Adults who are more anxious and were anxiously attached as children report later first memories

Here, we examined retrospective reports of adults’ earliest autobiographical memory, the age of this report and whether the reported age was associated with exposure to early life adversity, current anxiety and childhood attachment. Across four studies, we found that reporting a later ‘earliest’ memory was associated with higher self-reported anxiety in both American (Studies 1, 2 and 4) and Australian (Study 3) samples. Furthermore, in Studies 2–4, we found that reporting a later earliest memory uniquely predicted anxiety when controlling for number of adverse childhood events (a risk factor for the development of anxiety). In Study 4, we established that this relation is partially mediated by childhood anxious attachment. Although we consistently demonstrated that later earliest memories were associated with current anxiety, we found little evidence for a relation between reported age at the time of earliest memory and childhood adversity. We also found no evidence of gender differences in the associations of interest. These results suggest that poorer memory of early childhood is associated with greater childhood anxious attachment and anxiety in adulthood. The implications of this work are discussed in terms of the adaptive nature of autobiographical memory and the development of a coherent life narrative.