What is the author's most likely reason for writing this passage?
Read the passage from "What Your Most Vivid
Memories Say about You," which is an informational
text that explores what makes up a person's identity.
In an intriguing study, Connecticut College
psychologist Jefferson Singer and his colleagues
(2007) compared older adults with college students
self-defining memories. They found that older adults
tended to come up with more general memories that
linked several events together and that, in general,
older adults tended to feel more positively about their
self-defining memories, even if the memories were of
events that were negative in nature. These findings fit
with other lines of research suggesting that older
adults have found ways to make sense out of their life
stories. They convert memories of troubling events into
stories of redemption in which they make peace with
their past struggles. For younger adults, events of a
negative nature had more rough edges, causing them
O to provide evidence that connects age with self-
defining memories
to suggest that negative self-defining memories are
not important
to encourage young people to think more positively
about memories
to summarize the impact of negative memories on
older people