Search

Intergenerational storytelling between grandparents and their grandchildren is a developmentally meaningful and mutually enjoyable shared activity. Until now, we know little about grandparents’ motivations for telling stories to younger generations. Do grandparents tell stories to entertain, to teach life lessons, or to simply pass the time? To cast light on this issue, we systematically investigated grandparents’ reasons, and grandchildren’s perceptions of their grandparents’ reasons, for intergenerational storytelling. We asked samples of grandchildren and grandparents in Canada and Austria to complete the newly developed 61-item Intergenerational Storytelling Functions Questionnaire (ISFQ) that measures 12 potential reasons for storytelling. A preliminary factor analysis of the ISFQ, presented here for the first time, suggests that the 12 hypothesized reasons reduce to five factors. Listed in the order of their reported frequency, the factors have been labelled: positive reminiscence function, intimacy/entertainment function, wisdom/teaching function, familial/cultural heritage function, and passing-time function. To supplement these analyses, before completing the ISFQ, grandchildren and grandparents were asked to provide up to four open-ended reasons for intergenerational storytelling. A qualitative analysis of their responses indicates that we failed to capture one additional functional with the ISFQ. We have called this the negative reminiscence or ‘processing the past’ function, in which grandparents tell stories of negative life experiences (a common example being war stories) many years later in order to make sense of the experience in the present. We hope these preliminary results spark interest in studying the underlying motivations for intergenerational storytelling, for which we provide a new measurement tool.

Why do some people become exemplars of wisdom in the course of their lives, while most of us do not? The development of wisdom entails a complex interaction of personality, life experiences, and self-regulation that has hardly been empirically investigated. In this symposium, leading wisdom researchers present new findings highlighting important factors in the life-span development of wisdom. Ardelt, Pridgen, and Nutter-Pridgen analyzed relations between wisdom and age in an online study with more than 14,000 participants. All three wisdom dimensions had curvilinear relationships with age, but the compassionate dimension differed markedly from the reflective and cognitive dimensions. Weststrate and Fournier analyzed data from the Patterns of Child Rearing study, relating interview data from mothers of five-year-olds to the wisdom levels of their children 26 years later. Maternal behaviors in early childhood turned out to predict children’s wisdom as young adults. Staudinger, Law, and Wink measured wisdom-related knowledge in the last wave of the Berkeley and Oakland Growth Study. They found that personality characteristics in young adulthood influence trajectories of personality maturation and, in turn, wisdom in old age. Glück, Auer-Spath, Beichler, Holzer, and Spannring present first results from an ongoing longitudinal study relating wisdom development to life challenges. First results show that wisdom resources influence life challenges, which, in turn, can influence resource development. Theories of wisdom development have long been speculative due to a lack of empirical evidence. This symposium presents new findings that begin to shed light on the complex dynamics underlying wisdom development.

The MORE Life Experience Model (Glück & Bluck, 2013) proposes that wisdom develops through an interaction of psychological resources - a sense of Manageability, Openness, Reflectivity, and Emotional Sensitivity and Regulation - with life challenges: Individuals higher in the MORE resources are more likely to grow wiser as they experience and reflect upon life challenges. The MORE Wisdom Study investigates this dynamic longitudinally. After an extensive initial examination of wisdom, resources, and life experience, life challenges, wisdom resources, and wisdom are assessed annually. Here, we present findings from the second assessment wave (N = 101). Number of life challenges in year 2 significantly predicted Brief Wisdom Screening Scale scores beyond wisdom levels in the initial examination. Wisdom was also related to specific characteristics of the life challenges. The results support the interactive relationship between wisdom and life challenges postulated in the MORE Life Experience model.

Professional wisdom, the way people balance their own interests with those of their organization and the individuals they work with, has not often been investigated yet. We believe that organizational and situational constraints can limit individuals’ ability to act wisely. For a first test of this hypothesis, we investigated autobiographical memories of teachers and managers, two groups that are often viewed as in need of wisdom but differ markedly in control over their work, concerning professional situations in which they did and did not act wisely. A sample of 24 teachers and 15 high-ranking managers were interviewed about such situations, and responses were content-coded for wise and unwise behaviors and situational constraints. Results showed that unwise behaviors often involved ignoring divergent perspectives, overconfidence, and lack of empathy, and that situational factors predicting these differences including role pressures, limited time, and competition.