自传体记忆的研究

自传体记忆是人类记忆研究中的一个新领域．．本文介绍了有关自传体记忆的早期研究、自传体记忆的组织结构以及自传体信息的提取,并简评了自传体记忆的有关理论：复制理论、图式化理论、结构重建和部分重建理论。     

Individual differences in recognising involuntary autobiographical memories: Impact on the reporting of abstract cues

This study examined individual differences in the ability to recognise involuntary autobiographical memories. We hypothesised that individuals may not always recognise involuntary memories which are cued by abstract experiences (e.g., thoughts or language), while they are better able to recognise those which are cued by concrete sensory/perpetual experiences. We hypothesised that individuals without formal training in psychology would be more prone to these recognition failures than individuals with training in psychology. We tested the hypothesis by comparing the results of general first-year undergraduate students, graduate students in psychology and graduates students in other disciplines after each had participated in a two-week diary study of their naturally occurring involuntary memories. The results showed undergraduate participants and non-psychology graduate participants reporting fewer involuntary memories being triggered by abstract cues than the graduate psychology participants, while the groups did not differ in the report of memories triggered by sensory/perpetual cues. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Evidence that an episodic mode of thinking facilitates encoding of perceptually rich memories for naturalistic events relative to a gist-based mode of thinking

ABSTRACT

Several studies have demonstrated that an episodic specificity induction (ESI) can influence cognitive abilities that involve episodic processes at retrieval. To better understand the downstream implications of an “episodic mode of thinking,” we investigate whether an ESI influences encoding of new events. In a between-subjects design, participants were given an ESI or gist (control) induction. In an ostensibly unrelated task, participants then were shown film clips of naturalistic events. After a filled delay, participants were given a surprise memory test, which required narrative recollection of the film clips. Participants who received the ESI generated narratives that contained more perceptual details specifically. Relative to gist thinking, an episodic mode of thinking appears to facilitate encoding of perceptually rich memories for naturalistic events.     

Imagination and Memory

A growing body of literature shows that imagining contrary-to-truth experiences can change memory. Recent experiments are reviewed to show that when people think about or imagine a false event, entire false memories can be implanted. Imagination inflation can occur even when there is no overt social pressure, and when hypothetical events are imagined only briefly. Overall, studies of imagination inflation show that imagining a counter-factual event can make subjects more confident that it actually occurred. We discuss possible mechanisms for imagination inflation and find that, with evidence supporting the involvement of both source confusion and familiarity in creating inflation, the primary mechanism is still to be determined. We briefly review evidence on individual differences in susceptibility to inflation. Finally, the widespread use of imagination-based techniques in self-help and clinical contexts suggests that there may be practical implications when imagination is used as a therapeutic tool.     

Autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative of a staged event: The influence of the listener

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of narration and listening conditions in autobiographical memory of a staged event. Eighty young adults were recruited for the present research. First, they were interviewed on current issues (staged event). Second, they were asked to complete a memory questionnaire about the content of the interview. Then, they were assigned to three retrieval conditions: narration to an empathic listener, narration to a detached listener, and retrieving thinking silently about the event. Finally, 1 week later, the participants were asked to complete the memory questionnaire again to assess the influence of narration and listening conditions on memory. The results show that the experimental conditions significantly influenced the memory trend for a staged event. The emphatic listening condition promoted memory significantly more than did the other two conditions. The authors interpret these results in terms of the theory of narrativization.     

抑郁症患者的自传体记忆特征及其应用自传体记忆测验的元分析

研究目的在于探讨抑郁症患者自传体记忆的特征以及自传体记忆测验(the autobiographical memory test, AMT)在该领域的应用情况。通过文献检索, 搜集了18篇应用AMT作为测评工具的抑郁症自传体记忆研究, 抑郁症患者566人, 正常对照组457人。元分析研究发现, 和正常对照组比较, 抑郁症组的具体性记忆减少, 概括化记忆增多, 反应迟缓。目前对这种现象的解释主要有功能性回避模型、认知执行受损模型和沉思模型; 年龄、抑郁情绪以及AMT测试程序对测试结果有明显影响; 发表偏倚和敏感性分析显示存在发表偏倚, 但稳定性较好。AMT在抑郁症研究存在灵敏度不足等局限, 作者从AMT程序、研究设计等方面提出了改善建议。     

Autobiographical memory specificity in response to emotion pictorial cues among non‐clinical participants

The objective of the current study was to investigate whether emotion pictorial cues increase memory specificity among non‐clinical participants. Undergraduate university students were presented with emotion word and pictorial cues on a prompted and non‐prompted version of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT). In comparison to pictorial cues, participants retrieved significantly fewer specific autobiographical memories in response to word cues on the prompted AMT; however, there was no significant difference on the non‐prompted AMT. Participants also retrieved significantly fewer specific memories in response to both word and pictorial cues on the non‐prompted AMT compared with the prompted AMT. These results provide support for the hypothesis that among non‐clinical participants, visual cues increase memory specificity over and above emotion. Further research is needed to investigate ways in which memory specificity can be increased and the use of imagery may be a promising avenue.     

Memories from the cradle

How far back can we, as adults, remember details of our life experiences? Current popular and scientific beliefs are contradictory, with the latter stipulating that personal memories do not begin until the late preschool years (age 4–5 years) and the former claiming that we not only remember being born, but can also remember in utero experiences. In this review, these beliefs are examined in a scientific context and evaluated in terms of empirical data about the development of early memory. The theory proposed here is that memories for personal experiences are not possible until the advent of the cognitive self, around the age of 18 to 24 months. This age is much earlier than that proposed as the age of the earliest memories in other scientific accounts and much later than that proposed in popular beliefs about early memory. New data from a cross-sectional and longitudinal study of early memory development and the emergence of the self clearly show the origins of personal memory coincide with the emergence of the early self.     

Comparing music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in young and older adults: A diary study

Previous research has found that music brings back more vivid and emotional autobiographical memories than various other retrieval cues. However, such studies have often been low in ecological validity and constrained by relatively limited cue selection and predominantly young adult samples. Here, we compared music to food as cues for autobiographical memories in everyday life in young and older adults. In two separate four-day periods, 39 younger (ages 18–34) and 39 older (ages 60–77) adults recorded their music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in paper diaries. Across both age groups, music triggered more frequent autobiographical memories, a greater proportion of involuntary memories, and memories rated as more personally important in comparison to food cues. Age differences impacted music- and food-evoked memories similarly, with older adults consistently recalling older and less specific memories, which they rated as more positive, vivid, and rehearsed. However, young and older adults did not differ in the number or involuntary nature of their recorded memories. This work represents an important step in understanding the phenomenology of naturally occurring music-evoked autobiographical memories across adulthood and provides new insights into how and why music may be a more effective trigger for personally valued memories than certain other everyday cues.     

Reflecting on how we remember the personal past: missing components in the study of memory appraisal and theoretical implications

The current paper offers a selective review of the study of memory appraisal, focusing on recollections of the personal past, with the goal to bring attention to a missing component in this study. To date, memory appraisal studies have concentrated on participants’ assessments of the content of their personal recollections (e.g., their perceptual detail and story-like feel), including beliefs about the accuracy of that content. Participants’ assessments of reflection processes accompanying their recollections (e.g., a sense of piecing-together recollection fragments) have yet to be extensively examined. The lack of information on process-based appraisals is related to prior studies’ procedural constraints (e.g., kinds of cue prompts and their timing, minimal opportunities for reflection). Reasons for addressing this missing component provide the central themes of the paper. The reasons emerge from the analysis of autobiographical cueing studies, including integration of narrative research studies and autobiographical works. The analysis leads to suggestions for future research involving the use of personal narratives that are intended to address critiques of reconstruction accounts and unresolved questions in the study of memory appraisal.     

Observer memories may not be for everyone

ABSTRACT

Six studies explored the preponderance of people who experience third-person perspective observer memories during autobiographical memory retrieval. The concept of first-person field versus observer memories has been extensively used in the areas of cognitive, social, and clinical psychology. An implicit assumption is the idea that most people use both of these perspectives. What varies are the circumstances that bias people to use one perspective over another for a given autobiographical memory. We challenge that assumption across six studies by showing that, while there are some people who report to regularly have observer memories, there are also those that report to rarely or never have them. These reports were found to be related to levels of reported dissociative experiences. We discuss how this difference in the experience of observer memories may also reflect other innate characteristics, and may correspond to predispositions for various pathologies, including depression, social phobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder.     

Young and Older Adults' Expression of Emotional Experience: Do Autobiographical Narratives Tell a Different Story?

Though autobiographical remembering is a common means of emotional expression in everyday life, rarely have autobiographical narratives been used to assess emotion. Studies rely instead on retrospective scalar measures. In this study, 87 young (M = 20) and older (M = 62) adults' scalar reports and narratives of the salience, frequency, and intensity of emotional reactions to the OJ Simpson verdict announcement were compared. Scalar measures and autobiographical narratives sometimes tell different stories about certain aspects of emotion. Supporting theory, scalars measures, and narratives both indicate greater salience of emotion in late life. In contrast to expectation, older adults more frequently expressed negative affect in their narratives, but not in scalars measures. Both types of measures did, however, show a higher intensity of sadness in older adults. Theories of emotion and aging may benefit from incorporating the role of memory, and reactions to specific negative life events.     

5-9岁儿童自传记忆与自我概念的发展及其关系

自传记忆是关于个体生活事件的记忆,与个体的自我组织结构相互影响。为在同一文化背景下进一步探讨自传记忆与自我概念发展的关系,文章采用访谈的方式,对81名5-9岁儿童进行访谈,结果发现：（1）年龄较大儿童的自传记忆更丰富、具体,涉及更多的他人信息。（2）自我概念在一年级到三年级之间发展迅速。（3）儿童自传记忆与自我概念发展无显著的性别差异。（4）自传记忆与自我概念在多方面存在显著相关。     

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.     

A comparison of Chinese and American memories for public events

Memory for public events was compared across Chinese and U.S. participants to explore competing explanations for cultural differences in flashbulb memories. Participant recall of the canonical features of events was more detailed and more likely to include a specific time in the United States than in the Chinese reports. Vividness was positively correlated with the flashbulb memory scores only in the U.S. sample. In both cultures, emotion, national importance, and thinking about the event predicted vividness and recall of memory details. Chinese participants reported primarily disasters and social events, and their memories were more likely to include international events than U.S. participants. The U.S. participants recalled primarily political events and terrorism. These results suggest that culture has important influences on the quantity, level of detail, completeness, and vividness of autobiographical memories as well as on the types of events triggering flashbulb memories.     

A narrative synthesis of the applicability of the CaR–FA–X model in child and adolescent populations: a systematic review

The CaR–FA–X model [Williams, J. M. G., Barnhofer, T., Crane, C., Hermans, D., Raes, F., Watkins, E.,?…?Dalgleish, T. (2007). Autobiographical memory specificity and emotional disorder. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 122–148. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.122] is the most prominent and comprehensive model of overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) and provides a framework for OGM. The model comprises of three mechanisms, capture and rumination, functional avoidance and impaired executive control. These can independently, or in interaction, account for OGM. This systematic review aims to evaluate the existing research on the CaR–FA–X model, and trauma exposure studies specific to child and adolescent populations. The following databases were searched: “PsychInfo”, “PsychArticles”, “PubMed”, “Web of Science”, “Medline”, “SCOPUS” and “Embase” for English-language, peer-reviewed papers with samples <M?=?18 years, published since 1986. Support was reported for a relationship between trauma exposure and OGM as well as for capture errors and OGM. Limited support was found for rumination, avoidance and impaired executive control in isolation. No support was found for interacting mechanisms and OGM. Partial support for the CaR–FA–X model was found for child and adolescent populations. Recommendations, proposals for future research and plausible explanations for the mixed findings are discussed.     

The effects of social memories in autobiographical elaboration on incidental memory

The present study compared the effects of social memories with those of nonsocial memories on incidental memory. The participants were presented target words on two occasions, and each time they were asked to think of a past episode associated with them in the orienting task, followed by an unexpected free‐recall test. The results showed that the targets that were associated with social memories, episodes including any person, were recalled more often than those with nonsocial memories. Also, the spacing effect was observed only for the recall of target words associated with social memories. These results were interpreted as showing that the inclusion of any particular person in an episode makes an episode itself more distinctive as an effective cue in autobiographical elaboration.     

How thinking about what could have been affects how we feel about what was

Episodic counterfactual thoughts (CFT) and autobiographical memories (AM) involve the reactivation and recombination of episodic memory components into mental simulations. Upon reactivation, memories become labile and prone to modification. Thus, reactivating AM in the context of mentally generating CFT may provide an opportunity for editing processes to modify the content of the original memory. To examine this idea, this paper reports the results of two studies that investigated the effect of reactivating negative and positive AM in the context of either imagining a better (i.e. upward CFT) or a worse (i.e. downward CFT) alternative to an experienced event, as opposed to attentively retrieving the memory without mental modification (i.e. remembering) or no reactivation. Our results suggest that attentive remembering was the best strategy to both reduce the negative affect associated with negative AM, and to prevent the decay of positive affect associated with positive AM. In addition, reactivating positive, but not negative, AM with or without CFT modification reduces the perceived arousal of the original memory over time. Finally, reactivating negative AM in a downward CFT or an attentive remembering condition increases the perceived detail of the original memory over time.     

Socioemotional selectivity in older adults: Evidence from the subjective experience of angry memories

Few studies have compared the phenomenological properties of younger and older adults' memories for emotional events. Some studies suggest that younger adults remember negative information more vividly than positive information whereas other studies suggest that positive emotion yields phenomenologically richer memories than negative emotion for both younger and older adults. One problem with previous studies is a tendency to treat emotion as a dichotomous variable. In contrast, emotional richness demands inclusion of assessments beyond just a positive and negative dimension (e.g., assessing specific emotions like anger, fear and happiness). The present study investigated different properties of autobiographical remembering as a function of discrete emotions and age. Thirty-two younger and thirty-one older adults participated by recalling recent and remote memories associated with six emotional categories and completed the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire for each. Results demonstrated that older adults' angry memories received lower ratings on some phenomenological properties than other emotional memories whereas younger adults' angry memories did not show this same pattern. These results are discussed within the context of socioemotional selectivity theory.