Recalling Life’s Highs and Lows in Older Age: Hierarchical Clustering Methods to Topics, Themes, and Structures
Hsiao-Wen Liao, Nikhil Shanbhogue, Hongchen Wu, Thomas Oltmanns

TL;DR
This study uses AI to analyze how older adults recall important life events, finding that positive memories are more varied and less similar than negative ones.
Contribution
The paper introduces BERTopic for analyzing life story events, revealing distinct structures in autobiographical memory.
Findings
High points had more topics and lower semantic similarity compared to low points.
Themes like family joy and career milestones emerged from high points, while low points focused on illness and loss.
Findings align with life story schema theory and memory development research.
Abstract
Autobiographical memory becomes richer and more complex, forming a life story, as people develop and grow. This study applies BERTopic—a transformer-based modeling method that leverages BERT-based sentence embeddings and hierarchical clustering—to identify interrelated topics and themes in older adults’ life story events of high and low points. Participants, part of the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study (N = 468), completed a life story interview. Memories were transcribed verbatim for text analysis. Central analyses involved transforming the text into numerical representations by generating embeddings, reducing dimensions following cluster analysis, and extracting keywords for topic representation. Ward’s method was used to inform hierarchical dendrograms, through which broader themes and memory structures were inferred. Results indicated that older adults’ high points…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsIdentity, Memory, and Therapy · Aging and Gerontology Research · Mental Health via Writing
