Institute for the Liberal Arts
Talk about the personal past is ubiquitous; we tell our daily adventures to friends and family over dinner, we share each other’s everyday lives over coffee and over the internet, and we reminisce about our life experiences, big and small, in snatches of conversations and long soliloquies. Importantly, almost all of the experiences we reminisce about have an emotional component. Whether they are the routine ups and downs of everyday life or the tumultuous emotions that can change our life course, we talk about what happened and how we felt about it. Estimates indicate that we talk about 90% of everyday emotional experiences within 48 hours of their occurrence (Rime, 2007). That we reminisce about our emotional experiences is clear. How we reminisce about emotional experience is equally important for our understanding of self and relationships.
Clearly, reminiscing is a social interaction; as we narrate our experiences with others, their questions, comments, evaluations and interpretations help shape our evolving narrative of what happened and what it meant (Pasupathi & Billitteri, 2015). Through the process of narrating our past, we begin to develop a concept of self, an identity based on our life story (McLean, Pasupathi & Pals, 2007), and this process begins very early in development in parent-guided reminiscing (Fivush, 2019). Because much of reminiscing focuses on emotional experiences, parent-guided reminiscing also helps children develop an emotional self-concept, an understanding of how experiences define self and relationships in emotional and evaluative ways over time, as illustrated in this brief conversation between a white middle-class American mother and her 4-year-old daughter, Rachel (this and all narrative examples use pseudonyms and are from Fivush, 2019, unless otherwise noted; “…” indicates some phrases deleted for brevity of presentation). Rachel’s mother was asked to talk with her daughter about a time that Rachel was sad:
Mother: Well, one thing that made you really sad is when your best friend Sheila moved away, right?
Rachel: (nods yes)
Mother: Yeah, and did we watch all her things go on the moving truck? Uh-huh, and do you remember why she had to move away?
Rachel: …Because Sheila’s Father had to work.
Mother: Sheila’s Father was going to start working at a new job…And do you still miss Sheila when you think about it?
Rachel: (nods yes)
Mother: Yes?
Rachel: Yes.
Mother: It makes you sad. Doesn’t it? But is she still your friend even far away? Yes! What can you do even though she’s far away?
Rachel: Give her a happy letter with a (drawing) on it.
Mother: Give her a happy letter, right, and we have a drawing, don’t we?
As we can see in this excerpt, the mother helps her daughter to construct the experience of a friend moving away as one that causes sadness, underscores the importance of maintaining relationships with others, and develops a plan of action to maintain the relationship over time. I am not arguing that the mother is accurately portraying what happened or how her child felt – I am not even sure if this is possible – but rather that in helping her young child to label, explain, and evaluate her emotional experiences, the mother is helping her child develop an emotional self-concept, an understanding of self and relationships in emotional terms. Further, as I will argue in this essay, this emotional self-concept is gendered (Fisher, Rodriguez-Mosquera, Van Vianen & Manstead, 2004; Fivush & Zaman, 2013). My arguments are based on decades of research with mostly white, Western, middle-class samples (see Fivush, 2019, for a review), and this, of course, limits generalizability. Obviously both gender and emotion are complex constructs that vary considerably by culture (Fivush & Grysman, 2020), and I return to this issue at the end of the essay.
Emotion, Reminiscing and Narrative
Emotion has a long and conflicted history in psychology, but some consensus has emerged in defining emotions as complex dynamic interactions among physiological, neural, cognitive, and sociocultural components (Adolphs & Anders, 2017; Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner & Gross, 2007; Sander, Granndjean & Scherer, 2018). Focus on the sociocultural context of emotional experience underscores that emotions must be conceptualized as interpersonal as well as intrapersonal (Campos, Walle, Dahl & Main, 2011). But it is not simply how emotions are experienced interpersonally in the moment; the way in which individuals co-narrate their emotional experiences helps shape particular ways of understanding these experiences and what they mean over time, as Rachel’s narrative demonstrates. Emotion understanding unfolds within interpersonal contexts in which past emotional experiences are expressed, debated, contested and negotiated. In many ways, we understand ourselves and our emotions best in retrospect, upon reflection and co-construction of narrative meaning. Moreover, individual emotional experiences coalesce into a broader narrative of self as an individual with a particular emotional signature, as someone who is quick to anger, or who is nice, or who nurtures others (Fivush, 2019)
Narratives are culturally canonical linguistic forms that provide structures for organization, interpretation and evaluation of human experience. Narrative forms break the flow of human experience into meaningful chunks, defining beginnings, middles and ends, that create a sense of discrete experiences linked together through time and thematic content (Ricouer, 1991). Narratives move beyond simple chronologies that recount actions, to include reactions, interpretations, motivations and evaluations that integrate events in the world with internal subjectivity, essentially creating a landscape of emotionally imbued experiences (Bruner, 1990). In constructing narratives about experiences, we simultaneously construct emotional meaning.
Importantly, narratives are constructed within socioculturally saturated interactions (Fivush, 2019). Narratives are canonical, well-structured stories that follow specific forms in specific cultures (McLean & Syed, 2015). For example, one of the most prevalent American canonical narratives is redemption, a story of struggle and overcoming challenges to achieve great things (McAdams, 2013). Redemption narratives are American cultural bedrock – the story of the pilgrims, of manifest destiny and rags to riches. It is not that this narrative structure is accurate or true to any one person’s experiences, but rather that this is the cultural narrative that provides the implicit and explicit background of how to make meaning of the world, within and against which personal narratives are constructed (Fivush, 2010; Goodman, 1978).
In terms of self-concept, canonical and personal narratives help define both self and relationships (Bluck, Alea, Habermas & Rubin, 2005; Waters, Bauer & Fivush, 2014). For example, the canonical redemption narrative defines a self as resilient, and defines relationships in terms of power. Different canonical narratives provide different aspects of understanding each of these dimensions. As an example, Thorne and McLean (2003) discuss “John Wayne” narratives versus “Florence Nightingale” narratives, each of which defines self and relationships in different ways, and, notably, in gendered ways. Cultural and personal narratives are dialectically related; individuals adopt and adapt culturally mediated canonical narratives in constructing their personal stories that inform their self-concept.
Gendered Socialization of Canonical Emotion Narratives
Children are socialized into culturally canonical narrative forms from birth. Infants are surrounded by stories, including family stories of parents and grandparents, the family into which this new life was born and will unfold. By the time children are able to say even one or two words, about 16-months of age, parents draw them into reminiscing about the past and co-constructing shared narratives (see Fivush, 2019, for a review). Although toddlers are only able to participate minimally in these early reminiscing conversations, the parent is providing the structure and content of the emerging narrative in ways that model appropriate understandings of personal experience. For example, here is 16-month-old Anna, a child of European descent growing up in New Zealand, being drawn into a conversation about visiting the petting zoo by her mother (from Reese, Yan, Jack & Chan, 2010):
Mother: how many lambs were there?
Anna: [coughs] do do do.
Mother: two of the little baby lambs. Gertie and George.
Anna: heee.
Mother: and they had little tails, didn’t they? What did their tails do?
Anna: wave. ah.
Mother: yeah they wiggled and wiggled. And what did Anna give to the lambs?
Anna: fayah.
Mother: baby lambs. what did you give to the lambs?
Anna: is a baa a ah.
Mother: baby lamb. did you give them a bottle?
Anna: ayes.
Mother: you did!
Anna may or may not recall any of this experience (although it seems likely from her responses that she does), but what is critical is how her mother interprets Anna’s minimal responses as indications of Anna presenting her self – as an independent agent who acted on the world (feeding the lambs) as well as implying an emotional interpretation of the event as cute, funny and enjoyable through adjectives and repetition (“little tails”; “baby lamb”; “wiggled and wiggled”). Ending with the emphatic “you did” further implies that Anna was an active agent in this event. Through re-formulating Anna’s minimal contributions into a brief but clear narrative of Anna as having a good time feeding the lambs, Anna’s mother is helping Anna learn how to narrate the self as an independent being who understands and evaluates her experiences.
By the end of the preschool years, children are full participants in parent-child reminiscing, although parents still play a large role in providing the overall narrative structure. Further, as we saw in Rachels’s narrative, many of these reminiscing conversations explicitly include emotion. Re-visiting Anna when she was about 4 years old, she reminisces with her mother about a recent haircut. After narrating the event, the mother turns the conversation specifically to an emotional evaluation:
Mother: …it was fun, wasn’t it? And because you were such a good girl, what happened at the end?
Anna: I got a lollipop.
Mother: mm, cos you were very good.
Anna: cos I was very shy as well.
Mother: she said that you sat very still. She was quite pleased with you.
Anna and her mother co-construct Anna as a good girl, perhaps a bit shy, but someone who pleases others. And her good behavior got Anna a reward, a lollipop. In five short exchanges, Anna and her mother construct and agree on a particular self-definition of Anna as “good” and perhaps shy. Although these are not emotions per se, being good and being shy imply a way of emotionally interacting in the world as quiet, perhaps withdrawn and a bit anxious, as being someone who is not angry, disruptive or aggressive. In accord with this, relationships are defined in terms of the importance of assuring pleasant interactions that are enabled by the self sitting still and being quiet. Again, the self-concept being constructed is one of a self who does not express disruptive emotions, but rather facilitates pleasant interactions. It is hard to ignore the gender-typing in this conversation (Prentice & Carranza, 2002). We see many of these themes echoed in the following exchange between a middle-class American mother and her 4-year-old daughter, Jennifer, when asked to talk about a time that Jennifer and her mother had a conflict. They discussed an event that occurred a few days ago in which Jennifer screamed at her mother, and the conversation ends with:
Mother: … You yell(ed) at me. And that’s wrong, right? You can’t do that. That’s not the right way. You need to talk-
Jennifer: Sorry Mommy.
Mother: Oh, it’s ok, baby, I told you that, that it was ok. You just need to learn…Hm? Alright. So are you gonna do- are you gonna, are you gonna scream at Mommy again?
Jennifer: Mm-mm.
Mother: No? You’re gonna talk in a, in a good way, right?
Jennifer: Mhm.
Mother: Very softly, and with a, with a nice tone of voice… huh?
Jennifer: (unintelligible)
Mother: You are always nice, sweetie, (kisses child). Love you. Alright.
We see here again the mother and daughter defining Jennifer as nice, that expressing anger is inappropriate and disrupts relationships, and how Jennifer should engage in relationships by talking in a “good” way and in a “nice tone of voice.” Note also that the conversation includes Jennifer’s apology and ends with the mother assuring a loving relationship thus resolving the disruption caused by the misbehavior, and bringing the dyad back to emotional harmony (indicated by multiple pet names such as “baby” and “sweetie” throughout as well). Intriguingly, whereas we see these themes reasonably frequently in mother-daughter preschool remining, we see them much less frequently in mother-son reminiscing (Fivush, Brotman, Buckner & Goodman, 2000; Fivush & Zaman, 2013).
Of course, it is possible that these gender differences reflect differences in the frequency or emotional tone of particular kinds of lived experiences, but they are reified in culturally constructed gendered ways of understanding lived experience (Chaplin, 2015; Fisher, et al., 2004; Grysman, Fivush, Merrill & Graci, 2016), such that girls (perhaps especially white Western middle-class girls) are socialized to create a self-concept that revolves around being “good”, “nice” and “sweet”, a concept of the importance of maintaining harmonious relationships over time (apologizing, writing letters with happy faces), and by engaging in particular kinds of behaviors that will insure emotional harmony, such as sitting still, talking softly (with a nice tone of voice), and thus pleasing others.
To be clear, this is a matter of emphasis between mother-daughter and mother-son reminiscing (and father-child reminiscing follows the same gendered pattern with daughters and sons; see Fivush & Zaman, 2013, for a full review). It is not that girls are socialized one way and boys another, but rather that certain themes are more heavily emphasized with daughters than with sons. Parents do talk about emotions with their sons, although the way in which they talk about emotions, especially sadness, seems to differ. Again, an example of a white middle-class American father asked to talk about a time his 4-year-old son, Jason, was sad:
Father: So sometimes you’re sad. What makes you sad?
Jason: Not going to the park.
Father: Not going to the park? Yeah, that’ll do it. What about sometimes in the morning? Nah, that’s not necessarily sad, that’s kinda grouchy.
Jason: Well, in the morning I want to not go to school.
Father: Yeah, that’s true…that’s true and that can lead to conflict. Um what are some things that make us sad though?
Jason: Well, like sending me to timeout.
Father: Yeah, I was gonna say that, when Mommy or Daddy sends you to time out. That makes you sad?
Jason: I was gonna say that.
Father: Yeah. Well, that’ll do it.
Jason and his father are clearly engaged, and provide an extended list of events that lead to Jason being sad. Jason’s father even makes distinctions between sad, grouchy and feelings of conflict. But each is simply mentioned; how emotions evolve over time, influence relationships, and especially how emotion should be expressed in the future to maintain harmonious relationships are not really discussed at all. There is no elaborated narrative linking emotion to understanding self and relationships.
Developing an emotional self-concept
Obviously, children are not socialized in the context of a single reminiscing conversation at one point in time. Rather, the argument is that these reminiscing conversations happen multiple times a day, every day, across childhood. Indeed, estimates from recordings of naturally occurring conversations indicate that references to past events emerge several times an hour (Bohanek et al., 2009; Rime, 2007). Longitudinal research on the ways in which parents reminisce about emotional experiences with their children show that these gendered patterns emerge early in the preschool years, are consistent across the preschool years, and are still seen in parent-teen reminiscing (see Fivush, 2019, for reviews). Over time, children participate to a greater extent in the co-construction of these narratives, thus children are internalizing these narrative forms and productively using them to help construct their own self-narratives, and these narratives coalesce into an emotional self-concept in at least two ways, defining self and defining relationships.
Defining Self. Both cognitive and personality researchers agree that much of our self-definition is linked to our personal memories (Conway, Singer & Tagini, 2004; McAdams, 2015). We define ourselves in terms of, and abstracting from, experiences mediated through the narratives we co-construct about them. We do not know whether the narratives accurately reflect lived experience, but in telling the story in particular ways, perhaps over multiple occasions, this becomes the memory (Dudai, 2004). By focusing on particular events to tell over and over, and particular ways of telling those events, certain experiences, and certain types of experiences, become self-defining. And if these experiences focus on certain kinds of emotional ways of being in the world then this becomes part of the self-definition – I am someone who does not express anger, who does not disrupt pleasant interaction but is always nice, sweet, quiet. These attributes are often attributed to daughters but rarely attributed to sons. In these reminiscing conversations children are learning how their emotional experiences define who they are and how who they are defines what kinds of emotional experiences they should be having, and this process is gendered.
Defining Relationships. Relationships are defined both in the narrative content and the process of telling (Waters et al., 2014). Looking at narrative content, for example, Rachel is learning that maintaining friendships is important, Anna is learning that pleasing others is important, and Jennifer is learning that apologizing for misdeeds is important. All of these are ways of internalizing frameworks, or culturally canonical narratives, for how to construct and nurture relationships with others. In addition, the very process of co-constructing a narrative provides templates for how to interact with others. In co-constructing a harmonious narrative with her mother that resolves the previous negative interactions, Jennifer and her mother are re-affirming their loving relationship. Similarly, Anna and her mother talk about having fun together, building a bond through enjoying activities. Notice that Jason and his father do not include these kinds of evaluations in their reminiscing, so it is unclear if and how they may be creating a narrative about their own ongoing emotional relationship. For girls, emotional reminiscing seems to reinforce the importance of maintaining harmonious relationships, but we do not see this theme emerging frequently in parent-son reminiscing.
Caveats and Conclusions
Research on white Western middle-class samples indicates that parent-child emotion reminiscing is gendered in ways that differentially define self and relationships. Of course, canonical narratives are culturally mediated, and gendered narratives and gendered reminiscing likely vary both within and across cultures. Emerging research indicates both similarities and differences along the lines discussed in this essay across Western and Eastern cultures, as well as within cultures along an autonomy-relatedness dimension (Schroder et al. 2013; Wang, 2016). Cultural and individual variations in the process and product of emotional reminiscing will be critical in fully understanding links between narrating experience and emotional self-concept. Still, what is clear across all cultures studied thus far is that we reminisce about our emotional experiences, and the culturally canonical ways in which narratives of these experiences are co- constructed across multiple social interactions matters for how we come to understand our emotional experiences for ourselves and with others.
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