Reminiscence Bump Research Articles

Autobiografska memorija i Eriksonovi stadijumi psihosocijalnog razvoja

Prikazano istraživanje je usmereno na proučavanje 1) autobiografskih memorija starih osoba u kontekstu Eriksonovih psihosocijalnih stadijuma razvoja, 2) emocionalnog tona autobiografskih memorija kao i 3) fenomena kod odraslih osoba koji ukazuje da najveći broj autobiografskih memorija potiče iz perioda između 20. i 30. godine života (efekta reminiscencije). Uzorak je činilo 65 ispitanika, prosečne starosti 69 godina, sa različitih podneblja Republike Srbije. Putem intervjua evocirali su 1265 pojedinačnih događaja iz svog dosadašnjeg iskustva. Za analizu podataka korišćena je deskriptivna statistika, poređenje distribucija i analiza korespondencije. Rezultati istraživanja su bili u skladu sa sledećim pretpostavkama: a) najdostupnija autobiografska sećanja evocirana u okviru tačno određenih životnih dekada, s obzirom na razvojno relevantne zadatke, korespondiraju sa Eriksonovim stadijumima psihosocijalnog razvoja, b) najveći broj evociranih uspomena je pozitivnog emocionalnog tona, i c) efekat reminiscencije se javlja samo kod memorija pozitivnog emocionalnog tona. Rezultati su diskutovani u svetlu teorije self-memorija sistem.

Narrative identity in schizophrenia

This study examined narrative identity in a group of 81 patients with schizophrenia and 50 healthy controls through the recall of self-defining memories. The results indicated that patients’ narratives were less coherent and elaborate than those of controls. Schizophrenia patients were severely impaired in the ability to make connections with the self and extract meaning from their memories, which significantly correlated with illness duration. In agreement with earlier research, patients exhibited an early reminiscence bump. Moreover, the period of the reminiscence bump, which is highly relevant for identity development, was characterized by fewer achievements and more life-threatening event experiences, compared with controls. A negative correlation was found between negative symptoms, number of self-event connections and specificity of narratives. Our results suggest that schizophrenia patients have difficulties to organize and extract meaning from their past experiences in order to create coherent personal narratives.

Examining the life story account of the reminiscence bump: Why we remember more from young adulthood

The reminiscence bump is a robust finding demonstrated mostly with the cue-word method in Western cultures. The first aim of the study was to replicate the reminiscence bump using a life history timeline method and to extend reminiscence bump research to a Turkish sample. The second aim was to empirically examine the recently proposed life story account (Glück & Bluck, 2007) for the reminiscence bump. The sample consisted of 40 women and 32 men aged 52 to 66 years. Participants’ lives were divided into 5-year intervals and they verbally reported as many memories as possible in a standard timeframe from each interval (in random order) and provided ratings of several memory characteristics. As expected, the lifespan distribution of the resulting 6373 memories demonstrated a reminiscence bump. In support of the life story account, bump memories were found to be more novel, more important for identity development, more distinct, and more likely to involve developmental transitions than memories from other age periods. Findings are discussed in terms of the life story account, which synthesises lifespan developmental theory and life story theory.

A novel study: Forgetting curves and the reminiscence bump

This study examined the forgetting curves for information read in a novel. People read a 10-chapter novel where each chapter covered an approximately 10-year period in the life of the protagonist. After reading the entire novel, participants completed various memory tests in which they summarised the novel, provided associated information from cues, and answered specific questions. Performance was plotted as the amount of information or the accuracy of question answering for each chapter. All of the memory tests revealed similar patterns: (a) better performance for early information (a primacy effect), (b) a bump in performance when the protagonist was approximately 20 years old, and (c) a smaller bump in performance when the protagonist began a career later in life. These results are considered in the context of theories of forgetting, autobiographical memory, and situation models.

Differential effects of age on involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memory.

Research on aging and autobiographical memory has focused almost exclusively on voluntary autobiographical memory. However, in everyday life, autobiographical memories often come to mind spontaneously without deliberate attempt to retrieve anything. In the present study, diary and word-cue methods were used to compare the involuntary and voluntary memories of 44 young and 38 older adults. The results showed that older adults reported fewer involuntary and voluntary memories than did younger adults. Additionally, the life span distribution of involuntary and voluntary memories did not differ in young adults (a clear recency effect) or in older adults (a recency effect and a reminiscence bump). Despite these similarities between involuntary and voluntary memories, there were also important differences in terms of the effects of age on some memory characteristics. Thus, older adults' voluntary memories were less specific and were recalled more slowly than those of young adults, but there were no reliable age differences in the specificity of involuntary memories. Moreover, older adults rated their involuntary memories as more positive than did young adults, but this positivity effect was not found for voluntary memories. Theoretical implications of these findings for research on autobiographical memory and cognitive aging are discussed.

Exploring self-defining memories in schizophrenia

Previous studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in recalling specific events from their personal past. However, the relationship between autobiographical memory impairments and disturbance of the sense of identity in schizophrenia has not been investigated in detail. In this study the authors investigated schizophrenic patients’ ability to recall self-defining memories; that is, memories that play an important role in building and maintaining the self-concept. Results showed that patients recalled as many specific self-defining memories as healthy participants. However, patients with schizophrenia exhibited an abnormal reminiscence bump and reported different types of thematic content (i.e., they recalled less memories about past achievements and more memories regarding hospitalisation and stigmatisation of illness). Furthermore, the findings suggest that impairments in extracting meaning from personal memories could represent a core disturbance of autobiographical memory in patients with schizophrenia.

Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self

The self-memory relationship is thought to be bidirectional, in such a way that memories provide context for the self, and equally, the self exercises control over retrieval (Conway, 2005). Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the life span; instead, memories peak between ages 10 and 30. This reminiscence bump has been suggested to support the emergence of a stable and enduring self. In the present study, the relationship between memory accessibility and self was explored with a novel methodology that used generation of self images in the form of I am statements. Memories generated from I am cues clustered around the time of emergence for that particular self image. We argue that, when a new self-image is formed, it is associated with the encoding of memories that are relevant to that self and that remain highly accessible to the rememberer later in life. This study offers a new methodology for academics and clinicians interested in the relationship between memory and identity.

Reminiscence Bump in Autobiographical Memory: Unexplained by Novelty, Emotionality, Valence, or Importance of Personal Events

People tend to recall a disproportionately large number of personal events from their adolescence and early adulthood. This "reminiscence bump" has been examined extensively, but its causes remain unclear. In this Internet-based experiment, nearly 3,500 participants were given 10 cue words and were asked to describe the personal events that came to mind. Furthermore, they were asked to date each event and to indicate whether it was a first-time experience. Finally, the participants were asked to rate the strength of the emotional reaction to the event or the valence or the importance of the event. Surprisingly, the reminiscence bump consisted of relatively fewer novel, emotional, important positive or negative events. This result increases the likelihood of an alternative explanation--namely, that memory is generally enhanced in adolescence and early adulthood. However, this account has not been tested directly.

Reminiscence bump in memory for public events

People tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods. Most evidence suggests that differential encoding causes this reminiscence bump. However, the question why personal events are encoded better in those periods is still unanswered. To shed more light on this discussion, we examined memory for public events. Since it is often impossible to ascertain that queried events are equally difficult, we circumvented the issue of equivalence by calculating deviation scores for each trial. We found that participants more frequently answered questions correctly about events that occurred in the period in which they were between 10 and 25 years old. Furthermore, we found that the reminiscence bump was more pronounced for cued recall than for recognition. We argue that these results support the biological account that events are stored better, because the memory system is working more efficiently during adolescence and early adulthood. These results do not falsify the other accounts for differential encoding, because they are not mutually exclusive.

Regret as autobiographical memory

We apply an autobiographical memory framework to the study of regret. Focusing on the distinction between regrets for specific and general events we argue that the temporal profile of regret, usually explained in terms of the action–inaction distinction, is predicted by models of autobiographical memory. In two studies involving participants in their sixties we demonstrate a reminiscence bump for general, but not for specific regrets. Recent regrets were more likely to be specific than general in nature. Coding regrets as actions/inactions revealed that general regrets were significantly more likely to be due to inaction while specific regrets were as likely to be due to action as to inaction. In Study 2 we also generalised all of these findings to a group of participants in their 40s. We re-interpret existing accounts of the temporal profile of regret within the autobiographical memory framework, and outline the practical and theoretical advantages of our memory-based distinction over traditional decision-making approaches to the study of regret.

Patterns of autobiographical memory impairment according to disease severity in semantic dementia

Studies of autobiographical memory in semantic dementia (SD) have yielded either a reversed temporal gradient or spared performances across the entire lifetime. This discrepancy might be owing to the fact that these studies did not take into account disease severity. Our aim was to study patterns of autobiographical memory impairment according to disease severity and to unravel their mechanisms in 14 SD patients, using an autobiographical memory task assessing overall and strictly episodic memories across the entire lifetime. We divided our patients in 2 subgroups of 7 patients each, one mild and one moderate according to their level of disease severity. The results indicated for the mild subgroup selective preserved performances for the most recent time period (last 12 months period) for both autobiographical memory scores. In the moderate subgroup, performances were impaired for both scores whatever the time period. Within-group comparisons across time periods showed a recency effect and a reminiscence bump in the mild subgroup and only a less important recency effect in the moderate subgroup, suggesting that with disease severity, old memories (reminiscence bump) tend to vanish and even recent memories are less well retrieved. A correlation analysis was carried out on the entire group, between the overall autobiographical memory score and performances provided by a general cognitive evaluation (semantic memory, executive functions, working and episodic memory). The results of this analysis reflect that mechanisms of disruption of autobiographical memory in SD predominantly involve a deficit of storage of semantic information in addition to faulty executive retrieval strategies. Finally, our result and those of the literature suggest the existence of 3 distinct autobiographical memory impairment patterns in SD according to disease severity: firstly preserved performances whatever the time period, secondly a reversed temporal gradient with a reminiscence bump and thirdly the appearance of a “step-function”.

An explanation of the reminiscence bump in the dreams of older adults in terms of life goals and identity

Older adults tend to recall a disproportionately large number of autobiographical events from late adolescence – early adulthood. The presence of such a reminiscence bump has recently been found in the contents of dreams as well. The fact that this referred life period is characterized by the development of life goals and identity could explain the prominence of associated autobiographical memories. In order to test this hypothesis, the present study examined the contents of older adults' dreams with temporal reference to that foundational period of life. These dreams were found to be characterized by contents related to personal goals and akin to the integrative type of reminiscence. These findings support the theory that personal memories of the bump period remain salient, even in the dreams of older adults, because they relate to the development of goals of the self and identity, and that older adults use these “personal data” to (re)construct a coherent and meaningful self.

Looking back across the life span: A life story account of the reminiscence bump

The reminiscence bump is a robust finding in the autobiographical memory literature: Adults recall more events from the second and third decades of life than from other periods. Berntsen and Rubin (2004; Rubin & Berntsen, 2003) proposed a life script account of the reminiscence bump. We extend the life script account by taking a theory-based, life span developmental approach, proposing a life story account for the bump. This account predicts that events in the reminiscence bump are characterized not only by positive valence, but also by high perceived control and high perceived influence on later development. Predictions from the life story account were confirmed in analyses of 3,541 life events collected from 659 participants 50-90 years of age. Only high-perceived-control positive events showed a reminiscence bump, and these events were rated as more influential on later development than were events showing any other combination of valence and perceived control. Findings are discussed in terms of a theoretical extension of the life script account embracing (1) principles of life span development and (2) the personal creation of a life story that helps to organize autobiographical memory.

Temporal distribution of favourite books, movies, and records: Differential encoding and re-sampling

The reminiscence bump is the effect that people recall more personal events from early adulthood than from childhood or adulthood. The bump has been examined extensively. However, the question of whether the bump is caused by differential encoding or re-sampling is still unanswered. To examine this issue, participants were asked to name their three favourite books, movies, and records. Furthermore, they were asked when they first encountered them. We compared the temporal distributions and found that they all showed recency effects and reminiscence bumps. The distribution of favourite books had the largest recency effect and the distribution of favourite records had the largest reminiscence bump. We can explain these results by the difference in rehearsal. Books are read two or three times, movies are watched more frequently, whereas records are listened to numerous times. The results suggest that differential encoding initially causes the reminiscence bump and that re-sampling increases the bump further.

On the persistence of positive events in life scripts

AbstractThe life script account of the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memories suggests that cultural expectations about the nature and timing of transitional events lead to the bump. The empirical evidence for life scripts is limited. We tested the generality of the life script by looking at the effects of culture, gender and cohorts. Turkish participants were asked (a) to list the seven most important events a newborn or an elderly would experience during his/her lifetime and (b) to estimate the prevalence, importance, age‐at‐event and emotional valence of each event. We obtained a clear life script containing more positive than negative events; there was also stronger agreement about the timing of positive than of negative events. The life script for this sample overlapped substantially with earlier data from Denmark. Events and their characteristics were not influenced by the gender of either the participants or the target person. Finally, many aspects of the life script, but not the bump, changed depending on for whom the script was constructed (newborn vs. elderly). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reminiscence and Vivid Personal Memories across Adulthood

This study examined reminiscence functions and vivid (i.e., landmark) personal memories in nine samples ranging from the teens to the nineties. Participants (n = 198) ranging in age from 18-95 years completed the Reminiscence Functions Scale (Webster, 1997) and described a vivid personal memory which was subsequently rated for frequency of recall, emotional valence, time of occurrence, impact, and thematic content. Reminiscence results showed that older adults tend to reminiscence more for social functions while younger adults tend to reminisce more for self functions. Older adults reported vivid memories that were less intimate and less negative although adults of all ages showed the "reminiscence bump." Significant relationships were also obtained between the content of vivid memories described and the patterns of general reminiscence behaviors.

Autobiographical memory of adolescence and early adulthood events: An investigation in schizophrenia

The reminiscence bump corresponds to a marked increase in autobiographical memories of events that occurred when normal people were aged 10 to 30 years, a critical period for the formation of identity. The reminiscence bump was studied in 27 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and 27 control participants. They were asked to recall 20 specific autobiographical events that had occurred during their lifetime and to indicate the subjective states of awareness associated with the recalled memories using the Remember/Know procedure. Finally, participants were asked to state whether recalled memories related to private or public events. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia recalled less specific memories than controls and exhibited an earlier reminiscence bump. They recalled more public, and less private events than controls, and they gave fewer Remember responses. The reminiscence bump peaked in the 16 to 25-year period for patients and the 21 to 25-year period for controls. These findings indicate that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibit an early and abnormal reminiscence bump, with an impairment of conscious recollection associated with memories highly relevant to personal identity. They suggest that schizophrenia is associated with an impairment of autobiographical memories of events that had occurred during the last stage of personal identity development.

Autobiographical Memory and Depression in the Later Age: The Bump is a Turning Point

This preliminary study integrated previous findings of the distribution of autobiographical memories in the later age according to their age of occurrence, with the overgeneral memory bias predictive of depression. Twenty-five non-demented, Israeli participants between 65-89 years of age provided autobiographical memories to 4 groups of word cues reflecting events from childhood, adolescence, adulthood and late age. Their autobiographical responses were coded for degree of specificity of mentioning people, place and time. They additionally completed the Geriatric Depression Scale (Sheikh & Yesavage, 1986). We found that specificity of memories for adolescence cue-words ("the reminiscence bump") was significantly and inversely correlated with depression (r = -0.61), and this remained significant after controlling for gender and education. The study's limitations and the possibility that puberty hormones may be involved in memory and later age depression are discussed.

高齢者の自伝的記憶におけるバンプと記憶内容

A reminiscence bump is a phenomenon that people typically remember the events experienced the ages of 10 and 30 more often than these experienced in other period. This paper investigates (I) whether a reminiscence bump is found in autobiographical memory in Japanese elders, and (2) the features and content of autobiographical memories in general and in the bump. Twenty-five participants more than sixty-years old recalled past events using a cue-word method, described the content of each memory, dated the event, and rated the features of the memory on five scales, i.e., vividness, importance, present self-involvement, past self-involvement, and frequency of recall. The results showed that although a reminiscence bump emerged, memories within the bump did not differ from other memories in terms of rated features nor in content. Approximately 50% of autobiographical memories were "self-centered", 30% were about "self-other relations", and the rest were "other-centered" and "scenes" which did not involve people. The results were discussed in relation to theories about the reminiscence bump.

A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Autobiographical Memory

Groups from Japan, China, Bangladesh, England, and the United States recalled, described, and dated specific autobiographical memories. When memories were plotted in terms of age-at-encoding highly similar life-span memory retrieval curves were observed: the periods of childhood amnesia and the reminiscence bump were the same across cultures. However, content analysis of memory descriptions of the U.S. and Chinese groups found that memories from the Chinese group had interdependent self-focus (i.e., were of events with a group or social orientation), whereas the memory content of the U.S. group showed an independent self-focus (i.e., were of events oriented to the individual). These findings suggest that there are culturally invariant features of autobiographical memory that yield structurally similar memories across cultures, yet the content of memories is sensitive to cultural influences related to the nature of the self. Findings are discussed in light of similarities and diversity between selves with different self/other orientations.