The normative and the personal life: individual differences in life scripts and life story events among USA and Danish undergraduates.

Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course. American and Danish undergraduates produced life story events and life scripts by listing the seven most important events in their own lives and in the lives of hypothetical people living ordinary lives. They also rated their events on several scales and completed measures of depression, PTSD symptoms, and centrality of a negative event to their lives. The Danish life script replicated earlier work; the American life script showed minor differences from the Danish life script, apparently reflecting genuine differences in shared events as well as less homogeneity in the American sample. Both consisted of mostly positive events that came disproportionately from ages 15 to 30. Valence of life story events correlated with life script valence, depression, PTSD symptoms, and identity. In the Danish undergraduates, measures of life story deviation from the life script correlated with measures of depression and PTSD symptoms.

H.M.'s personal crossword puzzles: understanding memory and language.

The amnesic patient H.M. has been solving crossword puzzles nearly all his life. Here, we analysed the linguistic content of 277 of H.M.'s crossword-puzzle solutions. H.M. did not have any unusual difficulties with the orthographic and grammatical components inherent to the puzzles. He exhibited few spelling errors, responded with appropriate parts of speech, and provided answers that were, at times, more convincing to observers than those supplied by the answer keys. These results suggest that H.M.'s lexical word-retrieval skills remain fluid despite his profound anterograde amnesia. Once acquired, the maintenance of written language comprehension and production does not seem to require intact medial temporal lobe structures.

Internal languages of retrieval: the bilingual encoding of memories for the personal past.

In contrast to most research on bilingual memory that focuses on how words in either lexicon are mapped onto memory for objects and concepts, we focus on memory for events in the personal past. Using a word-cue technique in sessions devoted exclusively to one language, we found that older Hispanic immigrants who had come to the United States as adults internally retrieved autobiographical memories in Spanish for events in the country of origin and in English for events in the U.S. These participants were consistently capable of discerning whether a memory had come to them "in words" or not, reflecting the distinction between purely imagistic or conceptual memories and specifically linguistic memories. Via examination of other phenomenological features of these memories (sense of re-living, sensory detail, emotionality, and rehearsal), we conclude that the linguistic/nonlinguistic distinction is fundamental and independent of these other characteristics. Bilinguals encode and retrieve certain autobiographical memories in one or the other language according to the context of encoding, and these linguistic characteristics are stable properties of those memories over time.