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 on 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 rouah edaes, causing them to experience greater distress when they recalled them. What is the author's most likely reason for writing this
passage?
O to provide evidence that connects age with self-
defining memories
O to suggest that negative self-defining memories are
not important
O to encourage young people to think more positively
about memories
O to summarizg the impact of negative memories on
older people