Abstract
The present study examines the representational content of voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories (objectification), as well as the anchorings according to age, sex and time contexts. 1.200 individuals of both sexes and different ages participated in this study and were asked to write down three memory events and three “oblivion” events in a personal, family and social framework and to note the date that these events took place. The results highlight the significance of social contexts in the reconstruction of the autobiographical past, which are space, time and different affiliation groups. The content of autobiographical memory is constructed through everyday relationships between the individuals and the members of the groups they belong to. Family, school, friends, the workspace, the socio-historical and political framework of their era provide the individuals with identity references. Both the quality and the time reference of the events depend on the age of the participants.
Highlights
The aim of the present study was to examine personal, family and social events people would like to remember or would rather forget, in order to identify what, why and through which processes people deliberately choose to remember or intentionally forget
As far as the content of involuntary autobiographical memory is concerned, it is linked to events that belong to the following categories: family context, friends, love and sexual relationships, life stages, job, materials-goods, studies, leisure time, unhappy moments, health, first time
The category vacation and travels is absent from the involuntary autobiographical memory, whereas we find five new categories
Summary
The aim of the present study was to examine personal, family and social events people would like to remember or would rather forget, in order to identify what, why and through which processes people deliberately choose to remember or intentionally forget. Intentional forgetting of events, not studied, as an on-line process per se in the present context, is a form of remembering, albeit involuntary; along with its voluntary counterpart involuntary remembering supplies autobiographical memory with its contents. Voluntary memory contents contain events enhancing individual identity, while the ones of involuntary memory comprise events threateting it (Candau, 1998; Haas & Jodelet, 1999). It is important in studying memory to concentrate on what people do know and on what they know that they “should not know”.
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