Emotions Conference 2016 (8 of 20) | Robyn Fivush | Gender and Emotion in Autobiographical Reminiscing
In this presentation, I describe a feminist sociocultural model of autobiographical memory that provides a framework for understanding how gender and emotion are mutually constructed within everyday reminiscing about the personal past. Autobiographical narratives both reflect and create representations of what happened and what it means for the individual in terms of understanding self, others, and relationships. In particular, emotional expression within autobiographical narratives carries information about what Bruner has called the “internal landscape of consciousness,” focusing on subjective evaluative meaning. It is therefore especially interesting that females express more emotion in their autobiographical reminiscing than do males and do so across a wide developmental age span and a variety of contexts. Here, I focus on studies of family reminiscing that demonstrate how parents and children discuss emotions within narratives about their shared past and within intergenerational narratives about the parents’ past in ways that re-create gendered identities across the generations. (February 11, 2016)