Late Adolescents' Self-Defining Memories About Relationships - McLean & Thorne (2003)
The Emergence of Meaning-Making in Adolescence
(...) meaning refers to what one gleans from, learns, or understands from the event. Meaning-making requires stepping back from an event to reflect on its implications for future behavior, goals, values, and self-understanding (Pillemer, 1992).
The process of inferring larger meanings from past events requires a capacity for abstract thinking that emerges in adolescence (Erikson, 1963, 1968; Piaget, 1965). Erikson, in particular, targeted the period of late adolescence as the beginning of efforts to unify past, present, and future selves in order to construct a coherent life story (see also McAdams, 1988). To date, however, only a few studies have systematically examined the kinds of meanings that adolescents make of autobiographical memories, which are a basic unit of the life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1988).
Past research on the meanings that adolescents make of autobiographical memories has primarily conceptualized meaning-making as learning lesson (McCabe, Capron, & Peterson, 1991; Pratt, Norris, Arnold, & Filyer, 1999). McCabe et al. (1991) studied lesson learning by asking college students to recall three of their earliest childhood and earliest adolescent memories in an interview setting. Lesson learning was found to be more prevalent in early adolescent memories than in early childhood memories. Lessons included learning that spray painting one's name does not lead to positive outcomes, that people will get hurt when racing cars, and that it is important to learn whom to trust. Using questionnaires and interviews, Pratt et al. (1999) compared meaning-making in cross-sectional samples of young, middle-aged, and older adults. Building on McCabe et al.'s (1991) findings, Pratt and colleagues found that self-reported lessons learned in middle and late adulthood seemed to be more deeply reflective and more indicative of the kinds of insights found in well-formed life stories (McAdams, 1988).
Although prior research on meaning in memories has focused on lesson learning, there appeared to be a qualitative difference in the depth of reflection displayed by younger and older participants. We thus distinguished two kinds of meaning-making, lesson learning and gaining insight, which were differentiated by depth of reflection. Lesson learning refers to learning a specific lesson from an event that could direct future behavior in similar situations. Gaining insight refers to gleaning meaning from an event that applies to greater areas of life than a specific behavior; with insight, there is often some kind of transformation in one's understanding of oneself or one's relationships with others in general. Take, for example, an event in which a son throws eggs at his mother again, he claims to have learned a lesson. On the other hand, if the son comments that he realized that he has an anger management problem, his realization counts as gaining insight because it extends beyond eggs and beyond his mother. Theoretical claims that the life story begins in adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1988) suggest the possibility that adolescents' lessons can extend to such deeper insights. However, because concern with constructing a coherent life story appears to begin in earnest only around age 30 (McAdams, 1993), we expected that lesson learning would be more prevalent than gaining insight in out sample of late adolescents.
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