The COVID generation: A commentary on how the pandemic altered adolescents' life course.

The pandemic lockdowns interrupted critical developmental experiences especially for adolescents and emerging adults engaged in the challenge of constructing identities. This commentary focuses on four review articles that document both negative and positive consequences of the pandemic on family, peer, school, and community interactions. I argue that worldwide experiences of these interruptions led to a shared generational experience of disconnection and isolation, that, paradoxically, creates a shared generational identity.

Emerging adults' journeys out of the shutdown: Longitudinal narrative patterns in a college career defined by COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has defined the college career for this generation of learners, threatening mental health, identity development, and college functioning. We began tracking the impacts of this pandemic for 633 first-year college students from four U.S.

Intergenerational Storytelling and Positive Psychosocial Development: Stories as Developmental Resources for Marginalized Groups.

Academic Abstract: We articulate an intergenerational model of positive psychosocial development that centers storytelling in an ecological framework and is motivated by an orientation toward social justice. We bring together diverse literature (e.g.

Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization.

Background: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context.

Purpose: Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding.

College, Interrupted: Profiles in First-Year College Students Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Across One Year.

First-year college students in the 2019-2020 academic year are at risk of having their mental health, identity work, and college careers derailed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess emerging and evolving impacts of the pandemic on mental health/well-being, identity development, and academic resilience, we collected data from a racially, ethnically, geographically, and economically diverse group of 629 students at four universities across the US within weeks of lockdown, and then followed up on these students' self-reported mental health, identity, and academic resilience three times over the following year. Our findings suggest that: 1) students' mental health, identity development, and academic resilience were largely negatively impacted compared to pre-pandemic samples; 2) these alterations persisted and, in some cases, worsened as the pandemic wore on; and 3) patterns of change were often worse for students indicating more baseline COVID-related stressors.

Early Impacts of College, Interrupted: Considering First-Year Students' Narratives About COVID and Reports of Adjustment During College Shutdowns.

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened lives and livelihoods, imperiled families and communities, and disrupted developmental milestones globally. Among the critical developmental disruptions experienced is the transition to college, which is common and foundational for personal and social exploration. During college shutdowns (spring 2020), we recruited 633 first-year U.

Accuracy and reconstruction in autobiographical memory: (Re)consolidating neuroscience and sociocultural developmental approaches.

Autobiographical memories are never isolated episodes; they are embedded in a network that is continually updated and prediction driven. We present autobiographical memory as a meaning-driven process that includes both veridical traces and reconstructive schemas. Our developmental approach delineates how autobiographical memory develops across childhood and throughout adulthood, and our sociocultural approach examines the ways in which autobiographical memories are shaped by everyday social interactions embedded within cultural worldviews.

Gender differences in emotional reminiscing in a Scandinavian sample.

Emotional reminiscing is a context where children learn culture-specific ways of understanding past emotional experiences through parentally scaffolded conversations, and learn how to connect these disparate experiences into their developing autobiographical memory. The goal of the present investigation was to explore possible gender differences in emotional reminiscing in an egalitarian cultural context (Denmark). Mothers and fathers from families (N = 88) reminisced about a happy and a sad past event with their 4.

Narrative identity informs psychological adjustment: Considering three themes captured across five time points and two event valences.

Objectives: How narrative identity and well-being are intertwined as emerging adults process their lived experiences remains a critical theoretical and empirical question. We studied narrative identity among US emerging adults in a multiphase study. We aimed to test (1) if and how narrative identity themes (i.

Narrative coherence predicts emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a two-year longitudinal study.

Prior research has shown that narrative coherence is associated with more positive emotional responses in the face of traumatic or stressful experiences. However, most of these studies only examined narrative coherence the stressor had already occurred. Given the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 in March 2020 in Belgium and the presence of data obtained two years before (February 2018), we could use our baseline narrative coherence data to predict emotional well-being and perceived social support in the midst of the pandemic.

Longitudinal changes in trauma narratives over the first year and associations with coping and mental health.

Background: The structure of trauma memories impacts mental health, but questions remain about how structure changes with time and may shape coping with trauma. This study considered the structure of trauma narratives collected during an emergency department (ED) visit and at one-year follow-up. We addressed change in narrative structure over time, the extent structure predicted twelve-month psychological symptoms, and possible mechanisms in coping responses.

A meta-analytic examination of maternal reminiscing style: Elaboration, gender, and children's cognitive development.

Sociocultural theories of development privilege the role of parent-child conversation as a critical interpersonal context for cognitive and socioemotional development. Research on maternal reminiscing suggests that mothers differ on the elaborative nature of their reminiscing style. Individual differences in maternal elaborative style are thought to contribute to children's cognitive development in at least 3 critical areas: (a) memory; (b) language; and (c) theory of mind (ToM).

The empirical structure of narrative identity: The initial Big Three.

A robust empirical literature suggests that individual differences in the thematic and structural aspects of life narratives are associated with and predictive of psychological well-being. However, 1 limitation of the current field is the multitude of ways of capturing these narrative features, with little attention to overarching dimensions or latent factors of narrative that are responsible for these associations with well-being. In the present study we uncovered a reliable structure that accommodates commonly studied features of life narratives in a large-scale, multi-university collaborative effort.

Functions of Parental Intergenerational Narratives Told by Young People.

Family stories help shape identity and provide a foundation for navigating life events during adolescence and early adulthood. However, little research examines the types of stories passed onto adolescents and emerging adults, the extent to which these stories are retained and accessible, and the potentially influential parental- and self-identity content constructed in telling these stories. Across three samples, we investigate the accessibility and functions of intergenerational narratives that adolescents and emerging adults know of their parents.

Narratives in the Immediate Aftermath of Traumatic Injury: Markers of Ongoing Depressive and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms.

In this study, we considered connections between the content of immediate trauma narratives and longitudinal trajectories of negative symptoms to address questions about the timing and predictive value of collected trauma narratives. Participants (N = 68) were individuals who were admitted to the emergency department of a metropolitan hospital and provided narrative recollections of the traumatic event that brought them into the hospital that day. They were then assessed at intervals over the next 12 months for depressive and posttraumatic symptom severity.

Examining the factor structure of narrative meaning-making for stressful events and relations with psychological distress.

This study examined the underlying factor structure of 15 narrative meaning-making indices for narratives of stressful events, and explored the incremental validity of the narrative factor solution over and above general personality traits in predicting various indices of psychological well-being. Two-hundred and twenty four undergraduates (M = 19.2 years, SD = 2.

Consistency and stability of narrative coherence: An examination of personal narrative as a domain of adult personality.

Objective: Narrative theories of personality assume that individual differences in coherence reflect consistent and stable differences in narrative style rather than situational and event-specific differences (e.g., McAdams & McLean, 2013).

The sociocultural functions of episodic memory.

The functional use of episodic memories to claim epistemic truth must be placed within sociocultural contexts in which certain truths are privileged. Episodic memories are shared, evaluated, and understood within sociocultural interactions, creating both individual and group identities. These negotiated identities provide the foundation from which epistemic claims to truth can be made.

Adolescents' intergenerational narratives across cultures.

Adolescents' intergenerational narratives-the stories they tell about their mothers' and fathers' early experiences-are an important component of their identities (Fivush & Merrill, 2016; Merrill & Fivush, 2016). This study explored adolescents' intergenerational narratives across cultures. Adolescents aged 12 to 21 from 3 cultural groups in New Zealand (Chinese: n = 88; Māori: n = 91; European: n = 91) narrated stories about their mothers' and fathers' childhood experiences.

The recollective qualities of adolescents' and adults' narratives about a long-ago tornado.

The recollective qualities of autobiographical memory are thought to develop over the course of the first two decades of life. We used a 9-year follow-up test of recall of a devastating tornado and of non-tornado-related events from before and after the storm, to compare the recollective qualities of adolescents' (n = 20, ages 11 years, 11 months to 20 years, 8 months) and adults' (n = 14) autobiographical memories. At the time of the tornado, half of the adolescents had been younger than age 6.

The influence of gender and gender typicality on autobiographical memory across event types and age groups.

Gender differences in autobiographical memory emerge in some data collection paradigms and not others. The present study included an extensive analysis of gender differences in autobiographical narratives. Data were collected from 196 participants, evenly split by gender and by age group (emerging adults, ages 18-29, and young adults, ages 30-40).

Emotion, gender, and gender typical identity in autobiographical memory.

Gender differences in the emotional intensity and content of autobiographical memory (AM) are inconsistent across studies, and may be influenced as much by gender identity as by categorical gender. To explore this question, data were collected from 196 participants (age 18-40), split evenly between men and women. Participants narrated four memories, a neutral event, high point event, low point event, and self-defining memory, completed ratings of emotional intensity for each event, and completed four measures of gender typical identity.

Connecting the self to traumatic and positive events: links to identity and well-being.

Self-event connections in autobiographical narratives help integrate specific episodes from memory into the life story, which has implications for identity and well-being. Previous research has distinguished differential relations between positive and negative self-event connections to psychological well-being but less research has examined identity. In this study, examining self-event connections in emerging adults' narratives, 225 participants narrated a traumatic and an intensely positive experience and completed questionnaires assessing identity development and well-being.

Relations Between Narrative Coherence, Identity, and Psychological Well-Being in Emerging Adulthood.

The hypothesis that the ability to construct a coherent account of personal experience is reflective, or predictive, of psychological adjustment cuts across numerous domains of psychological science. It has been argued that coherent accounts of identity are especially adaptive. We tested these hypotheses by examining relations between narrative coherence of personally significant autobiographical memories and three psychological well-being components (i.