I'd like to hear your story : the narrative coherence of older adults in relation to the valence in emotion expression

Sharing autobiographical memories supports well-being among people, especially in the higher age as it helps to regulate emotions, maintain a positive mood and deal with the own mortality.The aim was to investigate if there is a relation between narrative coherence to the emotion expression among the participants when sharing autobiographical memories.There were significant but small relations found between causal and biographical coherence and positive valence in emotion expression. Three cross tables were used to show how the relations were between the different types of coherences (temporal, causal, thematic, biographical and no coherence) and the different types of valence (redemption, contamination, stays the same, positive and negative). The main strength of this research were the distinctions of narrative coherences and valence in emotion expression that was made as this was never done in research before. The main limitations were the low sample size which makes it difficult to see a high reliability in this research. A recommendation for future research would be to focus on causal and biographical coherence as there was discovered a significant relation between these types of coherences and positive valence.