Cultural Life Scripts, Personal Life Stories and Psychological Well-being of Nigerian Young Adults

The cultural life scripts are a shared semantic knowledge of the expected life course in a given culture, including the order, timing and importance of such events. In addition to this, the life script has been thought to guide the recall of autobiographical memory leading to a bump for memories from the second and third life decades (Berntsen & Rubin, 2002; 2004; Rubin & Berntsen 2003). The present study has four main goals; the first is to obtain the life scripts of Nigerians, a less Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) society in SubSaharan Africa. Second, is to determine if religion and gender will influence the cultural life scripts and life stories of Nigerian young adults. Third, the life scripts from this study will be compared with those from previous studies carried out on Turkish, Qatari, Danish and American participants. Finally, the study will determine if a culturally coherent life story (i.e. number of negative LST events, LST typicality scores, LST idiosyncrasy scores and number of scripted LST events) will predict mental well-being and depression scores of Nigerian young adults. To achieve this, 174 participants were divided into four groups consisting of Muslim males, Muslim females, Christian males and Christian females. They were administered the life script task, the life story task, the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory-II and the Revised Religious Orientation Scale. The findings mostly supported earlier claims regarding the life script, in that despite minor variations, the life script and life stories were quite stable across religion, gender and culture; in addition, the life script guided the recall of the life story. However, a bump was found for negative events in the life scripts and life stories; and mental well-being and depression scores were not always predicted by a culturally coherent life story.