On the Persistence of Positive Events in Life Scripts AHU ERDOG ˘ AN, BENGI ˙ BARAN, BI ˙ LLUR AVLAR, A. C ¸ AG ˘ LAR TAS ¸ and ALI ˙ I ˙ . TEKCAN * Bog ˘azic ¸i University, I ˙ stanbul, Turkey SUMMARY The life script account of the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memories suggests that cultural expectations about the nature and timing of transitional events lead to the bump. The empirical evidence for life scripts is limited. We tested the generality of the life script by looking at the effects of culture, gender and cohorts. Turkish participants were asked (a) to list the seven most important events a newborn or an elderly would experience during his/her lifetime and (b) to estimate the prevalence, importance, age-at-event and emotional valence of each event. We obtained a clear life script containing more positive than negative events; there was also stronger agreement about the timing of positive than of negative events. The life script for this sample overlapped substantially with earlier data from Denmark. Events and their characteristics were not influenced by the gender of either the participants or the target person. Finally, many aspects of the life script, but not the bump, changed depending on for whom the script was constructed (newborn vs. elderly). Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice). When people above the age of 40 are asked to remember specific autobiographical experiences, they remember more memories from their youth (10–30 years of age) than would be expected by a retention function (e.g. Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). This ‘bump’ has been one of the most robust findings in memory literature having been obtained under different methods of memory elicitation, for different materials and different participant groups. The bump appeared when participants were asked to report autobiographical memories in response to cue words (e.g. Jansari & Parkin, 1996; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997), when they were asked to report their most important memories (Rubin & Schulkind, 1997) or when they reported events that they would put in a book of their life story (Fitzgerald, 1996). Moreover, the bump extends to semantic information; Rubin, Rahhal and Poon (1998) found that participants had more knowledge about events (such as Academy awards) that took place when they were between 10–30 years of age than those when they were younger or older. The bump has also been obtained with Alzheimer’s disease patients, who suffer from significant memory problems (Fromholt & Larsen, 1991). APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 22: 95–111 (2008) Published online 21 May 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1363 *Correspondence to: Ali I ˙ . Tekcan, PhD, Department of Psychology, Bog ˘azic ¸i University, Bebek 34342, I ˙ stanbul, Turkey. E-mail: ali.tekcan@boun.edu.tr Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.