Autobiographical Facts Research Articles

A FEMALE LITERARY PORTRAIT IN THE NOVEL «THREE LOVES» BY ARCHIBALD JOSEPH CRONIN

The article analyses the artistic concept of female characters in the dynamics of the author’s worldview on the material of the Scottish writer’s novel, identifies attempts to create a typology of Archibald Joseph Cronin’s female characters, and reveals the specificity of the heroines’ portrayal in realistic prose. The author believes that the study of female images with the help of literary portrait helps to determine the essential features of the prose and artistic world of the writer. The article highlights figurative analogies connected with autobiographical facts, and the typological approach chosen by the author to the female image system in the writer’s work allows not only to determine the internal logic of Archibald Cronin’s artistic worldview, but also the presence of “literary and aesthetic commonality”. The research proves that the writer managed to colourfully draw all female images with the help of his heroine, through her emotions and relationships with other characters. Thus, the writer’s female literary portrait is characterised by the preservation of the features of everyday plausibility and individuality: the female characters in the novel have both general typical features and individual ones.

Evoking episodic and semantic details with instructional manipulation during autobiographical recall.

Older adults tend to describe experiences from their past with fewer episodic details, such as spatiotemporal and contextually specific information, but more nonepisodic details, particularly personal semantic knowledge, than younger adults. While the reduction in episodic details is interpreted in the context of episodic memory decline typical of aging, interpreting the increased production of semantic details is not as straightforward. We modified the widely used Autobiographical Interview (AI) to create a Semantic Autobiographical Interview (SAI) that explicitly targets personal (P-SAI) and general semantic memories (G-SAI) with the aim of better understanding the production of semantic information in aging depending on instructional manipulation. Overall, older adults produced a lower proportion of target details than young adults. There was an intra-individual consistency in the production of target details in the AI and P-SAI, suggesting a trait level in the production of personal target details or consistency in the narrative style and communicative goals adopted across interviews. Older adults consistently produced autobiographical facts and self-knowledge across interviews, suggesting that they are biased toward the production of personal semantic information regardless of instructions. These results cannot be easily accommodated by accounts of aging and memory emphasizing reduced cognitive control or compensation for episodic memory impairment. Nevertheless, future work is needed to fully disentangle between these accounts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The shared and unique neural correlates of personal semantic, general semantic, and episodic memory.

One of the most common distinctions in long-term memory is that between semantic (i.e., general world knowledge) and episodic (i.e., recollection of contextually specific events from one's past). However, emerging cognitive neuroscience data suggest a surprisingly large overlap between the neural correlates of semantic and episodic memory. Moreover, personal semantic memories (i.e., knowledge about the self and one's life) have been studied little and do not easily fit into the standard semantic-episodic dichotomy. Here, we used fMRI to record brain activity while 48 participants verified statements concerning general facts, autobiographical facts, repeated events, and unique events. In multivariate analysis, all four types of memory involved activity within a common network bilaterally (e.g., frontal pole, paracingulate gyrus, medial frontal cortex, middle/superior temporal gyrus, precuneus, posterior cingulate, angular gyrus) and some areas of the medial temporal lobe. Yet the four memory types differentially engaged this network, increasing in activity from general to autobiographical facts, from autobiographical facts to repeated events, and from repeated to unique events. Our data are compatible with a component process model, in which declarative memory types rely on different weightings of the same elementary processes, such as perceptual imagery, spatial features, and self-reflection.

Episodic memory and personal semantics as triggers of nostalgia: its relationships between abstraction of memory content and temporal distance

ABSTRACT Nostalgia, an autobiographically relevant positive emotion, is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. Autobiographical memory, which is one of the cognitive bases of nostalgia, includes both abstract semantic and detailed episodic memories. Recent studies have defined and classified memories that are located between semantic and episodic memory as personal semantics. Although autobiographical memory and personal semantics range over a continuum, past nostalgia research has not focused on or controlled them. In two experiments, undergraduate students retrieved episodic memory and personal semantics and rated cognitive and affective items. The intensity of nostalgia differed according to the types of memory content and temporal distance of the memory from the present. These results revealed that not only unique events but also repeated events and autobiographical facts induced nostalgia; furthermore, repeated events from both the distant and recent past (primary and high school, respectively) consistently induced relatively greater nostalgia, but in some cases, they were not significantly different from other types of memory (i.e., unique events and autobiographical facts). These findings suggest that both episodic memory and personal semantics are involved in the occurrence of nostalgia.

The impact of disclosing emotions on ratings of interpersonal closeness, warmth, competence, and leadership ability.

Increasingly, business leaders and other professionals are called upon to be vulnerable and authentic in the workplace, which often includes disclosing emotions to others. While sharing emotions is known to enhance closeness, several questions remain underexplored. Specifically, disclosing personal facts about oneself and disclosing emotions have often been studied together, making it difficult to determine the effects of disclosing emotions per se. Moreover, not enough is known about factors that may influence effects of disclosing emotions, including recipients' attitudes toward emotion-sharing, the sharer's gender, and whether one considers the disclosure to be similar to one's own experiences. We examined the impact of disclosing positive and negative emotion on ratings of closeness, warmth, competence, and leadership ability. 119 participants (95 female) in the United States were shown headshots of individuals who were introduced in the first person in written format. For half of the pictures, an autobiographical fact about the individual's past was disclosed. For the other half, an autobiographical fact and an associated emotion were disclosed. We found that sharing both positive and negative emotions increased feelings of closeness above and beyond the effects of autobiographical sharing alone. Sharing positive emotions also increased ratings of warmth, competence, and leadership ability. Male and female sharers benefited equally from disclosing emotions and effects were largely robust to recipients' attitudes toward emotional expression. Having something in common with the disclosed fact or emotion further increased all ratings. These findings indicate that disclosing emotions may improve interpersonal interactions, with potential management applications in business.

PSYCHOANALYTIC ANALYSIS OF TWO FEMINIST ARTISTS AUTOBIOGRAPHIC ART WORKS

The psychoanalytic analysis method aims to identify the artist's life experiences, traumas, traces of his self and traces of his psychic structure in the work revealed in the visual arts. The facts intended to be revealed in question reveal the autobiography of the artist in his work. While examining the psychic structure of the artist, it was determined that the artist produced autobiographical works with a Feminist approach, sometimes with life experiences and early effects on the artist's psyche. While feminist artists aimed to defend gender equality and women's rights and freedoms, they realized this through their own life experiences, and in this context, the facts related to the feminist approach were transferred to art in their own psychic structures and unconsciously. In this context, the research aims to examine the works of two prominent female artists in Feminist Art, Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, to examine their psychic structures with the psychoanalytic analysis method, to reveal the autobiographical facts and to determine the feminist phenomena in the artist's Psyche. In the study, it was determined that the two female artists included in the sample revealed the Feminist phenomena stemming from their experiences, as well as the situations that exist in the existential development of the individual in the pasicaanalytic context, and the Feminist phenomena from the unconscious phenomena.

ОСВІТНІЙ ЗВ'ЯЗОК «ВЧИТЕЛЬ ‒ УЧЕНЬ» У РЕФЛЕКСІЯХ НАУКОВЦІВ МИНУЛОГО (ІІ ПОЛОВИНА ХІХ – ПОЧАТОК ХХ СТ.)

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the functioning of the "Teacher-Student" system in the autobiographies of scientists written in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, the popularity of the images "I-Student", "Student", "I-Teacher", "Teacher" is determined, which allows us to draw conclusions about the awareness of the authors of autobiographies of the mechanisms of building a university career and the peculiarities of the researcher's scientific creativity. It was determined that for scientists-authors of autobiographies the most important component of the "Teacher-Student" system was the image of "I-Student". Depicting education as an autobiographical fact, the memoirists focused their attention on the moment of their own apprenticeship, which, in their opinion, was largely the result of self-education and supported by a belief in one's own destiny. The "teacher" acted as a catalyst, giving a certain direction to the process of acquiring "mastery". The transition to the status of "Master" was sometimes accompanied by a break with the person who claimed the role of "Teacher", in particular, in the case when the mentor could not ensure the student's entry into the university environment due to inappropriate moral or professional qualities. In such a case, the figure of the teacher was replaced by a "patron", which actually legitimized the change of status, certified the level of "mastery". At this stage, "mastery" was confirmed by scientific achievements and recognition by authoritative persons.The figure of the "Student" remained outside the boundaries of autobiographical texts, which, most likely, can be explained by various reasons: on the one hand, the fact that the process of formation of scientific schools was just beginning, and this phenomenon was not understood by memoirists; on the other - the history of writing autobiographical texts, most of which were not finished due to various circumstances. In addition, it can be assumed that the peculiarities of the vision of the "Teacher-Student" system in the mentioned autobiographical texts are due to the specifics of scientific creativity, which, like literary creativity, is primarily the result of individual work.

Healing Power of Personal Narrative

This study is an attempt to delineate the healing power of personalnarrative, and to identify autobiography as a genre based on the personalnarrative, recovered memories of psychological traumas and confessional mode,can transform into therapeutic tools of purgation in art resulting in catharsis. Inpsychological literature, autobiography is proved that human beings naturallyseek to understand how and why significant or life turning events happen intheir own lives or in the world they exist in. The autobiographical impulse hasundertaken to record the autobiographers' life stories as a form of self-therapy.To construct a story of their lives and to compose memory, emotion and internalexperience as well as autobiographical facts into a story helps them to becomewho they are. Storytelling is an important part of self-development, and thenarration that has gone awry can be addressed in psychotherapy. Thepsychotherapists used to discuss how creative writing can help authorsarticulate, accept and understand their vulnerability and suffering by releasingtheir thoughts in the secure medium of art. Discussing the implication ofcoherence for psychotherapy they maintain that constructing a personal storyfacilitates the comprehension of significant experiences because the process ofwriting allows the remembering of events during their organization in acoherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings related to those events.The study sets out to get the record right by redefining autobiography as healingfiction –assigning to its writers a vital role in psychological rehabilitation
 through the medium of art. Then it presents the theoretical questions and termsconcerning autobiography as a genre. The aim is to locate this study within itsliterary, psychological, socio-cultural, contexts to validate the central concept of- the healing power of autobiography and its implication to the individual andcommunity alike.

H. Kant’s Autobiographical Novel «The Stay» («Der Aufenthalt», 1976): Fiction and Reality

The theme of Kant’s autobiographical novel «The Stay» (Der Aufenthalt, 1976) is the spiritual rebirth of German prisoner of war, a soldier of the Hitlerite ar-my. The article reveals the interaction of two components found in the novel: the fic-tional and the real ones in depicting this complex psychological process. The analysis of the chapters (X, XV, VI) shows various forms of artistic –aesthetic processing of authentic autobiographical material. In Chapter X the author «collects» his own emotional impressions, experienced by him in different periods of his life (such as cold, loneliness, hunger) and «ties» them to the situation of the main character sitting in a lonely cell in a prison. In Chapter XV he «adds» to real autobiographical facts an important artistic detail –a school pencil case of a Jewish girl killed by Nazis. In Chapter VI Kant makes a masterful use of temporal and narrative distance: the hero estimates the decisive episode of his youth –a conversation with a Russian woman-doctor from the viewpoint of a mature person recalling his life.

“The Blue Rose” by Lesia Ukrainka as the ‘rite de passage’: biography, psychiatry and writing

The paper explores “The Blue Rose” (1896) by Lesia Ukrainka in terms of the ‘rite de passage’ as the text with a ritual function that reflects the cultural, gender, and author status transformations within the field of literature. In the most general sense, the first drama by Lesia Ukrainka is analyzed as an act of initiation into the fin de siècle culture. Peculiar features of this ritual are the critical comments of the modern culture, transformation of the autobiographical facts into aesthetic phenomena, and interiorization of the motif of death.
 “The Blue Rose” discusses a female genetic illness — a popular topic of the late 19th century — and depicts an attempt of escaping into the illusionary world of platonic love. Representation of the female insanity and ‘unconventional love’, as well as the critique of a bourgeois view of happiness and the patriarchal world, is also an important aspect of the drama. References to the unpublished materials of Lesia Ukrainka’s archive — her excerpts from the “Psychiatry” by Krafft-Ebing — allow concluding that “The Blue Rose” treats insanity as a psychiatric and not a psychological phenomenon. The mother-daughter relations as well as the tension of the mother-son relations in the family of Kosaches are also an important element in Lesia Ukrainka’s work.
 “The Blue Rose” (1896) is a multidimensional and experimental drama. Its author transforms numerous autobiographical facts into cultural situations and engages in a discussion on the topical themes and motifs of the fin de siècle, in particular female insanity, hysteria, and maternity. The writer employs naturalistic methods of analysis and reinforces descriptions of female insanity with the facts from psychiatric practice. “The Blue Rose” displays an interest of Lesia Ukrainka in Neoplatonism, which she would later associate with a Neo-romantic impulse ‘ins Blaue’.
 In general, the author did not follow the foreign patterns, as the critiques noted, but explored the Zeitgeist of the new era. She involved authentic practical experience of her own life and the lives of her relatives and friends, analyzed moral norms and psychological states referring to the cultural codes that ranged from “The Romance of the Rose”, Dante, Shakespeare, and Heine to Zola, Ibsen, and Nadson. This practice ensured Lesia Ukrainka’s initiation into the fin de siècle culture and paved her way to the modernist drama.

FRANZ KAFKA: PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE WRITER'S OEUVRE

The article presents the results of research on Franz Kafka's personality and oeuvre. The influence of cultural and historical factors on the development of the writer's personality was examined. The period and place of Kafka's residence had signs of social instability and conflict, including such events as the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the analysis based on autobiographical facts showed that the writer had seemingly a low level of interest in global historical events, and, therefore, the latter had insignificant influence on Kafka’s writing. The factors that had a significant impact on Kafka’s personality and works were divided into several groups. The micro factors include close social environment and micro events. In these groups, the following facts played a significant role. The most important figure in Kafka's life was his authoritarian and oppressive father. Through their relationship the writer’s main personality traits were developed. Constant acts of psychological tyranny, negative reinforcement of any Kafka’s initiative, including creative writing, and the feeling of guilt regarding everything that Kafka would do, led to the development of shyness, low self-esteem, insecurity, social isolation, permanent fear of the outside world, despondency and continuous unreasonable feeling of guilt. In this relationship, the mother played a role of a buffer, and over time, the son and the father started to communicate only through her. Kafka often endowed the main characters of his works with all of the above features, and portrayed their lives as depressing, sullen and hopeless. The psychological childhood trauma inflicted by Kafka’s father had substantial consequences, the emotions of its experience were embedded in the storylines of the writer’s novels (e.g. "The Trial", "The Castle"), where the protagonist is under complete control of a higher authority that punishes and humiliates him for unknown reasons. Although writer's loyal friend, Max Brod, provided psychological support and encouraged him to write, Kafka’s disappointment in his own talent sometimes led to the destruction of manuscripts. Research also revealed that personality characteristics of certain writer’s relatives were portrayed as his characters’ features in the novels, in “The Trial”, for instance. According to the study, it was found out that although the plot of the main works of Franz Kafka and his characters have fictional decorations and names, the emotions that run through his works have entirely real grounds and the writer experienced them at certain periods of his life.

Classification of general and personal semantic details in the Autobiographical Interview

The Autobiographical Interview (AI) separates internal (episodic) and external (non-episodic) details from transcribed protocols using an exhaustive and reliable scoring system. While the details comprising the internal composite are centered on elements of episodic memory, external details are more heterogeneous as they are meant to capture a variety of non-episodic utterances: general semantics, different types of personal semantics details, metacognitive statements, repetitions, and details about off topic events. Elevated external details are consistently observed in aging and in neurodegenerative diseases. In the present study, we augmented the AI scoring system to differentiate subtypes of external details to test whether the elevation of these details in aging and in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (including mixed frontotemporal/semantic dementia [FTD/SD] and progressive non-fluent aphasia [PNFA]) would be specific to general and personal semantics or would concern all subtypes. Specifically, we separated general semantic details from personal semantic details (including autobiographical facts, self-knowledge, and repeated events). With aging, external detail elevation was observed for general and personal semantic details but not for other types of external details. In frontotemporal lobar degeneration, patients with FTD/SD (but not PNFA) generated an excess of personal semantic details but not general semantic details. The increase in personal but not general semantic details in FTD/SD is consistent with prevalent impairment of general semantic memory in SD, and with the personalization of concepts in this condition. Under standard AI instructions, external details were intended to capture off-topic utterances and were not intended as a direct measure of semantic abilities. Future investigations concerned with semantic processing in aging and in dementia could modify standard instructions of the AI to directly probe semantic content.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SALVADOR DALÍ'S PERSONALITY AND CREATIVE PROCESS

The article is devoted to the study of the psychological aspects of Salvador Dalí’s personality and creative process. Based on the analyzed data taken from cultural and historical conditions of the artist's life, as well as from biographical, autobiographical facts and works of art, the following groups of factors were found that influenced both the psychological characteristics and elements of the artist's creative products. The group of macro factors includes geographical, in particular the tendency to portray the landscape, where the artist lived, as the background image in his paintings; global events (the image of the Civil War was used in the painting "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War" (1936)). Micro factors include two subcategories: close social environment and personal events. The death of the elder brother had seemingly an intense influence on artist's personality and creativity that led to the development of guilt in the parents who treated Dalí in a special way, as their second and only son. This situation formed a sense of permissiveness and uniqueness that, becoming Dalí’s fixed personality traits, were manifested in art: the widespread use of free associations and a surrealistic approach in paintings. Freud's ideas had an exceptional influence on Salvador Dalí, and led to the development of a unique method in his works of art - a paranoid-critical method that allows mixing real objects in paintings with the fantastic ones. It is worth noting the influence of two strong childhood emotional impressions that have signs of psychological trauma: contemplation of the decomposition process of a hedgehog’s corpse and entomophobia of grasshoppers. These two events formed individual images that the artist often used in his surrealist paintings. Therefore, based on these facts we can talk about the existence of a certain mechanism that transform the image of psychological trauma into a permanent element of creativity. The results of the study showed the presence of the following Dalí’s main personality traits: shyness (especially in childhood and adolescence), narcissistic personality type, alienation and closed nature, ambition and the desire for recognition. Thus, it can be argued that there is a certain mechanism in the creative process that transforms the formed psychological traumas and phobias into stable symbolic elements of creative products. The consistent effect of certain events in a life on personality structure was established and, accordingly, the impact of such events on a choice of a certain style in creativity was revealed.

Education as the Space where Identity Processes Come to Play – Based on Educational Narratives of Women

In this text, the Author carries out theoretical discussion and presents the outcomes of her studies of the shaping process of women's identity in the context of a human (auto)biography, referring to the category of identity, putting particular stress to the educational biography, called a special type of a thematic biography (important for the category of identity), and a category of narration, of key importance for comprehending the phenomenon of auto(biography). A human biography is an invaluable source of information on their life and the person her/himself. Getting acquainted with the biography, looking for information about a given person, learning her/his story from her/himself (biography passed through an autobiographical account) or from the biographical materials, e.g. diaries, letters, memoirs and recollection of others. The Author says that one of the identity criteria is the sense of one's own continuity in time. This criterion can be fulfilled thanks to the autobiographical memory, or a memory of personal episodes and autobiographical facts. The problems of biography are closely connected with the autobiographical memory. In the text the Author presents three intertwined categories: identity, autobiographical memory and biography.

Covert Intention to Answer "Yes" or "No" Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial Electroencephalograms (EEGs).

Interpersonal communication is based on questions and answers, and the most useful and simplest case is the binary “yes or no” question and answer. The purpose of this study is to show that it is possible to decode intentions on “yes” or “no” answers from multichannel single-trial electroencephalograms, which were recorded while covertly answering to self-referential questions with either “yes” or “no.” The intention decoding algorithm consists of a common spatial pattern and support vector machine, which are employed for the feature extraction and pattern classification, respectively, after dividing the overall time-frequency range into subwindows of 200 ms × 2 Hz. The decoding accuracy using the information within each subwindow was investigated to find useful temporal and spectral ranges and found to be the highest for 800–1200 ms in the alpha band or 200–400 ms in the theta band. When the features from multiple subwindows were utilized together, the accuracy was significantly increased up to ∼86%. The most useful features for the “yes/no” discrimination was found to be focused in the right frontal region in the theta band and right centroparietal region in the alpha band, which may reflect the violation of autobiographic facts and higher cognitive load for “no” compared to “yes.” Our task requires the subjects to answer self-referential questions just as in interpersonal conversation without any self-regulation of the brain signals or high cognitive efforts, and the “yes” and “no” answers are decoded directly from the brain activities. This implies that the “mind reading” in a true sense is feasible. Beyond its contribution in fundamental understanding of the neural mechanism of human intention, the decoding of “yes” or “no” from brain activities may eventually lead to a natural brain-computer interface.

Existential dimension of contemporary ukrainian cultural studies: review of recent works by M. V. Diachenko

The article is devoted to the review of the philosophical essays of Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of Kharkov State Academy of Culture Mykola Vasilovich Diachenko, who published recently last two books “Roman Stoics: Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Experience of reading” and “Just to live (philosophical essays and outlines)”. The authors of the paper explore the main philosophical themes and ethical discourses of Diachenko’s miniatures. On the basis of the original interpretation of the philosophy of stoicism, his own life experience, autobiographical facts, analysis of a wide philosophical and literary material in his works M. V. Diachenko examines the complex existential problems of contemporary man – loneliness, suffering, anxiety, love, death. Much attention is paid to the relationship of man with nature, the role of animals in human life and in his spiritual development. In the article, the authors emphasize that one of the main issues that arises in the works of V. Diachenko is the question of tolerant and careful attitude of a person to animals and nature. In the context of the philosophical and literary tradition of the 19th–20th centuries V. Diachenko emphasizes the need for a person to be aware of his responsibility to the living nature. His miniatures are imbued with existential perception of life, reflections on the values of life and the value of life itself, as well as the art to experience tragic events and processes of one's life. In the context of the philosophy of stoicism, the philosophy of the East, European philosophy of the 19–20th centuries, the author teaches the reader an optimistic view of the complex, ageless problems of a modern man – love, moral choice, guilt, loneliness. In the philosophical miniatures of M. V. Diachenko, the philosophy of suffering is closely intertwined with the philosophy of charity and rebirth, and this makes it a new turn in ethical philosophy. The article analyzes the ideas and principles of formation of man’s spiritual existence, which according to M. V. Diachenko, contribute to understanding how to live for a person who constantly overcomes life crises. The paper demonstrates that the ideas of M. V. Diachenko occupy a prominent place in the Kharkov university philosophy and correspond to the moods of the modern readers. The authors emphasize that Diachenko’ essays propose the new directions in the Ukrainian philosophy of the recent years.

Poetics of time and space in the works of Yermil Kostrov

The article discusses the spatial-temporal organisation of Yermil Kostrov’s works, identifies features that reflect the evolution of his work. The author of the article analyses Yermil Kostrov’s odes and epistles since these genres were the most stable in the system of classicism. Analysis of artistic time and space in Yermil Kostrov’s poetry reveals the evolution of his work in the context of the literary process of the transitional era of the last third of the 18th century. In works devoted to congenial contemporaries – Alexande rSuvorov and Gavrila Derzhavin, the poet refuses the "finished" rhetorical word and refers to the expression of individual-personal experiences. His odes and epistles voice specific features of the personality or the creative discoveries of the addressees of the works, reflect autobiographical facts. This corresponds to the general trend in the literary process of the transitional era of the last third of the 18th century.

The contribution of the left anterior ventrolateral temporal lobe to the retrieval of personal semantics

Autobiographical facts and personal trait knowledge are conceptualized as distinct types of personal semantics, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms that separate them remain underspecified. One distinction may be their level of specificity, with autobiographical facts reflecting idiosyncratic conceptual knowledge and personal traits representing basic level category knowledge about the self. Given the critical role of the left anterior ventrolateral temporal lobe (AVTL) in the storage and retrieval of semantic information about unique entities, we hypothesized that knowledge of autobiographical facts may depend on the integrity of this region to a greater extent than personal traits. To provide neuropsychological evidence relevant to this issue, we investigated personal semantics, semantic knowledge of non-personal unique entities, and episodic memory in two individuals with well-defined left (MK) versus right (DW) AVTL lesions. Relative to controls, MK demonstrated preserved personal trait knowledge but impaired “experience-far” (i.e., spatiotemporal independent) autobiographical fact knowledge, semantic memory for non-personal unique entities, and episodic memory. In contrast, both experience-far autobiographical facts and personal traits were spared in DW, whereas episodic memory and aspects of semantic memory for non-personal unique entities were impaired. These findings support the notion that autobiographical facts and personal traits have distinct cognitive features and neural mechanisms. They also suggest a common organizing principle for personal and non-personal semantics, namely the specificity of such knowledge to an entity, which is reflected in the contribution of the left AVTL to retrieval.

Analysing Style and Autobiographical Element in Alice Munro’s “Dear Life”

The paper aims to stylistically analyze the autobiographical elements in Alice Munro’s Story “Dear Life.” It is discovered that from the starting to the end of the story, it is full of the events which are very closely linked to Munro’s own life. Although the events have close resemblance to Munro’s life, these are factiously and artistically depicted so that they serve the purpose of literature and the stylistic aspects of the story. The researchers in the paper analyze and discuss the stylistic characteristics of the author with the help of the textual evidence from the story and to further support these, they cite the literature on the similar aspects. Finally, it is found that Munro’s fantastic style and the blend of the autobiographical facts and fiction make her story ‘Dear Life’ very interesting and worth reading.

Gamma-band neural synchrony due to autobiographical fact violation in a self-referential question

Our purpose was to investigate the cortical information processing of autobiographical fact violation (AFV) in self-referential questions. We expected that AFV in a self-referential question would evoke a characteristic pattern of neural synchrony and event-related potentials (ERPs). Averaged ERP and event-related synchronization in the gamma band were analyzed to observe differences between the processing of questions with and without AFV. Significant differences in ERP were found in the posterior area at 290–435ms (N400) and in the frontal area at 520–800ms (late positive component, LPC). Interestingly, differentiation of the gamma-band synchrony was found in two temporal periods, (255–365 and 525–585ms), which are comparable to the periods of significant ERP differences. The two periods are interpreted to be devoted to the processing of semantic and self-referential information, respectively. These findings may imply that the decision-making involved in answering self-referential questions is enabled by the integration of semantic and autobiographical information processing.