A Sampler of Autobiographical Memory Research: Contexts,Descriptions,Linkages,and Implications

We begin our introduction to this special issue on autobiographical memory with an autobiographical memory. This special issue was conceived at a conference. During a conversation at that conference, the first author of this article indicated that he was charged with increasing the impact factor of Psychological Reports, the journal he was editing. The second author of this article suggested that the journal tries to publish some special issues, given his perception that articles in special issues were often highly cited. The first author, after reflecting for a second on the excellent autobiographical memory course that was taught by the second author, took that opening and asked the second author “Will you do one for me on autobiographical memory?” After initially thinking, “Boy, am I a sucker,” the second author thought a bit more and agreed to curate the special issue.

Why this topic choice? Psychological Reports offers a general psychology viewpoint: “Preference is given to papers that are deemed to be of interest across specialties of psychology that are written in a way to be read by a wide range of people interested in the field of psychology.” Our opinion is that the topic of autobiographical memory is an excellent fit to both of these criteria.

There is no doubt about the fact that interest in autobiographical memory bridges specialty areas. Indeed, for those who are active scholars in the area, the breadth of autobiographical memory research is both stimulating and daunting.

It is stimulating because attempts to keep abreast of developments in autobiographical memory require a scholar to move beyond his/her comfort zone to read scholarship that is outside the scholar’s direct training area. Important autobiographical memory work regularly appears in outlets that span psychology’s diversity, including cognitive psychology, personality psychology: developmental psychology, clinical psychology and psychopathology, social psychology, cultural psychology, neuroscience and psychology, legal psychology, and applied psychology. Such diversity is especially good at promoting a scholar’s consideration of how all the various pieces of psychology can collectively contribute to an understanding of psychology. Such prompting might be desirable, especially given that psychologists have often been criticized for focusing on ideas that derive from their own training areas and ignoring ideas that were developed elsewhere.

However, this breadth can also be daunting. It is hard enough for scholars to keep abreast of autobiographical memory developments in their own specialty areas, let alone keep track of what is going on in autobiographical memory elsewhere in psychology. The high volume of autobiographical memory work being produced by scholars in the various areas further amplifies this problem. Moreover, different sub-areas often develop different “languages” for the phenomena that they explore. Thus, autobiographical memory scholars often have to sort through various sets of terms developed in the different specialty areas to explore circumstances in which, across sub-areas, the same idea is reflected in different terms, as well as circumstances in which the same term is used to express different ideas.

It is because of the need to keep up with current developments in the area that autobiographical memory scholars are especially appreciative of venues in which they can be easily exposed to the diversity of work in the area. One such mechanism is conferences. The second author often points to one conference that he attended early in his career, the Arkansas Symposium on Memory and the Self (2000) as the point at which he became cognizant of this diversity (or, as he more commonly describes it, as his “oh s—!” moment). The diversity of the scholars at that conference (who included Michael Ross, Constantine Sedikides, Denise Beike, Jim Lampinen, Robyn Fivush, Jefferson Singer, Mark Howe, Dan McAdams, and Daniel Povielli) caused the second author to re-evaluate his own work (and to wonder how he was ever invited to the conference) in light of all the different approaches that were being used to study autobiographical memory.

A second mechanism that helps scholars to keep abreast of recent thinking is the journal’s special issue. One function of special issues is to present in one place the diversity of scholarship that has developed around a given topic. It is our hope that this is one contribution that will be made by this special issue. While this special issue does not reflect the full diversity of research into autobiographical memory, it still serves to highlight the area’s diversity and provides an indication of current thinking and research in some of the various major sub-areas.

Certainly, the biological perspective appears in Steven Janssen’s work. This work addresses the reminiscence bump—the tendency for individual autobiographical memory reports to contain a disproportionately high number of memories from an individual’s late teens and early twenties. Janssen argues that for one method of memory solicitation, the cue word method in which people are given a cue word and respond with a cue word-related memory, at least a portion of this effect can be accounted for by biologically driven maturation. That is, because cognitive abilities and memory abilities are at their peak in an individual’s late teens and early twenties, Janssen argues that it makes sense that many memories from this range will be especially prominent in memory responses to cue words.

However, also note that one important part of the Janssen argument is that the method matters: There are different ways sampling events from a participant’s life (diaries, experience sampling, retrospective recall) and many ways of assessing memory for events (e.g., free recall, cued recall, memory ratings, recognition). Janssen argues that other mechanisms that have been used to account for the reminiscence bump (cultures, life scripts, etc.) may account for effects obtained using retrospective free recall (the most typical method employed). Hence, to understand the reminiscence bump, not only must one understand the various theoretical mechanisms that have been proposed to account for the bump, but one must also know the method by which the memories that contribute to a bump in a given study were obtained.

One of the things to keep in mind when reflecting on the Janssen article is that one of the challenges of autobiographical memory research is that the research domain is not amenable to classic manipulation-based experimental methods that allow the rapid generation of confidence in theoretical mechanisms. One reason is that when pursuing autobiographical memories, the researcher does not have full control over the stimuli used in the research, as might be the case in laboratory-based studies of memory in which it is the researcher who controls, and presents, the stimuli to be remembered. In contrast, in autobiographical memory research, participants often retain some degree of control over the memories that they report. This selective reporting possibility occurs across many different methods and thus serves as a possible confound, possibly muddying the explanation that a researcher wants to offer for a set of research results.

One of the usual responses to this dilemma is methodological variation. The idea is that different methods may prompt different biases, so if research results replicate over many different methods, the possibility that a given bias can explain all of the results across all the methods is reduced. The Janssen paper illustrates an alternative possibility: Research results may not replicate across different methods, and thus, different theoretical mechanisms may be necessary to account for the results obtained with the different methods.

A corollary to this latter point is that not all methods are equally revealing about the psychological processes that contribute to autobiographical memory results. Thus, one needs to tailor one’s method to the ideas that one is pursuing. This is the exact point to the article contributed by the Beike team. In their article, they note that one idea in the autobiographical memory literature is that people often share (in writing or orally) their autobiographical memories with others. This sharing is thought to have consequences. One hypothesized consequence of interest is that sharing autobiographical memories prompts interpersonal closeness in the sharers. This result can be explained by conceiving of the desire for closeness as a need state. From a motivational perspective, then, sharing autobiographical memories is a behavior that fills a need (desire for closeness). The Beike team notes that results from many different autobiographical memory paradigms supported this conclusion by showing that there was a correlation between memory sharing and interpersonal closeness. The Beike team noted, however, that this correlation could be explained in either of two ways: (a) sharing produces closeness or (b) closeness promoted sharing.

Because of an emphasis on understanding the possible functions of autobiographical memory, the field gravitated toward the “sharing produces closeness explanation.” However, the Beike team notes that because of the nature of the research methods used, none of the existing studies could nail down which of these directions were correct (though some methods might be better at this task than others). Denise Beike and some of her colleagues themselves pursued this issue in a long series of studies and eventually concluded that the “closeness promotes sharing” explanation was more likely than the “sharing produces closeness” view. However, the Beike team is unwilling to abandon the “sharing produces closeness” view. The Beike team suggests that there might be a better method that can be used to establish the validity of this view. The methodology involves the use of a manipulation designed to induce a need state (e.g., need for closeness with others). If sharing memories with others meets this need state, then one might expect social sharing of autobiographical memories to increase after the need is activated, and for the need itself to be reduced after the sharing occurred. It remains to future research to see if these predictions can be verified.

The notion that is central to the research domain discussed by the Beike team—that people communicate their events with others—is one element that distinguishes the autobiographical memory research domain from the laboratory research that examines human memory. We use and advocate for laboratory research, but we also see its potential limitations in the domain of memory. Laboratory research typically examines memory for events within a relatively constrained time period, so there is relatively little opportunity for people to do mental work on the stimuli presented in the research. In comparison, to communicate events in the real world, people need to do considerable mental work to put their events in communicable form. This form is often a narrative or story. In such narratives, people will often construct the story so that the story has a point. Story constructors will selectively include elements, omit elements, and distort elements to support that point. These tendencies can produce selective forgetting and/or memory distortion.

However, it must also be recognized that people offer their communications for different reasons—sometimes to vent, sometimes to get social support, sometimes to persuade, sometimes to get others to better know and understand the communicator, and sometimes to self-present. The motives that drive the communications can shape the structure and content of the events that are conveyed. This means that these motives can shape autobiographical memory in different ways.

The Nelson and Fivush article that appears in this special issue suggests that the consequences of these communications can go beyond the shaping autobiographical memory. For example, some developmental psychologists (including Nelson and Fivush) have long argued that there is a link between learning to communicate autobiographical event information and the development of the self-concept. Support for this claim comes from studies showing an especially early emergence of the self-concept in children who have parents who are especially active in prompting children to report events. In their article for this special issue, Nelson and Fivush push this process further, arguing that the consequences of such narrative storytelling can extend into thinking itself. Nelson and Fivush argue that the “narrative construction training” that occurs during childhood causes people to habitually think in terms of narratives, producing a kind of thinking that they call autobiographical consciousness. The habitual nature of this kind of thinking implies that, even when they don’t have to communicate to others, people will tend to spontaneously take the events in their lives and weave them into stories. Nelson and Fivush further suggest that the content of the stories (events reported, details emphasized, distorted, and/or omitted) will be influenced by cultural norms and stereotypes. Nelson and Fivush also suggest that parental prompting teaches children to “go beyond the data” to include in these stories evaluations and inferences. Thus, narratives will tend to be constructed so that they have meaning, but such meaning will be influenced by what people already know and believe—as influenced by peoples’ personalities, group memberships, cultures, and evaluations and inferences.

The article written for the special issue by the Mroz team illustrates some of the aftereffects of this narrative-style thinking in the context of how individuals deal with personal loss (e.g., death) events. The Mroz team suggests that the narratives that people construct for such events should be adaptive and should reflect two themes. One of these is the theme of personal growth: experiencing a personal loss somehow makes a person better or stronger. The second theme is a theme of personal closeness or communion: the loss strengthens ties to individuals related to the loss or who were near the loss when the event occurred. These effects emerged in the context of a study conducted by the Mroz team. The themes of personal growth and communion emerged in the narratives that people wrote about loss events (but not necessarily other events that presented life challenges). The effects were particularly strong for those who scored high on a measure assessing the tendency to engage in positive life reflection: The extent to which one reflects on one’s life overall in terms of having a sense of acceptance of the life who events over time has lived and feeling that life has had a direction. The data from the Mroz team also suggested that the adaptiveness of the narrative constriction process might be especially important for young adults as they strive to integrate loss into their emerging life stories.

The age-related findings and the positive life reflection findings reported by Mroz et al. serve to highlight the important role that individual differences variables play in autobiographical memory research. The notion of individual differences also lies at the heart of the findings reported by the Walker team. The article written by the Walker team explores the Fading Affect Bias: The tendency for negative events to lose their affective intensity faster over time than positive events.

Explanations for the bias have been partially grounded in how people think about autobiographical events across time. That is, when reflecting on bad events, people have a number of tactics at their disposal that could minimize the emotional impact of such events. Among these tactics are finding personal meaning from the events (a fit with the Mroz team data), minimizing the importance of bad events, attributing bad events to temporary circumstances or bad luck, or seeing bad events as psychologically closed and “in the past” (e.g., no longer relevant to the present self). Historically, one approach to examining these ideas was to look at the Fading Affect Bias in the context of people known to not readily engage in these kinds of thinking. These include people who are high in depression or anxiety. People who exhibit these negative tendencies do not show the bias to the same extent as do individuals who are not high in depression or anxiety.

The Walker et al. team produced unique data in that, unlike these other individual difference-focused studies, their study focused on the positive end of the individual differences spectrum. The Walker et al. team looked at the extent to which the FAB emerged in those individuals who could be classified as being high in grit—those individuals who are, in theory especially persistent in the face of difficulty and especially passionate about what they do. As the Walker team notes, people who study traits wonder whether the grit concept is any different from existing psychological constructs, most notably, conscientiousness. However, for the Walker team’s purposes, this debate does not matter. Regardless of what you call it, those who are higher in a grit or in grit-indicative positive characteristics (passion, persistence, conscientiousness) show an enhanced FAB relative to those who are low in grit. As does the Mroz team, the Walker team emphasizes the adaptiveness of these findings. They suggest that the Fading Affect Bias allows individuals to be able to think about negative events instead of avoiding consideration of such events. The ability to dispassionately examine life’s difficulties ought to allow people to learn from those difficulties and, at a later date, be able to perform well in the face of similar difficulties.

The Garry team also reports the results of research that focus on the properties of recalled autobiographical events. Unlike the Walker team, however, the Garry team focuses on judgments of the extent to which one sees a recalled event as being recalled voluntarily (retrieval of the memory was intended) or involuntarily (the memory came to mind without the intent to remember it). Because there is a long thread of work in autobiographical memory that examines similarities between and differences between voluntary memories and involuntary memories, this is potentially important work. The Garry team suggests, and the data from their four studies support, the idea that the difference between voluntary memories and involuntary memories lies not in the intent to retrieve, but in the ease of retrieval. That is, people judge events that are easy to retrieve (fluent) as voluntarily retrieved memories, and memories that are hard to retrieve (disfluent) as involuntarily retrieved memories.

The Garry team’s perspective is important because it can potentially overturn the existing apple cart in this autobiographical memory domain by showing that the differences that were being documented in various studies were not differences event recall volition, but were instead differences that were related to event recall ease. This does not mean that the idea that there are differences in the kinds of memories that are brought up in voluntary ways and in involuntary ways is wrong—it’s just that the current method of assessing the volition component of remembering (participant judgments) does not adequately do so. As the Garry team suggests, this means that an adequate assessment of the volition idea and autobiographical memories linked to volition may require new ways of determining volition.

The ease of recalling autobiographical memories is also the focus of the article submitted by the Capparelli team. This team examined the idea that autobiographical memory reporting might be improved if that reporting was made in the presence of support dogs. This novel idea makes good theoretical sense. Support dogs might increase an individual’s comfort level during an interview session, which might prompt the individual to be more open and forthcoming in reporting their memories than they otherwise might. However, the presence of support dogs might actually improve memory (not just memory reporting). Anxiety is known to interfere with recall. Hence, if the presence of support dogs reduces anxiety, then one might expect better recall in the presence of the dogs. The data provided by the Capparelli team do not distinguish between these ideas, but those data did clearly show an improvement in the informativeness of the negative autobiographical memories described in the presence of support dogs.

Of special note is that this support dog effect did not enhance memory as a whole. The Capparelli team reported that performance on a standard laboratory memory task (the DRM, or Deese–Roediger–McDermott task) did not improve in the presence of the support dogs. While some might argue that this null result points toward the enhanced-reporting mechanism for the autobiographical memory effects observed by the Capparelli team, this conclusion may not be correct. The DRM task assesses relatively short-term memory performance, and the DRM task is generally unrelated the self-concept. In contrast, autobiographical memory is obviously different from the DRM task in that it generally reflects long-term memory and the memory retrieves are obviously self-relevant.

In light of this distinction, we wonder whether it might be useful to conduct a replication of the Capparelli team’s research, but to use a mnemic neglect task as the laboratory assessment of memory (for a review of mnemic neglect research, see Sedikides, Green, Saunders, Skowronski, & Zengel, 2016). The mnemic neglect task gives individuals feedback (often in terms of behaviors that it is said that an individual is likely to perform) and then later assesses memory for that feedback. Memory is often especially poor for highly self-relevant negative information. If the presence of the support dogs lowers anxiety and enhances memory, then the presence of those support dogs may reduce or eliminate this mnemic neglect effect. Such a result would show that the action of the support dogs affect memory reports for especially threating negative information, regardless of whether the memories reflect long-term memories of short-term memories.

One other especially interesting extensions of the Capparelli team’s research is to replicate their methods, but to examine the effects of the support dogs on the memories of those who differ in their individual difference characteristics (depression, anxiety) that are associated with autobiographical memory performance. Of special interest here is that those who exhibit these negative characteristics often show especially good memory for the events that are linked to their characteristics (e.g., anxious individuals have better recall than non-anxious individuals for negative information; see Herrera, Montorio, Cabrera, & Botella, 2016). We wonder whether support dogs would enhance the reporting of even these negative characteristic-matching events, if the positive effects of the support dogs on autobiographical memory would be restricted only to those negative events that do not match the personality characteristic.

As you can tell from our commentary, the scholarship described in the set of articles that comprise this special issue prompted us to think (a lot). That is a good thing, especially when those thoughts prompt consideration of interesting research that could be conducted in the future. Even better is that these studies prompted us to consider the full range of influences that contribute to human psychological functioning and the full range of areas that study such influences. We believe that exposure to this diversity via exposure to autobiographical memory research has had profound and positive effects on us, allowing us to appreciate, and even use, various approaches to psychology in our own thinking and research. We offer this special issue in the hope that you will experience similar benefits.