The impact of group identity on the interaction between collective memory and collective future thinking negativity: Evidence from a Turkish sample.

Although several studies have addressed the relationship between memories and future projections regarding personal events, only a few studies exist on collective past and future events, almost all with North American samples. In two studies with Turkish samples, we investigated the relationship between sociopolitical identity and collective past and future representations. In Study 1, we compared the most important past and future collective events generated by voters of the ruling and the main opposition parties. Participants reported the two most important public events in the last 70 years and two in the next 70 years for Turkey, and rated events' valence, centrality, and transitional impact. Past events were dominated by national political events whereas future events' themes were more varied. Past events were also more negative than future events, with the negativity of future events decreasing as their temporal distance from the present increased. Opposition voters rated both the past and the future events more negatively than ruling party voters. In Study 2, we tested whether the negativity for future events may be due to perceived sociopolitical status of ruling party voters. Participants reported events from Turkey's future and provided ratings of status and privilege. We replicated the reduced negativity of distant compared to near future projections, but subjective sense of privilege was not related to events' valence. Overall, we demonstrated that in highly polarized societies, sociopolitical identity can impact the perceived valence of collective mental time travel outputs, diverging from findings of similar responses among Democrats and Republicans in the USA context.

Effects of dissociation on the characteristics of the happiest and the saddest autobiographical memories.

Dissociation is one of the phenomena that is closely linked to memory processes, specifically to autobiographical memory. Although a considerable amount of research investigated the relationship between dissociation and basic memory processes, how dissociation as a non-pathological personality trait relates to the characteristics of autobiographical memory is still largely unclear. Here, we investigated the relationship between dissociative tendency and the affect, phenomenology, and centrality of emotional autobiographical memories by asking participants low and high on dissociation to recall their happiest and saddest memories. Results indicated that dissociation is characterised by a negative self-concept and leads to increased accessibility and centrality of the saddest memories to identity and life story and to decreased vividness and clarity of time of the happiest memories. Findings also showed that dissociation leads to perceiving these emotionally salient memories as psychologically more distant yet feeling more positive about them over time, supporting the view of dissociation as the result of an ineffective emotional regulation system. The study provides empirical evidence that dissociation relates to the recollective experience of valenced autobiographical memories in different ways.

Stability and change in the organisation of collective memory representations.

In this study, we investigated the impact of a highly consequential public event, the July 15 Coup Attempt, on the structure and organisation of events in Turkish collective memory. To do this, we followed up on our earlier work (Mutlutürk, Tekcan, & Boduroglu, 2021) that used the multidimensional scaling approach to identify critical dimensions in public event representational space. Participants rated the similarity of 15 key public events in a pairwise fashion, across three waves of data collection. They were also asked to report for which political party they had voted in the most recent election. We replicated our earlier results that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were clustered based on their specific attributes. Despite substantial stability in the organisation of collective memories across three time points, the post-coup representational space among voters of the ruling party changed, eliminating clusters within the political dimension and resulting in the ruling party achieving a central and anchor status. These findings suggest that, transformative events may have the potential to impact the structure and organisation of collective memory representations and sociopolitical identity may have to do with the stability of collective memories.

Life-span retrieval of public events: Reminiscence bump for high-impact events, recency for others.

Although substantial evidence exists showing a reliable reminiscence bump for personal events, data regarding retrieval distributions for public events have been equivocal. The primary aim of the present study was to address life-span retrieval distributions of different types of public events in comparison to personal events, and to test whether the existing accounts of the bump can explain the distribution of public events. We asked a large national sample to report the most important, happiest, and saddest personal events and the most important, happiest, saddest, most proud, most fearful, and most shameful public events. We found a robust bump corresponding to the third decade of life for the happiest and the most important positive but not for the saddest and most important negative personal events. For the most important public events, a bump emerged only for the two most frequently mentioned events. Distributions of public events cued with emotions were marked by recency. These results point to potential differences in retrieval of important personal and public events. While the life-script framework well accounts for the findings regarding important personal events, a chronologically retroactive search seem to guide retrieval of public events. Reminiscence bump observed for the two public events suggest that age-at-event affects recall of public events to the degree that the events are high-impact ones that dominate nation's collective memory. Results provide further evidence that the bump is not unitary and points to importance of event type and memory elicitation method with regard to competing explanations of the phenomenon.

Urban-rural differences in children's earliest memories.

The purpose of the present study was to address the effects of urban vs. rural upbringing on earliest autobiographical memories. We asked children (aged 10-13) brought up in an urban vs. in a rural setting to report their earliest memories. Earliest memories of children from rural areas were a year later than those of children from urban areas. Moreover, memories of children from rural areas were more likely to contain social interactions and tended to be less detailed compared to those from urban areas. The groups, however, were not different in specificity, autonomous orientation, or emotion. Results are discussed in the context of a social cultural developmental approach.

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 600 Turkish words from four age groups.

The main purpose of this study was to report age-based subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.

Remembering and telling self-consistent and self-discrepant memories.

It has been argued that memories that are inconsistent with one's self would differ from those that are consistent with the self. The present study addresses retrieval, phenomenology, rehearsal and narrative characteristics of autobiographical memories that are consistent versus discrepant with one's self. One hundred participants were asked to recall one self-consistent and one self-discrepant memory as well as an episode of telling these memories to others. They also filled out the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire and the Centrality of Event Scale for each memory. Results showed no difference between self-consistent and self-discrepant memories in retrieval time, specificity or phenomenology. However, self-discrepant memory narratives contained more meaning-making statements and less autonomy than self-consistent memories. Compared to self-consistent memories, self-discrepant memories were told to fewer people, and listener responses were more negative when they were told. Results are discussed in relation to the functions these memories serve.

Effects of self-referencing on feeling-of-knowing accuracy and recollective experience.

The current research investigated the impact of self-referencing (SR) on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these metamemory judgements and specifically test the relationship between recollective experiences and FOK accuracy within the accessibility framework FOK judgements are thought to be by-products of the retrieval process and are therefore closely related to memory performance. Because relating information to one's self is one of the factors enhancing memory performance, we investigated the effect of self-related encoding on FOK accuracy and recollective experience. We compared performance on this condition to a separate deep processing condition in which participants reported the frequency of occurrence of pairs of words. Participants encoded pairs of words incidentally, and following a delay interval, they attempted at retrieving each target prompted by its cue. Then, they were re-presented with all cues and asked to provide FOK ratings regarding their likelihood of recognising the targets amongst distractors. Finally, they were given a surprise recognition task in which following each response they identified whether the response was remembered, known or just guessed. Our results showed that only SR at encoding resulted in better memory, higher FOK accuracy and increased recollective experience.

Retrieval and phenomenology of autobiographical memories in blind individuals.

Although visual imagery is argued to be an essential component of autobiographical memory, there have been surprisingly few studies on autobiographical memory processes in blind individuals, who have had no or limited visual input. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how blindness affects retrieval and phenomenology of autobiographical memories. We asked 48 congenital/early blind and 48 sighted participants to recall autobiographical memories in response to six cue words, and to fill out the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire measuring a number of variables including imagery, belief and recollective experience associated with each memory. Blind participants retrieved fewer memories and reported higher auditory imagery at retrieval than sighted participants. Moreover, within the blind group, participants with total blindness reported higher auditory imagery than those with some light perception. Blind participants also assigned higher importance, belief and recollection ratings to their memories than sighted participants. Importantly, these group differences remained the same for recent as well as childhood memories.

Life scripts across age groups: a comparison of adolescents, young adults, and older adults.

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate cultural life scripts across three age groups. Adolescents, young adults, and older adults were asked to list the seven most important events that a typical newborn would experience in a lifetime. They also provided estimates of emotional valence and age for the life script events they listed. Results showed that there was substantial overlap in the script events listed by three groups. The adolescent and young adult scripts were more similar to each other than they were to the older adult script. Older adult scripts also differed from that of the other two groups in that they (a) were more typical, and (b) showed a stronger bump for positive events corresponding to young adulthood. The bump for positive script events emerged for events not experienced by the participants as well.

Remembering the first seizure and the diagnosis of epilepsy: how much impact do they have in our lives?

The aim of the study described here was to investigate what people with epilepsy (PWE) remember about their first seizures and the diagnoses they received, as well as what healthy control participants (HCP) remember about the first seizure they witnessed. Forty PWE were asked to recall in detail their first seizures and their diagnoses, and 40 HCP were asked to recall the first seizure they witnessed. All participants also rated aspects of their subjective reactions to these experiences. Although the first seizure was more surprising and received more covert rehearsal than the diagnosis, PWE recalled equal numbers of details about the two events. Free recall protocols showed that the memory narratives were longer for the first seizure than for the diagnosis. HCP also showed almost perfect recall for the personal circumstances of the first seizure they witnessed. These findings, combined with strong emotional reactions to these experiences, suggest that they lead to detailed and lasting memories.

Memory bias in anorexia nervosa: evidence from directed forgetting.

The aim of this study was to examine memory bias for disorder-relevant information in anorexia nervosa by using the directed forgetting paradigm. Normal controls and patients with anorexia nervosa were given a list consisting of neutral and disorder-relevant words, which they were either asked to remember (R) or forget (F). Memory performance was measured by a free recall and a Yes/No recognition task for all items. There was a directed forgetting effect for both groups; however, the magnitude of the effect (difference between R and F words) was smaller for the patient group due to higher recall of F items. Further analyses showed that this was true only for disorder-relevant but not for neutral items. Our findings support the existence of a strong memory bias for disorder-relevant information in patients with anorexia nervosa, who had difficulty in avoiding the processing of information that they were asked to forget.

Memory and metamemory for semantic information in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Several studies have been conducted on OCD patients' memory and metamemory performance in episodic tasks. However, there is a clear lack of research addressing these issues for semantic memory (i.e., retrieval of information from long-term memory). Although findings regarding a memory deficit is somewhat equivocal, the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that OCD patients with primarily checking compulsions show reduced confidence in their memory performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate memory and metamemory performance of checkers in semantic memory domain. We compared checker OCD patients, non-checker OCD patients and normal controls on their ability to retrieve answers to general knowledge questions with a recall as well as a recognition test. We also investigated prospective (feeling-of-knowing (FOK)) and retrospective (confidence) metamemory judgments. Checker OCs were not poorer in retrieving semantic information from long-term memory. Neither were they less confident about their ability to remember currently unrecallable information in the future (FOK judgments) or about the accuracy of retrieved information (confidence judgments). Moreover, accuracy of metamemory judgments were comparable across groups. Overall, our results revealed that checker OCs do not show a memory or metamemory deficit when semantic memory was concerned, suggesting that any memory and metamemory deficit may be special to recently experienced materials.

Memory and metamemory in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Studies on the link between checking and memory problems have produced equivocal results regarding a general memory deficit in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and subclinical checkers. However, there is clear and consistent evidence that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show lack of confidence in their memory performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate memory and metamemory performance (feeling-of-knowing judgments) for neutral and threat-related material in three groups: OCD patients (OCs), subclinical checkers (SCs), and normal controls (NCs). Participants studied a list of neutral and threat word pairs. After an initial cued-recall test, they provided feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments for unrecalled word pairs, followed by a recognition test. The results showed that OCs but not SCs were impaired in both recall and recognition compared to NCs. OCs were also less confident about their future memory performance than the other two groups, as reflected in their lower FOK ratings. Moreover, FOK judgments of the OCs were not reliable predictors of their recognition performance. Finally, neither OCs nor SCs showed any evidence of memory bias for threat-relevant information. The results support the idea of a general memory and a metamemory deficit in OCs.

Effects of age on flashbulb memories.

The authors investigated the effect of aging on flashbulb (FB) memories. In 1996, elderly Turks recalled how they had heard about 2 remote events--the death of the first president of Turkey (in 1938) and another event involving a change in the national borders of the country (in 1939)--and both elderly and younger adults recalled how they heard about the recent death of the 8th president of Turkey (in 1993). Seventy percent of the elderly had FB memories for the 1938 death; critical variables for the formation of FB memories were personal importance attached to the event and rehearsal. Ninety percent of younger Turks and 72% of elderly Turks had FB memories for the 1993 death; the only variable that differed between the 2 groups was rehearsal.

Episodic memory and metamemory in Parkinson's disease patients.

This study investigated episodic memory and metamemory for verbs and nouns in patients who have cognitive impairments associated with Parkinson's disease (PD). PD patients and healthy control participants were asked to recall word pairs and provide feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments for the items they were unable to recall. This was followed by a 4-alternative recognition test. PD patients were impaired in both recall and recognition, compared with controls. In terms of metamemory, PD patients were less confident in their ability to recognize the unrecalled items in a future recognition test. Most important, accuracy of PD patients' FOK judgments was not above chance and was lower than that of control participants. The PD group correctly recognized fewer verbs than nouns, but type of material (verb vs. noun) had no impact on recall or FOK judgments. In addition, contribution of executive functions to FOK accuracy was different in PD patients and controls.