The purpose of this study was to compare narrated memories of parents and
friends, recounted by both males and females. A total of 177 Italian
undergraduates were asked to recall and to write in detail one relevant memory
regarding their relationship with either parents or friends during adolescence.
Half of the participants wrote a narrative about parents and half about friends.
Narratives were examined using both a content and a lexical linguistic method of
analysis. The results showed that the language of memories was substantially
influenced by the identity of the social partners that were part of the
remembered events. In particular the ratio of negative emotion words to all
words and the use of ‘I’ personal pronouns were higher when participants
recounted memory narratives about parents rather than friends, and ‘We’ was used
more in narratives about friends. Gender differences were found as well. The
authors interpret the results as suggesting that the language of memory is
affected by the type of interpersonal relationship that exists between the
narrator and the other participants in the remembered events as well as by the
gender of the narrator. In other words, memory narratives both reflect and are
influenced by the relationships within which an individual is embedded.