and the construction of gender and identity concepts in developmental and situational contexts.

Monisha Pasupathi and Kate C. McLean Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going? Narrative Identity in Adolescence How can we help youth move from childhood to adulthood in the most effective and positive way possible? This is a question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers engage with every day. In this book, we explore the potential power of the stories that youth construct as one route for such movement. Our emphasis is on how those stories serve to build a sense of identity for youth and how the kinds of stories youth tell are informed by their broader contexts – from parents and friends to nationalities and history. Identity development, and in part- ular narrative identity development, concerns the ways in which adolescents must integrate their past and present and articulate and anticipate their futures (Erikson, 1968). Viewed in this way, identity development is not only unique to adol- cence (and emergent adulthood), but also intimately linked to childhood and to adulthood. The title for this chapter, borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates story, highlights the precarious position of adolescence in relation to the construction of identity. In this story, the protagonist, poised between childhood and adulthood, navigates a series of encounters with relatively little awareness of either her childhood past or her potential adult futures. Her choices are risky and her future, at the end, looks dark.

Autobiographical memory is constituted from the integration of several memory skills, as well as the ability to narrate. This all helps in understanding our relation to self, family contexts, culture, brain development, and traumatic experiences. The present volume discusses contemporary approaches to childhood memories and examines cutting-edge research on the development of autobiographical memory. The chapters in this book written by a group of leading authors, each make a unique contribution by describing a specific developmental domain. In providing a multinational and multicultural perspective on autobiographical memory development—and by covering a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, this state-of-the-book is essential reading on the autobiographical memory system for memory researchers and graduate students. It is also of interest to scholars and students working more broadly in the fields of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, and to academics who are conducting interdisciplinary research on neuroscience, family relationships, narrative methods, culture, and oral history.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.