Personal Memory Telling and Personality Development

Although personal memories have been appreciated by psychologists for nearly a century, their significance for personality development has tended to be relegated to internalized representations of early childhood experiences. Recent research, however, suggests that adolescence and early adulthood are the most memorable parts of the life span and perhaps the broadest period of memory telling. This article integrates recent work in cognitive and developmental psychology into a framework for studying how and why tellers proffer and make sense of momentous emotional events, and how families and friends collude in self-making. Promising areas for future research include individual differences in readiness for memory telling, gendered ecologies of memory telling, the developmental significance of parents' stories, and reconciling personal memories and personality traits. Personal memory telling is not just for fun and entertainment, but, more important, drives social and emotional development in concrete moments of social life.