The flashbulb-like nature of memory for the first COVID-19 case and the impact of the emergency. A cross-national survey.

Flashbulb memories (FBMs) refer to vivid and long-lasting autobiographical memories for the circumstances in which people learned of a shocking and consequential public event. A cross-national study across eleven countries aimed to investigate FBM formation following the first COVID-19 case news in each country and test the effect of pandemic-related variables on FBM. Participants had detailed memories of the date and others present when they heard the news, and had partially detailed memories of the place, activity, and news source. China had the highest FBM specificity. All countries considered the COVID-19 emergency as highly significant at both the individual and global level. The Classification and Regression Tree Analysis revealed that FBM specificity might be influenced by participants' age, subjective severity (assessment of COVID-19 impact in each country and relative to others), residing in an area with stringent COVID-19 protection measures, and expecting the pandemic effects. Hierarchical regression models demonstrated that age and subjective severity negatively predicted FBM specificity, whereas sex, pandemic impact expectedness, and rehearsal showed positive associations in the total sample. Subjective severity negatively affected FBM specificity in Turkey, whereas pandemic impact expectedness positively influenced FBM specificity in China and negatively in Denmark.

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.

Remembering future life goals: Retrospective future thinking affects life goal qualities.

Personal goals are important for the construction and organization of episodic future thought. This study examines the impact of two future thinking perspectives on qualities of mental goal representations. Here, 142 participants (Mage = 21.9 years) reported on the content and characteristics of five life goals either retrospectively, imagining goals from the perspective of their 100-year-old self, or prospectively from the perspective of their current self. Results indicate that retrospectively reported life goals relied more on schematized knowledge, were dated to occur later in life, and were perceived as more self-concordant with increasing distance from the present. Independent of condition, more distant goals were rated as more difficult, less likely to occur, and were associated with lower self-efficacy. This study provides the first evidence that the point in life from which you consider your own future affects the qualities of mental goal representations, suggesting that retrospective future thinking serves as a form of psychological distancing.

Subjective judgments on direct and generative retrieval of autobiographical memory: The role of interoceptive sensibility and emotion.

Autobiographical remembering is a subjective experience, and whether retrieval is perceived to occur through involuntary or voluntary, direct or generative cognitive processes is also based on subjective intuition. The present study examined factors that may contribute to the subjective judgment that occurs when we perceive memories as being retrieved directly (i.e., a memory comes to mind directly and immediately) or through generative processes (i.e., recalling a memory with effort or by using additional information). We examined the hypothesis that internal awareness (interoceptive sensibility and mindfulness traits) contributes to the physical reaction and emotional impact of memories at retrieval, which then influence the subjective judgment that memories are retrieved directly. In two online experiments, participants were asked to recall specific memories following verbal cues and to judge the retrieval process (i.e., direct or generative). We demonstrated that emotional awareness, an interoceptive sensibility scale factor, consistently predicted a high probability of direct retrieval judgments independent of other predictors of direct retrieval, such as retrieval latency and cue concreteness. This effect was especially common for concrete cues. In Experiment 2 we demonstrated that emotional awareness predicted direct retrieval judgments through the mediation of retrieval impact (physical reaction and emotional impact). These results indicate the involvement of interoceptive processing in the direct retrieval of autobiographical memories. We discuss the role of interoception in memory retrieval and present interoceptive prediction error as a novel and potentially integrative account of our findings.