Cultural life scripts are culturally shared expectations concerning the order and timing of major life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004). They are semantic knowledge about an entire life span and are acquired across childhood and adolescence.
Studies that have investigated such divergent psychological phenomena as Mental Time Travel into the past and future, life story development, the reminiscence bump, life story memories in older adults and future expectations in younger adults, as well as experimental and cross-cultural studies have all provided converging evidence that cultural life scripts should be considered the overarching principle that helps individuals organize subjective time.
During Annette Bohn’s one year at AIAS as a Jens Christian Skou Junior Fellow, she will be working on projects that further explore the hypothesis that cultural life scripts play an important role for the organization of autobiographical memory, but that they also guide expectations about the future. This will be done with varying research methods and various populations, such as adolescents, younger adults and older adults.
Annette Bohn was a Jens Christian Skou Fellow at AIAS. She received her PhD in Psychology in 2008 from Aarhus University. Since 2012, she has been an Associate Professor at the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research (Con AMORE), Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences at Aarhus University. Her research interests are life story development in children and adolescents, memory for emotional events, and cultural life scripts and their role for the organisation of autobiographical memories and future expectations.
Project title:
Cultural Life Scripts organize autobiographical memories and future expectations
Area of research:
Psychology
Fellowship period:
01 Aug 2013 – 31 Jul 2014
Fellowship type:
Jens Christian Skou Fellow
This fellowship has received funding from The Aarhus University Research Foundation.
