Chapter 1: What is the significance of family stories in shaping identity?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother told me a family story. It had to do with her brother, my uncle. He was an extremely creative man with varied interests in books and music and art. He could also be a little, how shall I put this, disorganized.
My uncle was the kind of person who was always ready to reminisce, and he was an amazing storyteller. He could spin the tiniest events into funny stories that had you laughing until you cried. Anyway, the story my mother told me had to do with my uncle's wedding day.
On his way to the wedding venue, my uncle suddenly remembered he had forgotten to invite a dear friend and fellow storyteller, his barber. so he took a detour and went to the barber shop to make sure his friend came to the wedding. When he got to the shop, the barber was busy with his customers and asked my uncle to wait while he finished.
My uncle happily settled down, and he and the barber traded funny stories as the scissors went snip-snip.
Chapter 2: How can storytelling enhance psychological well-being?
All this time, of course, the guests at the wedding and the prospective bride were getting increasingly alarmed. Had something happened to the groom? Had he gotten cold feet? Was the marriage called off? When my uncle finally showed up, his barber triumphantly in tow, he had no idea why everyone was upset. I've always loved that story because it perfectly captured my uncle's attitude toward life.
Live in the moment, be present. Deadlines and appointments can wait. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the world of family stories, how these stories shape who we become, and the fascinating science that demonstrates why telling certain kinds of stories can make us happier, healthier, and better people.
Cultures around the world have occasions that are designed for people to gather, chat, and reminisce. This can happen on birthdays, on anniversaries, and at funerals. Family members remind each other about the ties that bind them together. Disputes break out over half-remembered events from decades ago.
At Emory University, psychologist Robin Fyvush studies the psychological effects these stories can have on our lives. Robin Fyvush, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.
Robin, when you were very young, your family was struck by two terrible tragedies, more or less simultaneously. It changed the course of your life. Can you tell me what happened?
Well, my father died when I was quite young, and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died.
Oh, my God.
And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine. She was in a body cast.
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Chapter 3: What role do family narratives play in emotional regulation?
But she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and Not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.
Hmm. If I could ask you, what happened to your dad? How did he come to pass away at an early age?
He died of cancer.
I see. And how old were you at the time, Robin?
I was three years old.
Oh, so you were very young. You probably have very few memories of your dad.
You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding.
When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood. I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.
Can you tell me what those two memories are?
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Chapter 4: How do different storytelling styles affect children’s development?
and feeling safe. And that's it. That's the whole memory.
And you felt safe, of course, because you were sitting on your father's shoulders.
I was sitting on his shoulders. And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.
The twin tragedies of her father's death and her mother's injuries devastated the family. Of course, Robin was too young to fully understand what was happening.
I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just my life was yanked out, but I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And so my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family was. Their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.
I mean, I can imagine at one level this must have been so painful and even recollecting these events must have been so painful. And perhaps they were worried that you were very small and talking to you about something that was painful might have hurt you. So I can imagine that those might have been the impulses that caused people to say, let's not talk about it.
I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times, and her way of dealing with all of it was, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting.
Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past.
In time, Robin would come to study the role that family stories play in the psychological well-being of both children and their caregivers. But that was much later. As a child, Robin wasn't comparing what happened in her family to what happened in other families.
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Chapter 5: What is the Do You Know Scale and its importance?
I didn't really notice it until... I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family storytelling family. They told stories... like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, tell me about your day-to-day, what happened, sharing their home.
Remember, this is like when we went to the beach last summer. And they had the big, iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told. And it had to get told the same way with the same punchlines every year.
And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.
Yeah. Yes, it's not the information in that uncle car crash story that was important because everybody knew the facts already.
Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.
And what went through your heart when you saw that? I mean, you must have been happy to be part of this family that had this rich family lore. But was there a part of you that sort of said, that noticed that you didn't have that? I mean, is that how you, was that made aware to you?
I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.
As Robin became a researcher, she was to learn that family stories are not just family stories. They are much more than dinner table conversation or fodder for Thanksgiving table punchlines. Family stories turn out to play a crucial role in the mental health of the people who tell the stories and the mental health of the people who listen to the stories.
They can serve as anchors for identity and self-esteem. Told right, they can change the direction of our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
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Chapter 6: How can understanding family history improve resilience?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fiversh is a psychologist at Emory University who studies the way parents and children communicate. Early on in her career, she spent extended amounts of time with families listening to how parents talked with children.
I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three-, four-, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them. And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences.
We gave them very few instructions. And we looked at how the past got reconstructed. And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past, and also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past. We found that different mothers do this in different ways, and it has a lot of
consequences not only for how children remember things, but how they feel about themselves. So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations have children who have higher self-esteem even very early in development. They also have higher emotional understanding because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional.
So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke. talking about the power of these early conversations and how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are. Marshall's a clinical psychologist, and he said, yeah, that's totally important. But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history.
Coming from the family I did, I was like, I don't think that matters as much. I really think that that's not as important. So we had this conversation and we were part of a big funded research program. We had the means to do this. We said, let's use our resources to figure this out. So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table to see what they talk about.
So we tape recorded these families and we simply asked them to just tape record a few dinner time conversations. We were not there. We just, this is old technology, was literally a physical tape recorder. One of those cassette recorders. Families tell stories all the time.
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Chapter 7: What are the practical applications of Stoicism in daily life?
Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner.
Wow.
And we know from other research that 40% of all human conversation is referring to past experiences. So that's what human beings do. We talk about what happened to us. And we ask other people what happened to them. We tell stories. We listen to stories all the time.
Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a 35, 40-minute dinnertime conversation, most of the stories are what are called today I stories. So most of these table conversations were four, five people. So you're coming back together at the end of the day, and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day. What happened?
And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children. They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they are starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like.
This is the world you're going to be developing into, right? It's not just your perspective on the world. I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it. But then about a third of the stories are these family stories where the family –
is talking about something is said and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent. That's like when we went to grandma's last Thanksgiving and then they start talking about that. Or that's like when we went to see Jaws. And embedded in those conversations, you get family history.
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Chapter 8: How can we cultivate a growth mindset through Stoicism?
where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents' lives. And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better. But what really predicted good functioning, both for the family and for the child, were the family stories.
So in other words, can you talk a little bit about that? When you say that the children were doing better, they had better well-being, how so?
So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories... and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem. They have higher academic competence. They're doing better in school. They have higher social competence.
They are more socially skilled. And in later research, because, of course, we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess... more mature aspects of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
All of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories.
So as you were probing the relationship between these family stories and well-being, including long-term well-being, you and a colleague created an instrument called the Do You Know Scale. What does this tool do, Robin, and what are some of the kinds of questions you have on it?
The Do You Know Scale is a 20-item yes-no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed simply to assess as a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history. We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school?
Do you know... where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes, no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that, we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One,
This very simple 20 questions, yes, no, is a good index. It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful.
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