Autobiographical phenomenology of memories of fiction.

Most autobiographical memories are based on real-life experiences, but memories of fiction have many similarities to real-life autobiographical memories. However, the phenomenological nature of this similarity, the potential differences between media types, and the role of individual differences need further investigation. Based on previous findings, we expected differences between media types on emotional intensity, sensory vividness, and confidence about the recall. To provide insight into these issues, we collected one real-life autobiographical memory and one memory of fiction (book, film, or video game) from 291 participants. We asked them to rate their memories phenomenologically. The participants also provided information regarding their motivations for engaging with fictional stories. Our results show phenomenological differences in several dimensions between media types and differences in the similarity of media types to real-life memories. While absorption seems to be a good predictor for immersion, escapism tendency is a motivation to engage with fiction frequently.

The cost of changing language context: The language-dependent recall of fictional stories.

Language-dependent recall refers to the language-specific retrieval of memories in which the retrieval success depends on the match between the languages of encoding and retrieval. The present study investigated language-dependent recall in terms of memory accuracy, false memory, and episodic memory characteristics in the free recall of fictional stories. We also asked how language-dependent memories were influenced by language proficiency and visual imagery. One hundred and thirty-seven native Turkish (L1) speakers who were second-language learners of English (L2) were divided into four groups in which they read fictional stories and then recalled them: (1) Turkish reading-Turkish recall, (2) English reading-English recall, (3) English reading-Turkish recall, (4) Turkish reading-English recall. Regardless of the match between L1 or L2, accuracy was higher when participants read and recalled the stories in the same language than when they did it in different languages, showing the language-dependent recall effect. Notably, the effect of match or mismatch between encoding and retrieval languages on accuracy did not depend on L2 proficiency and visual imagery. In addition, false memories were salient, particularly for participants who read the stories in L2 but retrieved them in L1. Overall, our findings suggest that accuracy-oriented memory research provides a comprehensive investigation of language-dependent recall, addressing the links of language-dependent memories with accuracy, false memory, and episodic memory characteristics.

Collective remembering and future forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic: How the impact of COVID-19 affected the themes and phenomenology of global and national memories across 15 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events. The themes and phenomenological characteristics of the events differed based on contextual group factors. First, across all conditions, the event themes differed to a small yet significant degree depending on the severity of the pandemic and stringency of governmental response at the national level. Second, participants reported national events as less negative and more vivid than global events, and group differences in emotional valence were largest for future events. This research demonstrates that even during the early stages of the pandemic, themes relating to its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it was occurring. Current findings provide a profile of past and future collective events from the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, and factors accounting for the consistencies and differences in event representations across 15 countries are discussed.

Mood regulation upon remembering open memories.

ABSTRACTOpen autobiographical memories are personal life experiences on which an individual does not have closure. It is unknown whether emotion regulation strategies through recalling positive memories are active after recalling open memories. The current study aims to explore the presence of emotion regulation for open memories while testing for the interference of depressive tendencies. The participants were asked to remember an open memory and answer questions on phenomenological features of this event. Later, they recalled a memory without any restrictions and answered similar phenomenological questions. The results showed that the subsequent memories were significantly more closed, more positive, and less intense during retrieval than open memories. Additionally, open memories were reported as involuntarily rehearsed more frequently than the subsequent memories. Depressive tendencies were unrelated to emotion regulation after open memory recall. This study provides insight into the emotion regulation strategies after remembering open memories and how depression could be related to this strategy.

Emotional closure in autobiographical memories: phenomenology and involuntary remembering.

Open autobiographical memories are events without closure. The current study explored the influence of potential closure in the future. We compared the phenomenology and involuntary recall for events that were either closed, open with a possibility of closure, or open without such a possibility. Participants (N = 87) recalled these events in random order and answered phenomenology questions. We expected open events without closure possibility to be highest in negativity, emotional intensity, regret and involuntary recall frequency, followed by potentially open events and closed events. We found that emotional intensity at recall, negativity and involuntary recall frequency were higher for open than closed events. Open events without closure possibility were the highest in regret and evoked more negative affect upon involuntary recall than open events with closure possibility. We discussed our findings in relation to research on autobiographical memory and involuntary remembering, along with intrusion and possible clinical implications.

Involuntary memories are not déjà vu.

The proposed framework can benefit from integrating predictive processing into the explanation of déjà vu which corresponds to interrupted prediction. Déjà vu is also accompanied by familiarity. However, considerable ambiguity is inherent in familiarity, which necessitates elaboration of this construct. Research findings on involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu show discrepancies, and clustering these constructs can be counterproductive for research.

Representing the collective past: public event memories and future simulations in Turkey.

Common processes involved in remembering and predicting personal and public events have led researchers to study public events as a part of autobiographical memory. In the present study, we asked for past events and future predictions and examined the temporal distribution and factors that made these salient in event representations. A sample of 1577 individuals reported six most important public events since their birth and six future events that they expected. Past events mostly came from the recent past and were negative in valence. Similarly, future predictions consisted of negative events that are expected to occur in the near past. We did not find a reminiscence bump but there was a strong recency effect. Despite being inconsistent with some literature, this supports the view that remembering the past is largely influenced by the current goals and experiences. Also, in predicting what is remembered from the past and what is expected in the future, what individuals believed others would report appeared as a robust predictor.

New perspectives on childhood memory: introduction to the special issue.

This special issue brings together the scholarship that contributes diverse new perspectives on childhood amnesia - the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the special issue range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother-child conversations about memories for extended lifetime periods, and to retrospective recollections of early childhood in adolescents and adults. The methodological approaches are diverse and theoretical insights rich. The findings together show that childhood amnesia is a complex and malleable phenomenon and that the waning of childhood amnesia and the development of autobiographical memory are shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors. This collective body of work will facilitate discussion and deepen our understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, accuracy, and phenomenological qualities of memories from early childhood.

Consistency of adults' earliest memories across two years.

The consistency of earliest memories in content, dating, and memory qualities was investigated. A total of 84 (27 males; Mage = 24.93, SD = 1.36) adults reported earliest memories, estimated ages, and rated their recollections on memory qualities with a two-year time lag. At Time 2, their original reports at Time 1 were presented and they were asked to report whether the earliest memories they recalled at Time 2 were the same. Fifty-six per cent of the participants reported the same earliest memories and those remembering the same events had earlier memories than those remembering different ones. Although no significant differences were observed in estimated ages on the basis of mean ages, a predating bias of later memories and a tendency to postdate earlier memories were observed on the basis of a 48-month cut-off point. Thus, how the data is analysed is critical in detecting dating biases or errors affecting conclusions and interpretations about the dating consistency of earliest memories. Finally, memory qualities of earliest memories displayed a high level of consistency with a two-year time lag regardless of remembering the same versus different event.

Autobiographical remembering regulates emotions: a functional perspective.

Emotional deviation has been considered an essential factor in emotion regulation, in that, attempts to compensate for the deviation is reflected on cognitive processes. In the present study, we focused on autobiographical remembering and tested the functional role of memory on emotion regulation. We specifically examined the congruence effect in individuals' subsequent memory reports after recalling emotional events. Individuals were randomly assigned to three groups to report either sadness or anger evoking events or emotionally unspecified events that they experienced in the last five years. Results supported mood-incongruence, but only for the emotional memory groups. Despite highly negative memories reported in the initial recall, individuals in anger- and sad-memory groups revealed an up-regulation trend in subsequent recall. Furthermore, sadness and anger induction affected phenomenological features of the subsequently reported memory. Overall, our findings supported for the emotion regulation function of remembering that serves counter-regulation of the negative emotion. We discuss potential mechanisms in the light of explanations by a functional approach to autobiographical memory.

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.

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.

Depression, But Not Dissociative Experiences, Predicts Overgeneral Memory: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis.

Background: Reduced memory specificity (i.e., overgeneral memory) is a characteristic of autobiographical memories widely studied in clinical populations, and it is explained by rumination, functional avoidance, and executive dysfunction. Though the relationship of autobiographical memory specificity with mood and anxiety disorders has been shown, how it relates to dissociation is not well-established. Thus, we aimed to investigate whether dissociative experiences are related to overgeneral memory while considering concurrent depression as a possible confounding factor. Methods: We conducted a systematic review in compliance with The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and searched PubMed and Web of Science databases using autobiograph* and dissoc* as our keywords. Results: Of the 768 studies identified, 9 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. A meta-regression analysis was conducted to analyze the relationship between dissociative experiences and depression scores with autobiographical memory test scores. Our research revealed that depression scores, but not dissociative experiences, are significantly related to reduced memory specificity. Conclusion: While the possible overlap between dissociation and depression should be considered in the interpretation of the findings, dissociative experiences do not seem to pose vulnerability for reduced specificity of autobiographical memory. The number of studies on the topic is limited, and they do not have longitudinal follow-ups. The heterogeneous reporting of memory scores and low scores of dissociative experiences in the samples are also limitations of the existing studies.

Examining the life story account of the reminiscence bump: why we remember more from young adulthood.

The reminiscence bump is a robust finding demonstrated mostly with the cue-word method in Western cultures. The first aim of the study was to replicate the reminiscence bump using a life history timeline method and to extend reminiscence bump research to a Turkish sample. The second aim was to empirically examine the recently proposed life story account (Gluck & Bluck, 2007) for the reminiscence bump. The sample consisted of 40 women and 32 men aged 52 to 66 years. Participants' lives were divided into 5-year intervals and they verbally reported as many memories as possible in a standard timeframe from each interval (in random order) and provided ratings of several memory characteristics. As expected, the lifespan distribution of the resulting 6373 memories demonstrated a reminiscence bump. In support of the life story account, bump memories were found to be more novel, more important for identity development, more distinct, and more likely to involve developmental transitions than memories from other age periods. Findings are discussed in terms of the life story account, which synthesises lifespan developmental theory and life story theory.

The emergence of sex differences in personality traits in early adolescence: A cross-sectional, cross-cultural study.

Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines the NEO Personality Inventory-3 (McCrae, Costa, & Martin, 2005) informant ratings of adolescents from 23 cultures (N = 4,850), and investigates culture and age as sources of variability in sex differences of adolescents' personality. The effect for Neuroticism (with females scoring higher than males) begins to take on its adult form around age 14. Girls score higher on Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness at all ages between 12 and 17 years. A more complex pattern emerges for Extraversion and Agreeableness, although by age 17, sex differences for these traits are highly similar to those observed in adulthood. Cross-sectional data suggest that (a) with advancing age, sex differences found in adolescents increasingly converge toward adult patterns with respect to both direction and magnitude; (b) girls display sex-typed personality traits at an earlier age than boys; and (c) the emergence of sex differences was similar across cultures. Practical implications of the present findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Reliance on schemas in source memory: age differences and similarity of schemas.

The present study has examined the effects of source-schema-consistency, schematic distinctiveness and encoding time of schematic information on source memory of younger and older adults. Participants were administered a source memory test, in which two sources presented statements that were congruent with, incongruent with or irrelevant to sources' professions. Professions of sources were schematically similar or distinct, and they were revealed before or after the presentation of items. The results yielded that revelation of profession information before presentation of items enhanced source memory for incongruent items. Aging was associated with a general decrease in source monitoring processes. Participants who were assigned to similar-source condition and had their schemas activated before learning phase had higher source monitoring scores. Results are discussed in relation to source monitoring framework and aging of memory.

Cross-cultural variability of component processes in autobiographical remembering: Japan, Turkey, and the USA.

Although the underlying mechanics of autobiographical memory may be identical across cultures, the processing of information differs. Undergraduates from Japan, Turkey, and the USA rated 30 autobiographical memories on 15 phenomenological and cognitive properties. Mean values were similar across cultures, with means from the Japanese sample being lower on most measures but higher on belief in the accuracy of their memories. Correlations within individuals were also similar across cultures, with correlations from the Turkish sample being higher between measures of language and measures of recollection and belief. For all three cultures, in multiple regression analyses, measures of recollection were predicted by visual imagery, auditory imagery, and emotions, whereas measures of belief were predicted by knowledge of the setting. These results show subtle cultural differences in the experience of remembering.