SHAME MEMORIES ACROSS GENERATIONS: STUDIES ON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND THEIR MOTHERS

Date

2026-7-3

Author

Kozak, Ekin Doğa

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Three interrelated studies were designed to investigate shame memories among 278 university students and their mothers. The first study was designed as a pilot study to reveal the relational context and memory content of the personal shame memories. Results revealed that university students narrated personal shame memories that took place in educational environments, family and peer context, while mothers narrated memories set in the family context and professional settings. The memory content was categorized under the mishaps and missteps, aggression and performance-related themes for all participants. The second study revealed that university students and mothers could and chose to narrate also vicarious shame memories, that are shame memories where their partner was the protagonist experiencing shame. Results of the second study revealed that individuation and impaired limits schema domain were statistically significant predictors for the thematic coherence and subjective perspective terms of university students in both their personal and vicarious shame memories. The third and last study aimed to collect shame memory conversations. To empirically capture the complex dynamics of this mother-daughter co-construction in a naturalistic setting, we asked the mother-daughter dyads to have a memory conversation with each other in the absence of the researcher, analyzing the data via Actor-Partner Interdependence Model. Results revealed that individuation appeared as an actor and partner effect, while the other-directedness schema domain and external shame levels of mothers appeared as partner effects on their daughters’ emotion word usage during their memory conversation. All results were discussed in the light of the existing literature.

Subject Keywords

Emotion-induced memories, Shame memory, Mother-daughter memory conversation, Actor-partner interdependence model

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119735

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis