Going global: The functions of autobiographical memory in cultural context

This special issue of Memory brings together research from around the globe, from Japanese, Chinese and East Indian cultures, to American and European societies, to the Caribbean, to Turkey and to Australia and New Zealand, which examines how and why people, from childhood to old age, remember the personal past in daily life. This journey highlights the important role of the cultural context in shaping the functional usages of autobiographical memory. We illuminate six major contributions of cross-cultural research to a broader and deeper understanding of the functions of autobiographical memory, and call attention to the filed that memory research must “go global.”     

Functions of autobiographical memory in Taiwanese and American emerging adults

The study addresses cultural and person-level factors contributing to emerging adult's use of memory to serve adaptive functions. The focus is on three functions: self-continuity, social-bonding and directing-behaviour. Taiwanese (N = 85, 52 women) and American (N = 95, 51 women) emerging adults completed the Thinking about Life Experiences scale, and measures of trait personality, self-concept clarity and future time perspective. Findings show that individuals from both cultures use memory to serve these three functions, but Taiwanese individuals use memory more frequently than Americans to maintain self-continuity. Culture also interacted with person-level factors: in Taiwan, but not America, memory is more frequently used to create self-continuity in individuals high in conscientiousness. Across cultures, having lower self-concept clarity was related to greater use of memory to create self-continuity. Findings are discussed in terms of how memory serves functions in context and specific aspects of the Taiwanese and American cultural context that may predict the functional use of memory in emerging adulthood.     

Crafting the TALE: Construction of a measure to assess the functions of autobiographical remembering

Theory suggests that autobiographical remembering serves several functions. This research builds on previous empirical efforts (Bluck, Alea, Habermas, & Rubin, 2005) with the aim of constructing a brief, valid measure of three functions of autobiographical memory. Participants (N=306) completed 28 theoretically derived items concerning the frequency with which they use autobiographical memory to serve a variety of functions. To examine convergent and discriminant validity, participants rated their tendency to think about and talk about the past, and measures of future time orientation, self-concept clarity, and trait personality. Confirmatory factor analysis of the function items resulted in a respecified model with 15 items in three factors. The newly developed Thinking about Life Experiences scale (TALE) shows good internal consistency as well as convergent validity for three subscales: Self-Continuity, Social-Bonding, and Directing-Behaviour. Analyses demonstrate factorial equivalence across age and gender groups. Potential use and limitations of the TALE are discussed.     

Lifespan trends of autobiographical remembering: Episodicity and search for meaning

Autobiographical memories of older adults show fewer episodic and more non-episodic elements than those of younger adults. This semantization effect is attributed to a loss of episodic memory ability. However the alternative explanation by an increasing proclivity to search for meaning has not been ruled out to date. To test whether a decrease in episodicity and an increase in meaning-making in autobiographical narratives are related across the lifespan, we used different instructions, one focussing on specific episodes, the other on embedding events in life, in two lifespan samples. A continuous decrease of episodic quality of memory (memory specificity, narrative quality) was confirmed. An increase of search for meaning (interpretation, life story integration) was confirmed only up to middle adulthood. This non-inverse development of episodicity and searching for meaning in older age speaks for an autonomous semantization effect that is not merely due to an increase in interpretative preferences.     

Priming autobiographical memories: How recalling the past may affect everyday forms of autobiographical remembering

This study investigated the idea that when one recalls past episodes, that the content of those memories will activate additional episodic memories with like content, and such memories will then have the potential of surfacing in subsequent acts of involuntary and voluntary recall. We tested the episodic content priming hypothesis in two experiments. In Experiment 1, priming group participants first recalled memories about specific activities or events and then they were subsequently engaged in a word-cue voluntary autobiographical memory task. The results showed that priming group participants produced more episodic memories involving the primed content on this task than control participants occupied in the same task. In Experiment 2, episodic content priming was further tested on a measure of involuntary autobiographical memory (i.e., the vigilance task). The results on this task also revealed support for the episodic content priming hypothesis, including after a delay of 24 h.     

Factor structure of overall autobiographical memory usage: The directive,self and social functions revisited

According to theory, autobiographical memory serves three broad functions of overall usage: directive, self, and social. However, there is evidence to suggest that the tripartite model may be better conceptualised in terms of a four-factor model with two social functions. In the present study we examined the two models in Danish and German samples, using the Thinking About Life Experiences Questionnaire (TALE; Bluck, Alea, Habermas, & Rubin, 2005), which measures the overall usage of the three functions generalised across concrete memories. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor model and rejected the theoretical three-factor model in both samples. The results are discussed in relation to cultural differences in overall autobiographical memory usage as well as sharing versus non-sharing aspects of social remembering.     

The unpredictable past: spontaneous autobiographical memories outnumber autobiographical memories retrieved strategically

Involuntary autobiographical memories are spontaneously arising memories of personal events, whereas voluntary memories are retrieved strategically. Voluntary remembering has been studied in numerous experiments while involuntary remembering has been largely ignored. It is generally assumed that voluntary recall is the standard way of remembering, whereas involuntary recall is the exception. However, little is known about the actual frequency of these two types of remembering in daily life. Here, 48 Danish undergraduates recorded their involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories during a day using a mechanical counter. Involuntary memories were reported three times as frequently as voluntary memories. Compared to voluntary memories, they were associated less with problem solving and social sharing and more with day dreaming, periods of boredom, no reasons for remembering and predominantly came to mind during unfocused attention. The findings suggest that involuntary recall is a typical way of accessing the personal past.     

Latent constructs model explaining the attachment-linked variation in autobiographical remembering

In the current study, we proposed a latent constructs model to characterise the qualitative aspects of autobiographical remembering and investigated the structural relations in the model that may vary across individuals. Primarily, we focused on the memories of romantic relationships and argued that attachment anxiety and avoidance would be reflected in the ways that individuals encode, rehearse, or remember autobiographical memories in close relationships. Participants reported two positive and two negative relationship-specific memories and rated the characteristics for each memory. As predicted, the basic memory model yielded appropriate fit, indicating that event characteristics (EC) predicted the frequency of rehearsal (RC) and phenomenology at retrieval (PC). When attachment variables were integrated, the model showed that rehearsal mediated the link between anxiety and PC, especially for negative memories. On the other hand, for avoidance EC was the key factor mediating the link between avoidance and RC, as well as PC. Findings were discussed with respect to autobiographical memory functions emphasising a systematically, integrated framework.     

Priming voluntary autobiographical memories: Implications for the organisation of autobiographical memory and voluntary recall processes

The goal of this study was to show that voluntary autobiographical memories could be primed by the prior activation of autobiographical memories. Three experiments demonstrated voluntary memory priming with three different approaches. In Experiment 1 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their elementary school years. In a subsequent memory task primed participants were asked to recall memories from any time period, and they produced significantly more memories from their elementary school years than unprimed participants. In Experiment 2 primed participants were asked to recall what they were doing when they had heard various news events occurring between 1998 and 2005. Subsequently these participants produced significantly more memories from this time period than unprimed participants. In Experiment 3 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their teenage years. Subsequently these participants were able to recall more memories from ages 13–15 than unprimed participants, where both had only 1 second to produce a memory. We argue that the results support the notion that episodic memories can activate one another and that some of them are organised according to lifetime periods. We further argue that the results have implications for the reminiscence bump and voluntary recall of the past.     

Predicting remembering and forgetting of autobiographical memories in children and adults: a 4-year prospective study

Preservation and loss to forgetting of autobiographical memories is a focus in both the adult and developmental literatures. In both, there are comparative arguments regarding rates of forgetting. Children are assumed to forget autobiographical memories more rapidly than adults, and younger children are assumed to forget more rapidly than older children. Yet few studies can directly inform these comparisons: few feature children and adults, and few prospectively track the survival of specific autobiographical memories over time. In a 4-year prospective study, we obtained autobiographical memories from children 4, 6, and 8 years, and adults. We tested recall of different subsets of the events after 1, 2, and 3 years. Accelerated rates of forgetting were apparent among all child groups relative to adults; within the child groups, 4- and 6-year-olds had accelerated forgetting relative to 8-year-olds. The differences were especially pronounced in open-ended recall. The thematic coherence of initial memory reports also was a significant predictor of the survival of specific memories. The pattern of findings is consistent with suggestions that the adult distribution of autobiographical memories is achieved as the quality of memory traces increases (here measured by thematic coherence) and the rate of forgetting decreases.     

Being American, being Asian: the bicultural self and autobiographical memory in Asian Americans

Studies of autobiographical memory have shown that the degree to which individuals focus on themselves vs. social relations in their memories varies markedly across cultures. Do the differences result from differing cultural self-views (i.e., an autonomous vs. a relational sense of self), as often suggested in the literature? Experimental evidence is required to answer this question. In the present study, Asian American participants (N=118) were primed to focus on their American or Asian self prior to recalling important autobiographical events, and participants in a control group described things in nature prior to the memory recall. Those whose American self was activated recalled more self-focused and less socially oriented memories than those whose Asian self was made salient, with the control group falling in between. The findings shed light on the mechanism underlying cultural influences on autobiographical remembering. They further highlight the dynamic nature of the memory-self interplay in cultural contexts.     

Emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory across the preschool years: a cross-cultural longitudinal investigation

Knowledge of emotion situations facilitates the interpretation, processing, and organization of significant personal event information and thus may be an important contributor to the development of autobiographical memory. This longitudinal study tested the hypothesis in a cross-cultural context. The participants were native Chinese children, Chinese children from first-generation Chinese immigrant families in the U.S., and European American children. Children's developing emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory were assessed three times at home, when children were 3, 3.5, and 4.5 years of age. Children's emotion knowledge uniquely predicted their autobiographical memory ability across groups and time points. Emotion knowledge further mediated culture effects on autobiographical memory. The findings provide important insight into early autobiographical memory development, and extend current theoretical understandings of the emotion-memory interplay. They further have implications for the phenomenon of infantile amnesia and cross-cultural differences in childhood recollections.     

Visual object imagery and autobiographical memory: Object Imagers are better at remembering their personal past

In the present study we examined whether higher levels of object imagery, a stable characteristic that reflects the ability and preference in generating pictorial mental images of objects, facilitate involuntary and voluntary retrieval of autobiographical memories (ABMs). Individuals with high (High-OI) and low (Low-OI) levels of object imagery were asked to perform an involuntary and a voluntary ABM task in the laboratory. Results showed that High-OI participants generated more involuntary and voluntary ABMs than Low-OI, with faster retrieval times. High-OI also reported more detailed memories compared to Low-OI and retrieved memories as visual images. Theoretical implications of these findings for research on voluntary and involuntary ABMs are discussed.     

Characterisation of music-evoked autobiographical memories

Despite music's prominence in Western society and its importance to individuals in their daily lives, very little is known about the memories and emotions that are often evoked when hearing a piece of music from one's past. We examined the content of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) using a novel approach for selecting stimuli from a large corpus of popular music, in both laboratory and online settings. A set of questionnaires probed the cognitive and affective properties of the evoked memories. On average, 30% of the song presentations evoked autobiographical memories, and the majority of songs also evoked various emotions, primarily positive, that were often felt strongly. The third most common emotion was nostalgia. Analyses of written memory reports found both general and specific levels of autobiographical knowledge to be represented, and several social and situational contexts for memory formation were common across many memories. The findings indicate that excerpts of popular music serve as potent stimuli for studying the structure of autobiographical memories.     

Autobiographical memory functions in young Japanese men and women

The present study examined whether the three major functions of autobiographical memory observed in Western societies (i.e., directing-behaviour, social-bonding and self-continuity) also exist in an East Asian society. Two self-report measures were used to assess the autobiographical memory functions of Japanese men and women. Japanese young adults (N = 451, ages 17–28 years) first completed the original Thinking About Life Experiences (TALE) Questionnaire. They subsequently received three TALE items that represented memory functions and attempted to recall a specific instance of memory recall for each item. Confirmatory factor analyses on the TALE showed that the three functions were replicated in the current sample. However, Japanese participants reported lower levels of all three functions than American participants in a previous study. We also explored whether there was an effect of gender in this Japanese sample. Women reported higher levels of the self-continuity and social-bonding functions than men. Finally, participants recalled more specific instances of memory recall for the TALE items that had received higher ratings on the TALE, suggesting that the findings on the first measure were supported by the second measure. Results are discussed in relation to the functional approach to autobiographical memory in a cross-cultural context.     

Reasons for withdrawing belief in vivid autobiographical memories

Previous studies have shown that many people hold personal memories for events that they no longer believe occurred. This study examines the reasons that people provide for choosing to reduce autobiographical belief in vividly recollected autobiographical memories. A body of non-believed memories provided by 374 individuals was reviewed to develop a qualitatively derived categorisation system. The final scheme consisted of 8 major categories (in descending order of mention): social feedback, event plausibility, alternative attributions, general memory beliefs, internal event features, consistency with external evidence, views of self/others, personal motivation and numerous sub-categories. Independent raters coded the reports and judged the primary reason that each person provided for withdrawing belief. The nature of each category, frequency of category endorsement, category overlap and phenomenological ratings are presented, following which links to related literature and implications are discussed. This study documents that a wide variety of recollective and non-recollective sources of information influence decision-making about the occurrence of autobiographical events.     

Knowledge of memory functions in European and Asian American adults and children: The relation to autobiographical memory

This study investigated explicit knowledge of autobiographical memory functions using a newly developed questionnaire. European and Asian American adults (N = 57) and school-aged children (N = 68) indicated their agreement with 13 statements about why people think about and share memories pertaining to four broad functions—self, social, directive and emotion regulation. Children were interviewed for personal memories concurrently with the memory function knowledge assessment and again 3 months later. It was found that adults agreed to the self, social and directive purposes of memory to a greater extent than did children, whereas European American children agreed to the emotion regulation purposes of memory to a greater extent than did European American adults. Furthermore, European American children endorsed more self and emotion regulation functions than did Asian American children, whereas Asian American adults endorsed more directive functions than did European American adults. Children's endorsement of memory functions, particularly social functions, was associated with more detailed and personally meaningful memories. These findings are informative for the understanding of developmental and cultural influences on memory function knowledge and of the relation of such knowledge to autobiographical memory development.     

Function in context: Why American and Trinidadian young and older adults remember the personal past

Multiple and interacting contextual (culture, life phase) and person-specific predictors (i.e., personality, tendency to think-talk about the past) of the functions of autobiographical memory were examined using the Thinking about Life Experiences Scale. American (N = 174) and Trinidadian (N = 182) young and older adults self-reported how frequently they remembered the personal past to serve self, social and directive functions, how often they thought and talked about their past overall, and completed a measure of trait personality. Independent contextual and person-specific predictors were found for using memory to serve a social-bonding function: Americans, young adults, those higher in extraversion, lower in conscientiousness and individuals who frequently think and talk about the past more often use autobiographical memory for social bonding. Across cultures, younger adults report more frequently using memory to serve all three functions, whereas Trinidadians who think more often about the past compared with those who reflect less often are more likely to use it for self and directive functions. Findings are discussed in terms of the individual's embeddedness in cultural and life phase contexts when remembering.