Age-related shifts in temporal narrative content: A structural topic modeling analysis of a life-span corpus
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Across the life span, people recall their past and envision their future, yet how the content of these narratives changes with age has rarely been examined at scale. We constructed a rare cross-sectional corpus of short essays in which participants ranging from elementary-school children to adults aged 60–80 years each wrote about a past event and an anticipated future event, and we modeled topic prevalence with a Structural Topic Model (STM) that incorporates age, gender, and temporal reference (past versus future) as covariates. The model yielded ten interpretable topics without manual coding. Five topics showed significant age × gender interactions in prevalence, and the focus of future narratives shifted with age from work and self-oriented life planning toward family, the next generation, and health. Future narratives were also consistently more abstract than past narratives. The approach provides a scalable framework for quantifying age-related change in temporal narrative without large-scale manual coding.
Source: Research Square
Institution: Ochanomizu University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225793586
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