Study Of Influence Of Age, Psychological Distance And Construal Level On Autographical Reasoning

Narrative, the concrete process of personality construction, is the integration and explanation of human's life story. People construct and integrate life story in narrative, which provides the stability and continuity of self and subserves the development of self-identity. Autobiographical reasoning (AR) is a critical cognitive processing in forming life story in narrative, through which individuals establish the connections not only between stories, but also between self and stories, shaping the consistency of life story and eventually self identity.The level of abstraction is a vital index in AR, and factors that affect the level have long been the focus and debate in this field. Previous findings suggested age is one of the factors, however, the distinction between abstraction level of AR in early and late adulthood still remains controversial. Besides, age might influence abstraction level of AR via temporal distance, but it has not been demonstrated whether age and temporal distance take effect separately, or mutually. Also, whether psychological distance as the superordinate concept of temporal distance has an effect on abstraction level of AR. Furthermore, there is a close relationship between psychological distance and construal level, and it is worth the study of whether construal level will have an influence on the abstraction level of AR to a broader extend.The current study adopted the narrative paradigm of McLean(2010) to explore the relationship and effect of age, psychological distance and construal level in the development of abstraction level of AR by semi-structured interview and measurement of two groups of participants, the younger and the elder. (1)The results show the order of quantity of connections from least to most in the participants is event-event connections, thematic coherence connections and self-event connections. Participants tended to build stable connections in narrative, the order from most to least is explanatory, descriptive and dismissal connection. Most cases in change connections are causal. (2)The distinction of abstraction of AR between the two groups is not significant. There is significance in self-event connection as the elder group showed more stable and fewer change connections, compared to the younger. (3)Psychological distance has an effect on AR. Higher abstraction of AR is due to farther psychological distance. With the increase in psychological distance, participants build more self-event and event-event connections and more abstraction of AR. (4) Construal level also has an effect on AR, in a way that the more abstract construal level results in more self-event and event-event connections.