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AbstractHumans construct coherence and meaning in their lives through reminiscing with and about others. The four articles in this Social Development Quartet focus on how reminiscing about emotionally and morally challenging personal experiences is a critical mechanism for integration and differentiation across development, both within the individual and within sociocultural interactions. Examining linguistic forms, emotional disclosure, expressions of perspective, and personal growth, these studies demonstrate that the ways in which we reminisce about our personal past with others matter for developmental outcome. Both the ways in which individuals differentiate between self and other, and between different types of events, and the ways in which individuals integrate perspectives across different types of events is related to emotional well‐being.

Abstract
In this research, mothers were asked to discuss four specific past events during which their 32- to 3 5-month-old children experienced happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Results suggest that mothers discuss the emotions of sadness and anger quite differently with daughters than with sons. Conversations about sadness were longer and emphasized the causes of sadness more with daughters than with sons, and mothers seemed concerned with comforting daughters about being sad. In contrast, conversations about anger were longer with sons than with daugh-ters, and mothers accepted anger and accepted retaliation as an appropriate response to anger with sons but not with daughters. Daughters are encouraged to resolve anger by reestablishing the damaged relationship. Further, all four emotions were placed in a more social interactional framework with daughters than with sons. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of what young children may be learning about emotional experience and self-concept, as well as how these early differences in emotional socialization may be related to gender differences in adults' emotional processing. (Psychology)

AbstractBoth gender and narrative are foundational to the ways in which humans engage in meaning-making. Arguing from evolutionary, psychological and feminist theoretical perspectives, we posit that narratives and gender are culturally mediated mutually constituted meaning-making systems: Narratives are defined through gender and gender is defined through narrative. To contextualise this argument, we define 'narrative' and 'gender' and review the extant literature on how gender is expressed in culturally mediated master narratives and how narratives are performed differently by women and men. Our core argument is that the very act of narrating is a gendered activity that constructs, represents and narrates gender as a primary category of human existence, and these fundamentally gendered ways of narrating then construct, define and reify gendered ways of being in the world.

AbstractThis study explores the functional variations in mother–child conversations of emotionally salient events in European‐American and Chinese families. Thirty Chinese and 31 European‐American 3‐year‐old children and their mothers participated. Mothers were asked to discuss with their children at home two specific one‐point‐in‐time events in which they both participated. One event was extremely positive to the child, one extremely stressful. American mothers initiated more interactive and elaborative conversations that focused on the child's roles and predilections in the story, and they employed a 'cognitive approach' to emotional regulation by providing explanations for the cause of children's feeling states. Chinese mothers took a directive role in posing and repeating memory questions and focusing on social interaction, and they used a 'behavioral approach' to emotional regulation by emphasizing discipline and proper conduct to their children. Findings are discussed in light of cultural influences on the functions of emotional reminiscing for self and relationship construction and emotional regulation.

We propose an interdisciplinary developmental model of narrative redemption. Although redemption is one of the most thoroughly studied constructs in the narrative identity literature, research to date has not sufficiently addressed the qualitative structures of redemption, which in turn has led to a lack of attention to the developmental functions that redemption serves in different periods of the life span. Based on a review of existing perspectives on redemption across a variety of disciplines, we propose 2 forms of redemption – return and emergent – that correspond to the dual functions of the life story – stability and change. These forms of redemption also interact with the thematic focus of the narrative, which constitutes the second component of our model. Namely, narratives may emphasize either situation themes or identity themes. We use this revised conceptualization of the structures of redemption to explore the developmental functions of redemption, both theoretically and through narrative examples. We conclude that redemption is an autobiographical tool that can be adapted for different psychosocial functions across the life span.

Families preserve and rewrite history in ways that pass on to the next generation a sense of family history based on what is known and what cannot be told. In this paper, we analyze New Zealand European adolescents' stories about their parents' childhood, exploring how these young people tell and do not tell family stories shrouded in secrecy. We identify three major ways in which families express secrets across the generations—through collusion, through confusion, and through whole-family secrets—and discuss the implications of each of these family practices for the preservation of family history.

Abstract
Individuals create both personal and culturally shared meaning through narratives; however, sparse research has
explored the specific ways in which individuals might use such cultural narratives in creating meaning from developmentally
important experiences. In this study, we examine how emerging adults narrate positive romantic relationships, both because
emerging adulthood is critical for the development of intimacy and because romantic relationship narratives are pervasive in
cultural media. Thematic analysis of 31 narratives from mostly European-descent students attending a private liberal arts
university in the Southeast US (mean age 19; 16 self-identified females) revealed three major narrative arcs, Love Grows,
Firecrackers and Fairytale, which varied in coherence, coda, and mutuality of the relationship, but
did not differ by gender. Further examination and discussion of these narratives suggest how emerging adults are making sense of
their first romantic relationships in ways that inform efforts to educate and intervene to promote healthy and positive
relationships.

Family narratives about the past are an important context for the socialization of emotion, but relations between expression of negative emotion and children's emerging competence are conflicting. In this study, 24 middle‐class two‐parent families narrated a shared negative experience together and we examined the process (initiations and collaborations) and function (the expression and explanation of emotions) of co‐constructed narratives in relation to preadolescents' perceived competencies and self‐esteem. Family narratives in which specific emotions were expressed and explained in a collaborative fashion, especially negative emotion, were positively related to preadolescents' reported competencies and self‐esteem, whereas family narratives that expressed general positive emotion were negatively related to preadolescents' perceived competencies. Implications of family narratives about emotional events, specifically the ways in which families discuss emotion, in relation to preadolescents' self‐development are discussed.