Self and social functions: individual autobiographical memory and collective narrative

The personal functions of autobiographical memory build on the basic biological functions of memory common to most mammals that, however, do not have the kind of episodic memories that compose human autobiographical memory according to present theory. The thesis here is that personal autobiographical memory is functionally and structurally related to the use of cultural myths and social narratives, and that the relative emphasis put on the self in different cultural and social contexts influences the form and function of autobiographical memory and the need for developing a uniquely personal life narrative in those contexts. Historical and cross-cultural trends revealed in psychological and literary research are invoked to support this thesis.     

The self in autobiographical memory: effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

Contemporary models of autobiographical memory attribute a prominent role to the conceptualisation of the self. In an attempt to better understand the impact of the self as an organising feature of autobiographical memory, narratives of personal episodes were elicited, either after a questionnaire about the self (self-prime condition) or after a distractor task (control condition). Participants also wrote a narrative of a turning-point memory, which is by definition a self-focused narrative. Narratives were divided into propositions and analysed for the types of statements used. As predicted, when writing self-focused turning-point narratives participants included more statements relating to the meaning of an event and connecting it to the self, and fewer statements focusing on the who, what, where, and when of the narrative. Narratives written after the self-prime also demonstrated characteristics that were similar to turning-point narratives, although not on all measures. This shift in narrative focus in turning-point and self-primed memory narratives indicates an increased attempt to fulfil goals of coherence rather than correspondence (Conway, 2005). These findings lend insight into the nature of the relationship between the semantic conceptualisation of the self, and the process of retrieving event-specific knowledge in episodic memory.     

The reminiscence circumplex and autobiographical memory functions

This study investigated the potential of a circumplex model to represent the functions of both reminiscence and autobiographical memory. Participants from four pre-existing data bases (i.e., Culley, LaVoie, & Gfeller, 2001; Webster, 1997, 2002; Webster & McCall, 1999) were combined, resulting in a total of 985 participants ranging in age from 17 to 96 (M age = 36.63 years). A total of 392 men (39.8%) and 591 women (60.1%), with two persons not reporting their gender, completed the Reminiscence Functions Scale (RFS) as part of the original four studies. The eight RFS factors were submitted to second-order factor analysis resulting in two orthogonal dimensions (self versus social and reactive/loss-oriented versus proactive/growth-oriented) accounting for 79.57% of the variance. Further, multidimensional scaling indicated that the original eight factors could be arranged in a circular fashion such that more closely related (i.e., more highly correlated) factors were placed closer together while factors less highly related were placed further apart. Advantages of a circumplex perspective for future theory and model development are illustrated.     

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.     

Directive functions of autobiographical memory: the guiding power of the specific episode

Vivid memories of personal experiences provide models for present activities and contribute to successful problem solving and adaptation. The memories serve important directive functions: they inform, guide, motivate, and inspire. Yet directive functions have received less emphasis in the research literature than social or self functions. Explanations for this relative neglect are explored. Case studies and systematic research illustrate the prominence of memory directives in everyday life. Empirical studies that have compared memory functions are examined critically, reasons why directive functions may be underestimated using existing methods are discussed, and ideas for future research are outlined.     

The constituent structure of autobiographical memory: autobiographical fluency in people with chronic epilepsy

A total of 59 people with chronic epilepsy recalled autobiographical episodes and personal facts (such as the names of friends or teachers) from various lifetime periods. Also tested was their verbal fluency and their fluency in generating items from semantic categories (animals, vegetables, US presidents, and British prime ministers). Results of a cluster analysis and a common factor analysis confirmed a dissociation between the retrieval of autobiographical information and that of nonpersonal semantic information. There was a similar dissociation between the recall of personal episodes and the recall of the personal information, but the corresponding factors were highly correlated with one another. Finally, verbal fluency performance was significantly correlated with the retrieval of personal information, personal episodes, and common objects, but not with that of public figures. The constituent structure of autobiographical fluency is extremely robust across different populations.     

The emergence of autobiographical memory: a social cultural developmental theory

The authors present a multicomponent dynamic developmental theory of human autobiographical memory that emerges gradually across the preschool years. The components that contribute to the process of emergence include basic memory abilities, language and narrative, adult memory talk, temporal understanding, and understanding of self and others. The authors review the empirical developmental evidence within each of these components to show how each contributes to the timing, quantity, and quality of personal memories from the early years of life. The authors then consider the relevance of the theory to explanations of childhood amnesia and how the theory accounts for and predicts the complex findings on adults' earliest memories, including individual, gender, and cultural differences.     

When the "I" looks at the "Me": autobiographical memory, visual perspective, and the self

This article presents a theoretical model of the self processes involved in autobiographical memories and proposes competing hypotheses for the role of visual perspective in autobiographical memory retrieval. Autobiographical memories can be retrieved from either the 1st person perspective, in which individuals see the event through their own eyes, or from the 3rd person perspective, in which individuals see themselves and the event from the perspective of an external observer. A growing body of research suggests that the visual perspective from which a memory is retrieved has important implications for a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals, and is integrally related to a host of self-evaluative processes. We review the relevant research literature, present our theoretical model, and outline directions for future research.     

Personality traits and autobiographical memory: Openness is positively related to the experience and usage of recollections

We examined the relationship between the Five-Factor Model of personality and the experience and overall usage of autobiographical memory in two studies. In both studies we found that Openness was related to the directive and self functions of overall usage. In addition, Openness was related to the vividness, reliving, coherence, and centrality of event to the person's identity and life story of concrete memories in Study 2, whereas this was not found in Study 1. For the remaining "Big Five" personality traits the results were less consistent across studies. Neuroticism was related to the self function in Study 1, but also to the directive function as well as to negative affect of concrete memories in Study 1. Extraversion was positively related to the social function as well as to conversational rehearsal of memories in Study 1, but this was also not replicated in Study 2. Finally, in both studies there were no significant relationships with regard to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Overall, the findings replicate and extend previous work showing a positive relationship between Openness and the experience and overall usage of autobiographical memory, whereas the roles for the remaining "Big Five" are less clear.     

Categorizing others and the self: How social memory structures guide social perception and behavior

In keeping with the special issue theme of “Remembering the Future,” this article provides a selective review of research on how memory for social information (i.e., social category representation) influences future processing and behavior. Specifically, the authors focus on how categorization and stereotyping affect how we perceive others and ourselves. The first part of the article reviews research on how individuals perceive others. The authors review research on the determinants and outcomes of social categorization and stereotype activation, concluding with the influence of ingroup/outgroup categorization on face processing. The second part of the article reviews research on how individuals perceive themselves. The authors argue that stereotype threat—concerns about being judged or behaving in ways that confirm negative group stereotypes, leading to poor performance—is the result of both self-categorization and stereotype activation. Overall, the article highlights the complex relationship between memory for social category information and future social perception and behavior.     

Affect, pain, and autobiographical memory

Twenty-five young female undergraduates were tested on two occasions: once when they were experiencing menstrual pain of at least moderate severity and once when they were pain free. On each occasion, Ss rated their current levels of pain and affect and retrieved real-life events from their personal past. At the end of the second occasion, Ss were reminded of all of the events they had retrieved on either occasion, and then rated the pleasantness of these events at the time of their original occurrence. Results revealed that the impact of pain on autobiographical memory was wholly mediated by its influence on mood. That is, pain impeded access to memories of pleasant personal experiences, whereas it promoted the retrieval of unpleasant events only if pain was accompanied by an increase in unpleasant affect. Discussion centers on the clinical and cognitive implications of the present results, and on prospects for future research.     

Culture, memory, and the self: An analysis of the personal and collective self in long-term memory

We used a memory paradigm to test whether the nature of representations of the self within long-term memory differed as a function of cultural background. In Western samples words encoded in relation to the self are typically remembered better, and Euro-Canadian participants here showed this standard self-reference effect. However, Asian-Canadian participants were slower to recognize personal traits (as opposed to collective traits) when these traits had been encoded in reference to the self, suggesting a more elaborate representation of the collective self than the personal self in long-term memory. Further, memory was actually inhibited for Asian-Canadians when personal traits were encoded in reference to the self (vs. encoded with other referents). Differences in long-term memory trace strength for self-related data may emerge even as differences in the working self do not, and implications of this difference are discussed.     

The role of motives in the content and structure of autobiographical memory

Findings from 4 studies suggest that differentiation and integration are used by individuals high in agency and communion to structure motive-related information in episodic memory. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that agentic and communal individuals recalled more emotional experiences related to their motives, and that agentic individuals used more differentiation whereas communal individuals used more integration to structure these memories. Study 3 showed that agentic and communal individuals used more differentiation and integration to structure memories about social separation and connection, respectively. Study 4 demonstrated a similar pattern of recall in an experimentally controlled retrieval task. For a motive-congruent topic, agentic individuals recognized more differentiated information and had fewer differentiation recognition errors, and communal individuals freely recalled more integration.     

Gender, personality, and involuntary autobiographical memory

We utilised the recently developed continuous word association task (CWAT) to investigate whether attributes of involuntary autobiographical memory, including gender and cue valence effects, were similar to those found for voluntary autobiographical memory, as well as investigating the role of individual differences in memory production. A total of 80 undergraduate volunteers reported involuntary memories that came to mind during the word association task and completed measures of trait dissociation and psychosis-proneness. Involuntary memories showed similar cue valence effects to those typically found with voluntary memories but the usual gender effect was only apparent once participants learned the task involved autobiographical memory. The total number of involuntary autobiographical memories produced in response to negative cue words was related to greater trait dissociation and psychosis-proneness. The implications for differences between voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memory 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.     

自传体记忆的开端:最早记忆的诱发与评估

童年期遗忘指人们无法回忆起生命最初几年的事情。最早记忆是童年期遗忘开始消退和自传体记忆发生的标志,诸多研究表明成人的最早记忆一般介于3~4岁间,儿童有更早的最早记忆。最早记忆的诱发方法,包括单一最早记忆法、线索词法、穷举法和生命全程法;最早记忆的评估方法,包括自陈式的记忆现象学问卷测量,以及针对记忆叙述内容的编码分析。未来研究要加强纵向研究,追踪最早记忆随年龄而发生的变化;展开特殊人群的研究;完善测量工具;探究早期记忆保持和遗忘的机制。     

Emotional reminiscing and the development of an autobiographical self

According to autobiographical memory theorists, past event conversations provide children with a framework for evaluating and connecting past events into a coherent autobiography (R. Fivush, 1994; K. Nelson, 1993; M. K. Welch-Ross, 1995). Two studies were conducted to empirically examine the association between past event conversation style and an independent measure of children's self-concept consistency. In Study 1, 50 New Zealand mothers discussed everyday past events with their children at 51 and 65 months of age. In Study 2, 51 New Zealand parents discussed 1 positive and 3 negative past events with their 5- and 6-year-old children. The consistency of children's self-views was assessed in both studies using the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (R. Eder, 1990). Children's self-concept consistency was moderately associated with greater explanation of the causes and consequences of children's negative emotions, resolution through social contact, and evaluation of positive events but not with simple attributions of emotion. These findings implicate parent-child conversations as a medium through which children can begin to understand the personal meaning of past experiences.     

A dysphoric's TALE: The relationship between the self-reported functions of autobiographical memory and symptoms of depression

Autobiographical memory (AM) is believed to serve self, social and directive functions; however, little is known regarding how this triad of functions operates in depression. Using the Thinking About Life Experiences questionnaire [Bluck, S., & Alea, N. (2011). Crafting the TALE: Construction of a measure to assess the functions of autobiographical remembering. Memory, 19, 470–486.; Bluck, S., Alea, N., Habermas, T., & Rubin, D. C. (2005). A TALE of three functions: The self–reported uses of autobiographical memory. Social Cognition, 23, 91–117.], two studies explored the relationship between depressive symptomology and the self-reported frequency and usefulness of AMs for self, social and directive purposes. Study 1 revealed that thinking more frequently but talking less frequently about past life events was significantly associated with higher depression scores. Recalling past events more frequently to maintain self-continuity was also significantly associated with higher depressive symptomology. However, results from Study 2 indicated that higher levels of depression were also significantly associated with less-frequent useful recollections of past life events for self-continuity purposes. Taken together, the findings suggest atypical utilisations of AM to serve self-continuity functions in depression and can be interpreted within the wider context of ruminative thought processes.     

Themes,events, and episodes in autobiographical memory

The process by which experience is divided into events was examined. Experiment 1 involved diarists recording their experiences over a 3-month period. Diary entries were later transcribed onto cards and the diarists arranged their cards so as to define events they had experienced, and in a separate phase arranged their cards so as to describe the themes that reflected their life. Examination of event- and theme-building strategies indicated that boundaries were frequently used, and events and themes were often formed from clusters of experience combined using content association rather than temporal sequence. Experiment 2 involved photographs taken by the participants, employed the same procedures as in Experiment 1, and revealed event- and theme-building strategies similar to those identified in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3 the size of the stimulus set from which events and themes were constructed was manipulated; this did not influence construction strategies. Overall, the experiments show that both autobiographical events and themes frequently consist of episodes taken from more than 1 day.