ИСТИНА

The Cultural life script (CLS), i.e. semantic knowledge on timing and emotional valence of the most common life events, determines the way people plan, experience and recollect their lives. Unlike the traditional methodology of CLS research, consisting of verbal nomination of the most probable events, in this study we employed a method of visualization of the entire structure of human life. We provided participants with a sheet of paper with an arrow in the middle (timeline). They were instructed to draw the life of an average person, identifying the most important events, providing the age when each event happened, and expressing the emotion associated with each event by the distance from the timeline (top for positive ones or bottom for negative ones). The sample consisted of 268 young adult volunteers. The data were analyzed with respect to the content, emotional valence and intensity, and time distribution of the events. Taken together participants generated 3780 life script events, which were classified into 55 categories that satisfied the cut off of 4% mentions. Results showed that events such as “having a child”, “marriage”, “entering university”, “having a grandchild”, “beginning school”, “death of parents”, “retirement”, “falling in love”, and “first job” emerged in more than 50% of protocols. The second and the fourth decades of prototypical life course were reported to be the most eventful. Inconsistently, the highest level of emotional intensity was associated with the first and the third decades (positive) and the fifth and seventh decades (negative). The notable finding is the emotional equality of the fourth and the sixth decades. This result highlights the contemporary slogan “Fifty is the new thirty”. We proposed that the coping with negative emotional attitudes towards life periods 40-50 and 60+ would be helpful for enhancing psychological well-being.