The effects of collective and personal transitions on the organization and contents of autobiographical memory in older Chinese adults.
Mem Cognit
; 45(8): 1335-1349, 2017 11.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-28710601
Life transitions like war, marriage, and immigration presumably organize autobiographical memory. Yet little is known about how the magnitude of a given transition affects this mnemonic impact. To examine this issue, we collected (a) word-cued events, (b) event-dating protocols, (c) personally important events, and (d) transitional impact scores of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and important events from Chinese adults who had been adolescents during the revolution. There were three main findings. First, rusticated participants, who moved from cities to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution, dated autobiographical memories in relation to this collective transition more frequently than nonrusticated participants, with the former group reporting a greater material (but not psychological) change in their lives due to this collective transition than the latter group. Second, material change predicted the degree to which the self-nominated important events served as temporal landmarks in event dating. Third, we observed that the events that people typically considered important and those that typically served as temporal landmarks changed as a function of age but displayed the similar temporal distributions. We conclude by considering the theoretical implications of these findings.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Mental Recall
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Rural Population
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Urban Population
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Memory, Episodic
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Life Change Events
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Aspects:
Determinantes_sociais_saude
Limits:
Aged
/
Humans
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Middle aged
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
En
Journal:
Mem Cognit
Year:
2017
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Country of publication: