Autobiographical Memory Research Articles

For better or for worse? Memories and mental health related to COVID-19 lockdowns in adolescents with Attention Deficit Disorders

Purpose In adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD, ICD-10 defined) we examined self-reported well-being, depressive symptoms and autobiographical memories from the first COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark in comparison to adolescents without an ADHD diagnosis. Methods Data from 16 adolescents with ADHD and 16 non-ADHD age and gender matched controls were collected between September 2020 and April 2021. Questionnaires included the World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5), the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ), and an autobiographical memory survey assessing a lockdown memory, a memory not related to lockdown and a future projection. Mixed design ANOVAs were used to compare within subject differences in memory types across groups and independent sample t-tests were used to compare group differences. Results Three adolescents with ADHD scored below the WHO-5 cut-off (< 50) and above the SMFQ cut-off (> 8) indicating risk of depression, compared to two in the control group. Both groups rated lockdown memories as less positive and more negative and reported feeling more sad and worried when reminiscing about lockdown experiences compared to ‘other personal memories’ and ‘future projections’. Compared to the non-ADHD controls, adolescents with ADHD reported more sadness, t(30) = −0.2.45, p < .05 and worries t(30) = −3.84, p < .001 when reminiscing about the lockdown. Conclusions Even though there were no striking differences between groups in the assessments on risk of depression, the findings suggest that adolescents diagnosed with ADHD were more negatively affected when recalling memories about the lockdown compared to their peers.

Place and Memory: Revisiting the Past Self Through Autobiographical Memory.

Place is everywhere as geography, location, territory, and landscape permeates everyday encounter. In contrast, memory is embedded in the physical setting as the burgeoning narratives of cities. In recent instances, literary settings of novels and characters are interpretations of actual life events. An immigrant from New York City returns to Lagos after a long period in Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and (2014) investigates the correlation of the past self within the present state of the setting. Exploring interrelated memories and places to revisit the sense of self, the present study aims to analyse how autobiographical memory distinguishes personal memory from social events and defines place attachment and identity in society. This article also explores the lack of conformity to the tendency to find the past self in different time and spatial aspects through which this research tries to bridge the past with the present using narrators' autobiographical memories.

Recall of Autobiographical Memories Following Odor vs Verbal Cues Among Adults With Major Depressive Disorder

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with deficits in autobiographical memory (AM) recall, which is thought to stem from disruptions in effortful recall. Understanding whether these deficits are mitigated when recall is stimulated more directly, such as by odor cues, could inform therapeutic interventions for MDD. To evaluate whether deficits in specific AM recall in MDD are mitigated when odor cues vs word cues are used to prompt memory. This cross-sectional study assessed recall of specific AMs in response to both odor cues and word cues (in a randomized, counterbalanced order) in a repeated measures design. Data were collected between September 2021 and November 2022. The study took place at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania and included adults with a primary diagnosis of MDD, according to the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview. Data were analyzed from January to June 2023. The primary outcome measure was the percentage of specific AMs recalled in response to odor-cued memories vs word-cued memories. Additional outcome measures included ratings of arousal, vividness, repetition, and recall response time for odor-cued memories vs word-cued memories. Thirty-two adults (mean [SD] age, 30.0 [10.1] years; 26 [81.3%] female; 6 [18.8%] male) with a primary diagnosis of MDD completed the study. Participants recalled more specific AMs for odor cues than word cues (mean [SD], 68.4% [20.4%] vs 52.1% [23.3%]; Cohen d, 0.78; P < .001). Additionally, odor-cued recall was rated more arousing (mean [SD], 3.0 [0.8] vs 2.6 [0.7]; Cohen d, 1.28; P < .001) and vivid (mean [SD], 3.3 [0.7] vs 3.0 [0.7]; Cohen d, 0.67; P < .001), and was slower than word-cued recall (mean [SD], 14.5 [3.6] vs 8.9 [3.4] seconds; Cohen d, 1.18; P < .001). When compared with the population mean for word cues in healthy controls (80%), participants recalled fewer specific memories in response to words (Cohen d, 1.18; P < .001), supporting the presence of overgenerality. Notably, the percentage of specific memories recalled in response to odor cues did not differ from the healthy control population mean (Cohen d, 0.26; P = .15). In this cross-sectional study, adults with MDD recalled more specific AMs in response to odor cues compared with word cues. This study suggests that AM deficits may only be observed when verbal cues are used and provides a potential new method for increasing specific AM recall in patients with MDD.

Proust and involuntary retrieval.

Proust was undoubtedly a pioneer in exploring cognitive processes engaged in memory. The analysis of the episode of the madeleine, as well as the study of Proust's statements on the goals of his work, clearly reveal the visionary side of this author. Long before several concepts entered into mainstream scientific thought, Proust proposed, among other things, that recall was a reconstruction, that a sensory cue could provoke a memory recall, and that we should distinguish between voluntary and involuntary memory. Through numerous episodes of "involuntary reminiscence" scattered throughout his work, Proust illustrates a particular form of autobiographic memory recall: a recall that does not involve consciousness and whose starting point is an emotion provoked by a specific cue. This recall, which leads, according to Proust, to a more intense revival of the memory than voluntary recall, has only reached prominence in cognitive science more than 80 years later. Additionaly, Proust underlined the determinant role that emotion may have in this particular form of recall. On the other hand, studies on animals have shown that the presentation of a retrieval cue could induce emotional reactions followed by a facilitation of the memory retrieval associated with the cue. The existence of these data, which support Proust's proposals, should encourage the neuroscience community to further explore, in humans and animals, this form of cue elicited emotion that initiated involuntary recall of autobiographical memory.

Bayesian evaluation of diverging theories of episodic and affective memory distortions in dysphoria

People suffering from dysphoria retrieve autobiographical memories distorted in content and affect, which may contribute to the aetiology and maintenance of depression. However, key memory difficulties in dysphoria remain elusive because theories disagree how memories of different valence are altered. Here, we assessed the psychophysiological expression of affect and retrieved episodic detail while participants with dysphoria (but without a diagnosed mental illness) and participants without dysphoria relived positive, negative, and neutral memories. We show that participants with dysphoria retrieve positive memories with diminished episodic detail and negative memories with enhanced detail, compared to participants without dysphoria. This is in line with negativity bias but not overgeneral memory bias theories. According to confirmatory analyses, participants with dysphoria also express diminished positive affect and enhanced negative affect when retrieving happy memories, but exploratory analyses suggest that this increase in negative affect may not be robust. Further confirmatory analyses showed that affective responses to memories are not related to episodic detail and already present during the experience of new emotional events. Our results indicate that affective memory distortions may not emerge from mnemonic processes but from general distortions in positive affect, which challenges assumptions of memory theories and therapeutics. Protocol registration: The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on the 18rd of March 2021. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14605374.v1.

Exploring the metamnemonic and phenomenal differences between transitional and mundane events.

In two experiments, we systematically investigated the reasons why people retained certain autobiographical events in their memory, as well as the properties of those events and their predicted memorability. The first experiment used three methods (word-cued, free-recalled, and "memorable, interesting, and/or important") to retrieve event memories, and examined memories from three different time-frames: very recent (within past 7 days), recent (past 2 weeks and 6 months), and older events (at least one year). In addition, data were also collected for an important transitional event recently experienced by all participants ("starting university"). The results revealed that people had access to three types of event memories: memories for life transitions, memories for older distinctive events, and memories for recent mundane events. Participants reported remembering events that were distinctive, first-time experiences, emotionally impactful, or simply because they were recent. They also predicted that older events would be more resistant to forgetting than very recent and recent events. The second experiment examined participants' memorable and forgettable events, and found that memorable events tended to be older, while forgettable events were more likely to be recent. These findings suggested that many retrievable memorable autobiographical memories were neither important nor transitional in nature. The studies contribute to our understanding of people's metamnemonic knowledge about their autobiographical memories.

The Subjective Experience of Autobiographical Remembering: Conceptual and Methodological Advances and Challenges.

The investigation of the phenomenology of autobiographical memories (i.e., how a memory is subjectively experienced and its meaning) has provided an important contribution to our understanding of autobiographical remembering. Over the last two decades, the study of phenomenology has received widespread scientific attention, and the field has undergone quite relevant conceptual and methodological changes. In the present work, we (1) review some basic and well-established research findings and methodological achievements; (2) discuss new theoretical and methodological challenges, with a special focus on the issue of the phenomenological experience of the retrieval process and its relationship with the phenomenology of the products of retrieval; and (3) propose an alternative way of conceptualizing and understanding it in the framework of experimental phenomenology.

The COVID-19 pandemic as autobiographical period: evidence from an event dating study

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 Pandemic is undoubtedly one of the most impactful and ubiquitous public events in recent history. In this study, we focused on how it affected the organisation of autobiographical memory by examining how often individuals referred to the COVID-19 Pandemic while estimating the date of their autobiographical memories. To that end, we collected word-cued memories from the recent past, event dating protocols, COVID-relatedness ratings, and the transitional impact scores from first-year undergraduates. We found that participants frequently recalled COVID-related memories, and often used the Pandemic as a temporal landmark for dating both COVID-related and unrelated memories. Importantly, reference to the Pandemic in dating estimates was as frequent as the references to other important life periods (high school, university). Despite affecting the lives of these individuals only moderately in psychological and material terms, these data indicate that the Pandemic has become a prominent landmark in autobiographical memory, shaping the way we remember and situate past experiences.

Intracranial Recordings of the Human Orbitofrontal Cortical Activity during Self-Referential Episodic and Valenced Self-Judgments.

We recorded directly from the orbital (oPFC) and ventromedial (vmPFC) subregions of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in 22 (9 female, 13 male) epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) monitoring during an experimental task in which the participants judged the accuracy of self-referential autobiographical statements as well as valenced self-judgments (SJs). We found significantly increased high-frequency activity (HFA) in ∼13% of oPFC sites (10/18 subjects) and 16% of vmPFC sites (4/12 subjects) during both of these self-referential thought processes, with the HFA power being modulated by the content of self-referential stimuli. The location of these activated sites corresponded with the location of fMRI-identified limbic network. Furthermore, the onset of HFA in the vmPFC was significantly earlier than that in the oPFC in all patients with simultaneous recordings in both regions. In 11 patients with available depression scores from comprehensive neuropsychological assessments, we documented diminished HFA in the OFC during positive SJ trials among individuals with higher depression scores; responses during negative SJ trials were not related to the patients' depression scores. Our findings provide new temporal and anatomical information about the mode of engagement in two important subregions of the OFC during autobiographical memory and SJ conditions. Our findings from the OFC support the hypothesis that diminished brain activity during positive self-evaluations, rather than heightened activity during negative self-evaluations, plays a key role in the pathophysiology of depression.

The Importance of Mental Functions and Autobiographical Memory in the Development of Identity and Life Story in Adolescence: Their Role in Preventing Identity Diffusion, Aggressiveness And Depression Among Adolescents

The structuring of one’s own identity is a fundamental and demanding evolutionary task of adolescence. The positive resolution of this task, that is the acquisition of a healthy and integrated identity, is closely linked to adolescents’ ability to develop one’s own Life Story, namely an internalized and evolving self-story. The structuring of one’s own identity, which is the foundation of positive development, requires adolescents to develop a good level of mental functioning and access to autobiographical memory. This work aims to deepen the importance of mental functions and autobiographical memory in the development of adolescents’ identity and life story and, accordingly, in preventing identity diffusion, aggressiveness and depression among adolescents. Specifically, given their relevance in relation to this, it has been decided to examine the mental functions of 1) Differentiation and Integration, 2) Mentalization and Reflexive function and 3) Meaning and directionality and the Self defining memories, a particular class of autobiographical memories.

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

ABSTRACT 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.

Trauma-related intrusive memories and anterior hippocampus structural covariance: an ecological momentary assessment study in posttraumatic stress disorder

Trauma-related intrusive memories (TR-IMs) are hallmark symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but their neural correlates remain partly unknown. Given its role in autobiographical memory, the hippocampus may play a critical role in TR-IM neurophysiology. The anterior and posterior hippocampi are known to have partially distinct functions, including during retrieval of autobiographical memories. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between TR-IM frequency and the anterior and posterior hippocampi morphology in PTSD. Ninety-three trauma-exposed adults completed daily ecological momentary assessments for fourteen days to capture their TR-IM frequency. Participants then underwent anatomical magnetic resonance imaging to obtain measures of anterior and posterior hippocampal volumes. Partial least squares analysis was applied to identify a structural covariance network that differentiated the anterior and posterior hippocampi. Poisson regression models examined the relationship of TR-IM frequency with anterior and posterior hippocampal volumes and the resulting structural covariance network. Results revealed no significant relationship of TR-IM frequency with hippocampal volumes. However, TR-IM frequency was significantly negatively correlated with the expression of a structural covariance pattern specifically associated with the anterior hippocampus volume. This association remained significant after accounting for the severity of PTSD symptoms other than intrusion symptoms. The network included the bilateral inferior temporal gyri, superior frontal gyri, precuneus, and fusiform gyri. These novel findings indicate that higher TR-IM frequency in individuals with PTSD is associated with lower structural covariance between the anterior hippocampus and other brain regions involved in autobiographical memory, shedding light on the neural correlates underlying this core symptom of PTSD.

Differences in the content and coherence of autobiographical memories between younger and older adults: Insights from text analysis.

Several studies have shown that older adults generate autobiographical memories with fewer specific details than younger adults, a pattern typically attributed to age-relate declines in episodic memory. A relatively unexplored question is how aging affects the content used to represent and recall these memories. We recently proposed that older adults may predominately represent and recall autobiographical memories at the gist level. Emerging from this proposal is the hypothesis that older adults represent memories with a wider array of content topics and recall memories with a distinct narrative style when compared to younger adults. We tested this hypothesis by applying natural language processing approaches to a data set of autobiographical memories described by healthy younger and older adults. We used topic modeling to estimate the distribution (i.e., diversity) of content topics used to represent a memory, and sentence embedding to derive an internal similarity score to estimate the shifts in content when narrating a memory. First, we found that older adults referenced a wider array of content topics (higher content diversity) than younger adults when recalling their autobiographical memories. Second, we found older adults were included more content shifts when narrating their memories than younger adults, suggesting a reduced reliance on choronology to form a coherent memory. Third, we found that the content diversity measures were positively related to specific detail generation for older adults, potentially reflecting age-related compensation for episodic memory difficulties. We discuss how our results shed light on how younger and older adults differ in the way they remember and describe the past. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Relationship between personal recovery, autobiographical memory, and clinical recovery in people with mental illness in the acute phase

AimNarratives are important in psychiatric rehabilitation. People with a psychiatric diagnosis find it difficult to recall specific autobiographical memories of events that lasted less than a day. Although personal narratives play a central role in personal recovery, the factors influencing personal and clinical recovery, such as psychiatric symptoms and cognitive function, have not been fully explored. Therefore, this study examined the associations between personal recovery and autobiographical memory, age, psychiatric symptoms, and neurocognitive function. MethodThe Self-Identified Stage of Recovery, Parts A and B (SISR-A, SISR-B), Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), Japanese version of the Brief Assessment Scale of Schizophrenia Cognitive Function, and Brief Psychiatric Symptom Rating Scale were administered to 40 individuals with psychiatric disorders who were undergoing psychiatric rehabilitation. ResultsA significant positive correlation was found between the total number of specific memories in the AMT and total SISR-B scores. A binary logistic regression analysis revealed that the total number of specific memories, especially high responsiveness to negative cue words, significantly predicted greater personal recovery. Age, psychiatric symptoms, and neurocognitive function did not significantly predict higher personal recovery. ConclusionIn psychiatric rehabilitation, negative episodes should be treated with caution; however, they may also facilitate personal recovery.

Daily-level associations between posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and reactions to retrieving positive autobiographical memories

Trauma survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report difficulties accessing and describing positive memories. To understand these patterns, we examined daily-level relations of PTSD symptoms with affective, cognitive (dwelling/rumination; pushing memory out of one’s mind; suppression; avoidance; distraction; thinking about something else; remembering negative or positive memories/events; negative or positive thoughts; accepting or disapproving memory; reinterpreting memory), and behavioral (using alcohol/drugs; smoking cigarettes; cravings for or seeking out cigarettes/alcohol/drugs; craving, seeking out, or consuming large amounts of food; dissociation; engaging in risky behaviors; sharing memories; interference with ongoing task; arousal) reactions to retrieving positive memories. Eighty-eight trauma survivors (Mage= 39.89 years; 59.1% female) completed 7 daily measures of PTSD and reactions to retrieving positive memories. Days with more PTSD severity were associated with higher odds of same-day suppression, avoidance, distraction, thinking about something else, smoking cigarettes, craving substances, craving, seeking out, or consuming large amounts of food, dissociation, remembering negative memories/events/thoughts, engaging in risky behaviors, interference with ongoing tasks, and arousal (ORs=1.10–1.22); and greater negative affect (β = 0.27). Supplemental lagged analyses indicated some associations between previous-day reactions to positive memory retrieval and next-day PTSD severity and vice versa. Trauma survivors with PTSD symptoms report negative and avoidance-oriented reactions to retrieving positive memories.

Remembering our darkest moments: Reminiscence bumps for highly negative life events.

Prior research has shown that the lifetime age distribution of adults' personal memories peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, and that this reminiscence bump is apparent primarily for positive rather than negative events. Inspired by sociological research on the crime-age curve, four new studies tested the idea that adults' negative memories of moral transgressions and behavioral missteps also would show a reminiscence bump. A secondary goal was to determine if the ages and content of actual memories recounted by older adults aligned closely with people's expectations for memories provided by an imaginary "typical" older adult. In Study 1, college students were asked to estimate the ages at which people are most likely to have committed crimes and minor moral transgressions; estimated ages peaked sharply during adolescence and early adulthood. Participants also listed emotions that they thought would accompany these misdeeds. In Study 2, college students were asked to describe memories that they expected a typical older adult to recall in response to distinctive emotion cues, including the negative emotions identified in Study 1. Study 3 was a replication of Study 2 using middle-aged participants. In Study 4, older adults provided their own personal memories in response to the emotion cues used in Study 2 and Study 3. The studies identified, for the first time, prominent reminiscence bumps for both expected and actual memories cued by negative emotions. Implications for new research on autobiographical memory functions and age-related memory declines are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of eye movements on the content and characteristics of unpleasant autobiographical memories: an extended replication study

ABSTRACT Experimental studies show that vividness and emotionality of aversive memories decrease after recall with eye movements. We aimed at replicating this finding. Relatedly, consistent with Conway’s view that memory retrieval is constructive, we examined changes in the content of the memories. If eye movements render a memory less aversive, it may be avoided less, stimulating recall and increasing the opportunity to infer (contextual) details. Two experiments (N = 97 and N = 250) examined whether eye movements affect the number of central and peripheral memory details and characteristics. Female undergraduate students were randomly allocated to either eye movements with recall (EM) or recall only (RO). Before and after the experimental task, participants rated the vividness and emotionality, provided a detailed description and evaluated other memory characteristics. We replicated earlier findings that vividness (both experiments) and emotionality (experiment 2) were reduced more after EM compared to RO. However, conditions did not statistically significantly differ with respect to content details and other memory characteristics. Overall, findings support the idea that eye movements decrease the experience of the memory as vivid and emotional. Results are inconclusive regarding the idea that eye movements alter the number of recalled central and peripheral memory details.

Disentangling boredom from depression using the phenomenology and content of involuntary autobiographical memories

Recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are memories retrieved unintentionally and repetitively. We examined whether the phenomenology and content of recurrent IAMs could differentiate boredom and depression, both of which are characterized by affective dysregulation and spontaneous thought. Participants (n = 2484) described their most frequent IAM and rated its phenomenological properties (e.g., valence). Structural topic modeling, a method of unsupervised machine learning, identified coherent content within the described memories. Boredom proneness was positively correlated with depressive symptoms, and both boredom proneness and depressive symptoms were correlated with more negative recurrent IAMs. Boredom proneness predicted less vivid recurrent IAMs, whereas depressive symptoms predicted more vivid, negative, and emotionally intense ones. Memory content also diverged: topics such as relationship conflicts were positively predicted by depressive symptoms, but negatively predicted by boredom proneness. Phenomenology and content in recurrent IAMs can effectively disambiguate boredom proneness from depressive symptoms in a large sample of undergraduate students from a racially diverse university.

Music, Memory, and Imagination

This article argues that the capacity of music to reliably cue both autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings can be leveraged to better understand the relationship and interdependence between memory and imagination more generally. The multiple levels involved in musical engagement provide a rich forum for investigating how emotional, semantic, and contextual associations with musical cues influence both memories and imaginings. Moreover, musical excerpts are extended in time and can influence the trajectory of a memory or imagining dynamically as it develops, allowing for a more precise manipulation of the implied semantic space. Because music’s uses and contextual associations are culturally constrained, and culture can be shared, autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings cued by music can show surprising similarities among individuals from the same culture. This article surveys the research on music-evoked autobiographical memories and music-evoked fictional imaginings, proposing a framework for bringing these separate strands of work together to shed light on larger questions about shared underlying mechanisms.

Evaluating autobiographical skills and their relationship with suggestibility in children: development and validation of the Children Recalling Autobiographical Memory.

Autobiographical narrative skills and resistance to suggestibility factors are central aspects in children's testimony. While the assessment of suggestibility relies on standardized questionnaire, no such an instrument exists to reliably assess autobiographical skills in children. This aspect is further important when considering that the development of such skills seems to be related to the suggestibility, that is, suggestibility would be reduced in presence of higher autobiographical skills. However, no direct test of this relationship is available in literature, also due to the lack of quantitative instruments for assessing autobiographical skills. To fulfill both these methodological and theoretical issues, in this study a new tool was validated to measure the main autobiographical narrative skills (Where, What, When, Who, and How) in relation to both Retrospective Memory and Prospective Memory: the Children Recalling Autobiographical Memory (CRAM). We recruited a sample of 321 children aged 7-16 years. The result of the EFA analysis showed one-factor model, and revealed also good fit indexes and internal reliability. After validating this new tool, we further used it to test our main hypothesis, that is, children with higher autobiographical memory skills were less vulnerable to interrogative suggestibility as assessed by Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale 2 (GSS2). A hierarchical linear regression model showed a reduction in suggestibility with age and level of autobiographical skills. Moreover, the level of such skills moderate the effect of age, such as only in presence of high or moderate level of autobiographical skills the age significantly reduces the level of suggestibility.