Is There a Cultural Life Script for Public Events? † STEVE M. J. JANSSEN* School of Psychology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA Australia Summary: The reminiscence bump is the higher prevalence of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood. The reminiscence bump has also been found in the memory for public events, which could, as recently has been suggested, be explained by cultural life scripts. Life scripts are culturally shared knowledge about the order and timing of life events in an idealized life course. They are examined by categorizing which events are expected to occur in a prototypical person’s life and when these events are supposed to occur. The present study found, however, no support for cultural life scripts as an explanation for the reminiscence bump in the memory for public events. Most public events were expected to occur before the reminiscence bump period. Although there was some agreement about which public events are likely to happen in a prototypical person’s life, there was little agreement about when these events are supposed to occur. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. When middle-aged or older adults are asked to recall autobio- graphical memories and subsequently to date these personal events, three components can be identified in the temporal distribution of the autobiographical memories. First, people hardly recall any events from the first 3 or 4 years of their lives, which is called childhood amnesia. Second, people tend to recall many events from recent years, which is called the increased recall of recent events or the recency effect. Third, people often recall more events from the period in which they were between 10 and 30 years old than from other lifetime periods, which is called the reminiscence bump (Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). The method used to gather personal events affects the shape of the temporal distribution of autobiographical memory (Rubin & Schulkind, 1997). If the temporal distribution of memories reported when participants retrieve events with the help of cue words is compared with the temporal distribution of memories reported when participants are asked for the most important events of their lives, then four differences can be observed. First, the distribution of word-cued memories contains a large increased recall of recent events, whereas this recency effect is absent from the distribution of highly important events. Second, when words are used to elicit the memories, the reminiscence bump is located in the second decade of participants’ lives (10–20 years), but it is located in the third decade (20–30 years) when participants are asked for the most important events. Third, the reminiscence bump in the distribution of word-cued memories is smaller than the reminiscence bump in the distribution of highly important events. Finally, there is no bias to report more positive memories in the reminiscence bump when memories are cued with words (e.g., Janssen & Murre, 2008; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997), but there is a positivity bias when partic- ipants report the most important events (e.g., Berntsen & Rubin, 2002; Rubin & Berntsen, 2003). The difference between the temporal distributions of word- cued memories and highly significant events can be explained by cultural life scripts (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010; Berntsen & Rubin, 2004; Rubin, Berntsen, & Hutson, 2009). Life scripts are culturally shared knowledge about the order and timing of life events in an idealized life course (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004). They combine the concept of story scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977) with cultural norms for the timing of salient life events (Neugarten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965). In a typical life script study, participants first imagine an ordinary infant with the same gender and cultural background as themselves and then name the seven most important events that will most likely happen in the rest of the life of this proto- typical child. Events that are often mentioned are as follows: begin primary school, first full-time job, marriage, and having children. Subsequently, participants indicate at which age the events are expected to occur and rate the importance, preva- lence, and valence of the events. Results generally show that participants mainly name positive events, most positive events are expected to occur between the ages of 15 and 30years, negative events are equally divided across the lifespan, and the standard deviations of the expected age at occurrence are smaller for positive than for negative events. Cultural life scripts do not represent an average life, but an idealized life course from which many common and some important life events are left out. In comparison with actual lives, life scripts contain more events expected to be positive and more events expected to occur in early adulthood. Life scripts can therefore be used to explain the shift in the location of the reminiscence bump from the second to third decade (when comparing word-cued and highly important memories) and why the reminiscence bump is stronger in the distribution of important positive events than in the distribution of important negative events (e.g., Berntsen & Rubin, 2004; Rubin et al., 2009). Cultural life scripts are not the result of instance-based learn- ing, but semantic knowledge. Although older people have lived through a larger part of their lives and thus have experienced more events from the life script, they still should generate the same life script as young adults. Small differences are tolerated by the life script theory but only if they are caused by cohort effects that reflect genuine changes in cultural views (cf. Habermas, 2007). Janssen and Rubin (2011) gave the life *Correspondence to: Steve Janssen, School of Psychology, Flinders Univer- sity, Social Sciences North Building, Room 382, Bedford Park, Adelaide, SA 5045, Australia. E-mail: steve.janssen@flinders.edu.au † Correction added 04 June 2014, after first online publication: An error was identified concerning the author’s interpretation of certain aspects of an unpublished paper and this is now corrected in this revised version. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 29: 61–68 (2015) Published online 25 March 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.3022