The cultural life script as cognitive schema: how the life script shapes memory for fictional life stories

Emergency department Nurses' narratives of burnout: Changing roles and boundaries

PURPOSE

Emergency department nurses work in rapidly changing environments, which can contribute to occupational stress. Emergency department nurses utilise diverse strategies to mediate the impact of stress on their daily lives. There is a paucity of qualitative research which explores emergency department nurses' experiences and perspectives of burnout. This study aimed to explore emergency department nurses' experiences of burnout. Further, the study considered how emergency nurses conceptualised burnout and the strategies they used to manage the professional and personal effects of burnout.

PROCEDURES

The COREQ research guidelines were used throughout the study from the design stage through to dissemination. Narrative inquiry was used as the underpinning theoretical framework. The researcher met individually with eight emergency department nurses from NSW hospitals to undertake a face-to-face semi-structured interview. An inductive approach was used to establish major themes within the narrative.

FINDINGS

Two major themes were established: experiencing conflicting emotions and trying to establish a personal sense of control. Emergency nurses felt passionate about their professional roles, yet encountered difficulties due to management structures, time constraints and a sense of underappreciation. The misalignment between their expectations and the reality of emergency department nursing, resulted in experiences of burnout such as dissatisfaction and frustrations at work. Consequently, these nurses adopted diverse strategies within both their professional and personal domains.

PRINCIPAL CONCLUSIONS

The conclusions of this study are transferable to a variety of acute health services. Health service management have a role to promote a positive workplace culture for nurses, which advocates for home life balance. This will support nurses to construct clear boundaries between professional identity and their personal lives.

The reminiscence bump and the self: evidence from five studies on positive and negative memories

A plethora of studies have shown that people persistently remember public and personal events experienced during adolescence and early adulthood, particularly with a positive valence. In five studies, we investigate the reminiscence bump (RB) for positive and negative memories of public events (Studies 1 and 2), private events (Study 3), music-related events (Study 4), and cross-cultural memory differences (i.e., China and US) (Study 5). Participants retrieved either one positive or one negative memory, indicated their Age of Encoding, and provided secondary measures, i.e., memory vividness and rehearsal (Studies 1 and 3) and emotional intensity (Studies 2 and 4). About 10,000 memories were collected and positive memories appeared generally older than negative recollections, but the RB emerged for both positive and negative memories. Furthermore, the peak was earlier for positive memories of public events (<15 years old) than for negative memories (20-40 years), while no differences were found for private events or music-related experiences (15-25 years). Chinese had their RB later than US respondents. Finally, autobiographical recollections have moderate to low associations with secondary measures of phenomenological features of memory. These findings are consistent with the identity-formation theory, providing additional and important information on the development of the Self.

Deficient semantic knowledge of the life course-Examining the cultural life script in Alzheimer's disease

Cultural life scripts are culturally transmitted semantic knowledge of the expected order and timing of major transitional events in a prototypical life course. This cognitive schema has been shown to serve as an important mnemonic template that guides retrieval from autobiographical memory, especially for positive and important life events. Autobiographical memory deficits are one of the earliest and most prominent symptoms in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, no studies have examined cultural life scripts in patients with AD, despite semantic memory impairments being reported even in the early stages of the disease. The aim of the present work was to assess life-script knowledge in older adults diagnosed with AD, particularly in terms of knowledge for the content of life-script events and the timing and temporal order of these events. Twenty-one older adults diagnosed with AD and 22 healthy age-matched controls completed the standard life-script task (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004, Memory & Cognition, 32[3], 427-442). We found that while AD patients produced significantly fewer life-script events, the content of the generated events were quite consistent with those of the controls and the cultural norms. AD patients were particular impaired with regard to the normative timing and order of life-script events, suggesting that these components of the cultural life script are more vulnerable to cognitive decline. The findings are discussed in relation to impaired script knowledge and semantic memory deficits in AD.

The good old days and the bad old days: evidence for a valence-based dissociation between personal and public memory

How does memory for the public past differ from memory for the personal past? Across five experiments (N = 457), we found that memories of the personal past were characterised by a positivity bias, whereas memories of the public past were characterised by a negativity bias. This valence-based dissociation emerged regardless of how far back participants recounted the personal and public past, whether or not participants were asked to think about significant events, how much time participants were given to retrieve relevant personal and public memories, and also generalised across various demographic categories, including gender, age, and political affiliation. Along with recent work demonstrating a similar dissociation in the context of future thinking, our findings suggest that personal and public event cognition fundamentally differ in terms of access to emotionally salient events. Direct comparisons between personal and public event memory should represent a fruitful avenue for research on event cognition.

Czech and Slovak life scripts: the rare case of two countries that used to be one

In this study, we examined cultural life scripts in two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The cultural life script is semantic knowledge about culturally shared expectations regarding the order and timing of important life events during an idealised life course. For many decades, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one country: Czechoslovakia. After a regime change in 1989 and the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, their two cultures have been evolving and changing independently from one another, making these countries interesting for examining life scripts. We found that the cultural life scripts provided by Slovak and Czech participants shared 25 event categories, representing 89.3% of event categories in the Czech sample and 80.6% of event categories in the Slovak sample (including the category Other). However, participants also reported unique event categories to each culture (10.7% of unique event categories in the Czech sample and 19.4% in the Slovak sample), reflecting the specific cultural characteristics of these two separate countries. Reported events were listed in the same order they are expected to happen during the life span, were mostly positive, and showed a lifespan distribution consistent with the reminiscence bump. Participants showed higher agreement in the age estimates of positive events, compared to neutral and negative ones. Events were mostly social, in contrast to biological events. All these findings are consistent with the life script literature.

Representing the collective past: public event memories and future simulations in Turkey

Common processes involved in remembering and predicting personal and public events have led researchers to study public events as a part of autobiographical memory. In the present study, we asked for past events and future predictions and examined the temporal distribution and factors that made these salient in event representations. A sample of 1577 individuals reported six most important public events since their birth and six future events that they expected. Past events mostly came from the recent past and were negative in valence. Similarly, future predictions consisted of negative events that are expected to occur in the near past. We did not find a reminiscence bump but there was a strong recency effect. Despite being inconsistent with some literature, this supports the view that remembering the past is largely influenced by the current goals and experiences. Also, in predicting what is remembered from the past and what is expected in the future, what individuals believed others would report appeared as a robust predictor.

Effects of scripted activities on false feelings of having previously visited a location

False memories of one's past are often created by unconscious influences of previous experiences. This study examined whether action sequences, scripts that are frequent in everyday life, might induce false beliefs of having visited a location. Participants were shown photos of places they had not previously visited. Next, they rated how strongly they felt that they had visited the locations in the target scenes. Results indicated that when typical actions were presented in canonical order before the target scene, the feeling of having previously visited the location increased, relative to a condition with a random ordering of typical actions or to one with no presented actions. This study suggests that activation of script knowledge and misattribution of the source of feelings of familiarity elicit false beliefs of having visited a specific location, even if one understands that one has never previously visited the location.

Life Gets Better and Better: Cultural Life Script Theory and Subjective Trajectories for Life Satisfaction

Young adults typically believe that life gets increasingly satisfying over time. We examined the cultural life script as a source of these beliefs. In Study 1 (N = 1244), tabulation of previously published studies indicated that life script events are perceived as becoming increasingly positive over time between the ages of 10 and 30. Further, a specific series of 16 key life script events during this life stage was identified. These results were replicated in Study 2 (N = 100, Mage = 21.14, 51% female) based on young adults‘ perceptions concerning life script events in their personal life stories. Further, the perception that life script events in one's personal life story were becoming increasingly positive over time was linked with more steeply inclining subjective life satisfaction trajectories (i.e. recollected past < current < anticipated future life satisfaction). In Study 3 (N = 261, Mage = 18.5, 93.7% female), manipulating life script event information (number and positivity of events over time) within a personal life story had an additive impact on young adults‘ subjective life satisfaction trajectories. These findings reveal a robust connection between information contained with the cultural life script and the belief that life gets more and more satisfying over time. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology

Gender and Ethnicity in Dating, Hanging Out, and Hooking Up: Sexual Scripts Among Hispanic and White Young Adults

We examined the scripts associated with heterosexual Hispanic and White young adults' most recent initial sexual or romantic encounter using two samples of heterosexual undergraduates: 224 Hispanic students (49% female) and 316 White students (51% female). Scripts were identified for three types of encounters: dating, hanging out, and hooking up. The three scripts had more than half of their actions in common. Items such as get to know one another, feel aroused, and engage in physical contact were present across all scripts for all participant groups. As expected, traditional gender roles were present within all scripts, but more so for dates than for hangouts and hookups. Men reported a higher presence of traditional gender roles than women across scripts and put a higher priority on the goal of physical intimacy across all scripts. Dating was the most prevalent script for all young adults, contradicting contemporary claims that "dating is dead." In terms of ethnicity, a higher proportion of Hispanic than White young adults went on dates, and a higher proportion of White students went on hookups, implying that social and contextual variables are important in understanding young adults' intimate relationships.

The reminiscence bump without memories: The distribution of imagined word-cued and important autobiographical memories in a hypothetical 70-year-old

The reminiscence bump is the disproportionate number of autobiographical memories dating from adolescence and early adulthood. It has often been ascribed to a consolidation of the mature self in the period covered by the bump. Here we stripped away factors relating to the characteristics of autobiographical memories per se, most notably factors that aid in their encoding or retention, by asking students to generate imagined word-cued and imagined 'most important' autobiographical memories of a hypothetical, prototypical 70-year-old of their own culture and gender. We compared the distribution of these fictional memories with the distributions of actual word-cued and most important autobiographical memories in a sample of 61-70-year-olds. We found a striking similarity between the temporal distributions of the imagined memories and the actual memories. These results suggest that the reminiscence bump is largely driven by constructive, schematic factors at retrieval, thereby challenging most existing theoretical accounts.

Recent Advances in Understanding the Reminiscence Bump: The Importance of Cues in Guiding Recall from Autobiographical Memory

The reminiscence bump is the increased proportion of autobiographical memories from youth and early adulthood observed in adults over 40. It is one of the most robust findings in autobiographical memory research. Although described as a single period of increased memories, a recent meta-analysis which reported the beginning and ending ages of the bump from individual studies found that different classes of cues produce distinct bumps that vary in size and temporal location. The bump obtained in response to cue words is both smaller and located earlier in the lifespan than the bump obtained when important memories are requested. The bump obtained in response to odor cues is even earlier. This variation in the size and location of the reminiscence bump argues for theories based primarily on retrieval rather than encoding and retention, which most current theories stress. Furthermore, it points to the need to develop theories of autobiographical memory that account for this flexibility in the memories retrieved.