Deck 10: Life Scripts, Life Stories

Question 1

Each of the primary emotions in Tomkins's script theory system is linked to all of the following except

A) Characteristic facial expressions
B) Characteristic subjective experience feeling)
C) Particular adaptive significance
D) Particular cognitive representation

Answer 1

Particular cognitive representation

Question 2

To say that a narrative identity integrates a life is to say that it

A) Brings happiness and fulfillment to a person's life
B) Brings together different parts of a person's life
C) Offers important life lessons
D) Connects the individual to ultimate truths about life

Answer 2

Brings together different parts of a person's life

Question 3

According to Baumeister, identity first became a central concern in Western societies around the time of

A) The Renaissance
B) 1800
C) 1900
D) World War II

Answer 3

1800

Question 4

Which of the following is a primary function of stories?

A) Healing
B) Entertainment
C) Integration
D) All of the above

Question 5

Self-defining memories tend to express all of the following except

A) Vivid scenes
B) Unresolved psychological issues
C) Links to other important memories
D) Clear causal statements about identity

Question 6

According to Tomkins's script theory, the person "magnifies" negative affect scenes by

A) Emphasizing similarities among scenes
B) Emphasizing differences among scenes
C) Combining them with positive scenes
D) Exaggerating their importance in his or her own development

Question 7

All of the following are characteristic of a nuclear script except

A) Negative affect is greater than positive affect
B) Magnification occurs through analogs
C) An initial scene is likely to be clear and monistic
D) Affect socialization is intense and ambivalent

Question 8

According to Tomkins's script theory, the major motivational force in human lives is

A) Affect
B) Drives
C) Needs
D) Goals

Question 9

According to Clifford Geertz, the people of Bali an island in Indonesia. engage in social behavior that is remarkable for its

A) Absence of climax
B) Gentleness
C) Rational status conventions
D) Randomness

Question 10

Compared to North Americans, East Asian adults typically

A) Show an earlier age of first memory
B) Have longer and more detailed autobiographical memories
C) Construct more intuitive narrative identities
D) Fashion personal memories with less emphasis on the self

Question 11

In Geertz's account, the people of Bali construe identity in a very different way than do Westerners because of their

A) Hunting and gathering background
B) Insistence that each person is completely unique
C) Understanding of time as punctual
D) Sense that all people inhabit the universe from the beginning of time

Question 12

If identity is viewed as an evolving life story, then the two major content themes in the story are

A) Approach and withdrawal
B) Intrusiveness and inclusiveness
C) Self and other
D) Agency and communion

Question 13

In an interpersonal conversation, when listeners are distracted, life-story tellers tend to

A) Talk longer and give more elaborate narrative accounts
B) Recall fewer details of the telling at a later point in time
C) Express fewer emotion words in the telling
D) Develop long-term feelings of animosity for the listener

Question 14

According to Tomkins, a script is

A) A generic plot in a person's life story
B) A set of implicit rules concerning how to organize scenes
C) A meaningful collections of scenes
D) An infantile complex that organizes drives, needs, and affect

Question 15

Making narrative sense of negative events ideally involves two-step process, which is characterized as

A) Exploration, positive resolution
B) Regret, acceptance
C) Character development, plot development
D) Description, interpretation

Question 16

At what age does an autobiographical self emerge?

A) 6 months
B) 2 years
C) 7 years
D) Early adolescence

Question 17

In a commitment script,

A) An original good scene turns bad
B) An original bad scene turns good
C) An original good scene continues to recruit positive affect
D) An original bad scene continues to recruit negative affect

Question 18

Compared to the paradigmatic mode of thought, the narrative mode

A) Aims to say no more than is meant
B) Emphasizes illogical and nonsensical statements
C) Explains the cause-and-effect relations of the physical world
D) Organizes human intentions

Question 19

In Tomkins's script theory, a scene must contain

A) At least two characters
B) A script
C) At least one affect
D) A decision rule

Question 20

Narrative identity is

A) An internalized and evolving life story
B) An objective biography about the self
C) A collection of unrelated scenes about life
D) The basic principles that guide a life

Question 21

With respect to narrative identity, the years before adolescence function to

A) Provide material for the life story that is constructed later on
B) Shape the basic images, goals, and themes of the story
C) Offer plots and characters that are later rejected or ignored in the story
D) Establish the personality traits out of which the life story is constructed

Question 22

Research by Woike suggests that individuals high in intimacy motivation tend to use

A) An integrative information processing style to understand interpersonal scenes
B) An analytical information processing style to understand interpersonal scenes
C) An integrative information processing style to understand instrumental scenes
D) An analytical information processing style to understand instrumental scenes

Question 23

To say that a life story is a "psychosocial construction" is to say that

A) Life stories are change from day to day
B) Life stories are deep structures of the unconscious
C) Life stories are cultural narratives that are absorbed by the individual
D) Life stories are fashioned by individuals using cultural resources

Question 24

Adults who construct life stories containing a large number of redemption sequences in which bad events are transformed into good outcomes) tend to show all of the following characteristics except

A) High generativity
B) High ego development
C) High levels of self-esteem
D) High levels of life coherence

Question 25

Research on disclosing traumatic events in one's life shows that

A) The disclosure is emotionally painful but leads to long-term health benefits
B) People feel good immediately after the disclosure but no long-term benefits can be discerned
C) People who disclose trauma to a good friend tend to be unable to disclose to a stranger
D) Disclosure has benefits only when a person believes that benefits will occur

Question 26

According to Habermas and Bluck, a person cannot construct a life story without an appreciation for biographical coherence. Biographical coherence is

A) An understanding of cultural norms for the life course
B) The ability to put one's life into a temporal order
C) Insight into the reasons behind behavior
D) Self-acceptance in the face of adversity

Question 27

Research on "the redemptive self" suggests that highly generative adults tend to fashion life stories that contain all of the following themes except

A) Sense of early personal advantage
B) Awareness of suffering of others at early age
C) Transforming bad events into good outcomes
D) Successful resolution of interpersonal conflicts

Question 28

If traits provide an initial sketch and characteristic adaptations fill in some of the details of human individuality, life stories function to

A) Tell what a life means in the overall
B) Explain how traits are integrated with motives
C) Organize personality into a coherent whole
D) Express the ways in which traits and motives conflict with each other

Question 29

In a dynastic strategy of life-story construction,

A) A good past leads to a good present
B) A good past leads to a bad present
C) A bad past leads to a good present
D) A bad past leads to a bad present

Question 30

In a contamination sequence,

A) An emotionally positive scene turns out bad
B) An emotionally negative scene turns out bad
C) The story's main character suffers a trauma
D) The story's main character recovers from a trauma

Question 31

At what point in the life cycle is the person first likely to adopt an historical perspective on the self?

A) Infancy
B) Childhood
C) Adolescence
D) Midlife

Question 32

The especially mature life story should have all of the following features except

A) Coherence
B) Openness
C) Reconciliation
D) Breadth

Question 33

Former psychotherapy patients who currently show the best psychological functioning tend to reconstruct their therapy experiences as a narrative in which

A) The therapist played a heroic helping role
B) They battled against a strong problem enemy) and emerged victorious
C) They improved because of a natural maturational process
D) They deny they ever had a problem in the first place

Question 34

Long-term health benefits of putting traumatic events into words are enhanced when

A) The person expresses highly positive emotions as well as negative ones
B) The account is told as a well-formed story
C) The account suggests that the self was partly to blame for the trauma
D) The person situates the trauma in the context of his or her whole life situation

Question 35

The ability to connect multiple events in one's life in order to explain how a person has come to a particular life outcome is an example of what Habermas and Bluck call

A) Temporal coherence
B) Biographical coherence
C) Causal coherence
D) Thematic coherence

Question 36

People at higher stages of ego development tend to construct narrative identities that are especially

A) Conflicted
B) Complex
C) Moralistic
D) Coherent

Question 37

An early scene in life that is characterized by confusing emotions and the movement from a good beginning to a bad outcome is an example of a

A) Commitment scene
B) Self-defining memory
C) Personal fable
D) Nuclear scene

Question 38

Research on self-defining memories suggests that adolescents and young adults

A) Tend to share accounts of especially personal memories with others shortly after the events occur
B) Rarely share accounts of personal memories with parents
C) Tend to share accounts of especially personal memories only after they have established close relationships with the people to whom the accounts are told
D) Repress many traumatic events

Question 39

Jefferson Singer's research has shown that the self-defining memories displayed by men addicted to drugs and alcohol

A) Tend to be filled with themes of violence and destruction
B) Tend to have very little agency and communion content
C) Tend to be structured as very simple narratives
D) Tend to emphasize themes of control to compensate for lack of control in life

Question 40

All of the following are true about Elkind's concept of "personal fable" except

A) It is likely to occur in adolescence
B) It is a first draft of an identity narrative
C) It suggests conflicts with parents and others in authority
D) It is rather unrealistic and fantastical