Abstract
This study investigated autobiographical memory for emotionally flavoured experiences in amnesia. Ten amnesic patients and 10 matched control subjects completed the Autobiographical Memory Interview and three semi-structured interviews which assessed memory for personal events associated with pain, happiness and fear. Despite retrograde amnesia for autobiographical facts and incidents, amnesics remembered a similar number of emotionally significant personal experiences as control subjects. Their recollections generally lacked elaboration and detail, but pain-related memories appeared to be more mildly impaired than memories associated with happiness and fear. The findings are discussed in relation to recent views on the relationship between affect and memory.
Highlights
Retrograde amnesia is characterized by a memory loss for past life experiences
On the basis of prior clinical studies and theoretical considerations on the relationship between memory and affect, it was expected that personal memories associated with strong emotions may be partly spared in amnesic patients
Autobiographical memory has rarely been investigated in brain-damaged patients, which may be due to the lack of experimental control and the difficulty in verifying their recollections
Summary
Retrograde amnesia is characterized by a memory loss for past life experiences. Amnesia is usually not complete, as brain damage typically affects some types of old memories more than others. Remote semantic memory is often seen to be better preserved than old episodic memories, and amnesic patients typically show a gradient which documents a differential disruption of memory for recent relative to early experiences (Butters and Cermak, 1986; MacKinnon and Squire, 1989). Recent clinical studies have indicated, that autobiographical memory may have both semantic and episodic components. This distinction between relative sparing of semantic personal facts and deficient recollection of specific occasions has been supported by a number of clinical investiga-
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