Memory Studies

What influence does body memory from light vs strong movement qualities have on affect and cognition? This article relates the phenomenological theory of body memory, movement observation theory from dance, and psychological conceptual and empirical work on body feedback. Kinesthetic body feedback means efferent feedback from the body’s peripheral movements to the higher cortical functions, such as the systematic effects of the adoption of certain gestures or postures on the memory for life events. Meaning of movements is stored in the body in relation to our learning history –ontogenetic as well as phylogenetic. Based on the phenomenological theory of body memory, we hypothesize that specific movement qualities will have a differential impact on affect and cognition. In accordance with our hypotheses, our results suggest that strong movements are related to more fighting affect and more negative memory recall, whereas light movements – just as a non-movement control condition – are related to more indulgent affect and more positive memory recall. Results are discussed with reference to the phenomenological framework.

In everyday life remembering occurs within social contexts, and theories from a number of disciplines predict cognitive and social benefits of shared remembering. Recent debates have revolved around the possibility that cognition can be distributed across individuals and material resources, as well as across groups of individuals. We review evidence from a maturing program of empirical research in which we adopted the lens of distributed cognition to gain new insights into the ways that remembering might be shared in groups. Across four studies, we examined shared remembering in intimate couples. We studied their collaboration on more simple memory tasks as well as their conversations about shared past experiences. We also asked them about their everyday memory compensation strategies in order to investigate the complex ways that couples may coordinate their material and interpersonal resources. We discuss our research in terms of the costs and benefits of shared remembering, features of the group and features of the remembering task that influence the outcomes of shared remembering, the cognitive and interpersonal functions of shared remembering, and the interaction between social and material resources. More broadly, this interdisciplinary research program suggests the potential for empirical psychology research to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of distributed cognition.

According to shared-reality theory, the sharing of memories satisfies the need for confident knowledge (an epistemic consequence) and belongingness (a social-affiliative consequence). In two experiments, German participants remembered a public event with collective importance—the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Germany. We examined whether inducing perceptions of sharedness increases confidence in one’s memory of the event (an epistemic consequence) and social identification with the national group (an affiliative consequence). Because episodic, but not semantic, memories entail the reconstruction of the social context of the original experience, they should elicit feelings of shared relevance to a greater extent than do semantic memories. Consistent with our rationale, memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were enhanced after participants recalled episodic (vs semantic) memories regarding the World Cup. In Experiment 2, we added a more direct manipulation of perceived sharedness: participants were asked to think about people with similar (vs dissimilar) memories. We found that memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were greater in the high sharedness conditions. In both experiments, the effects on memory confidence and identification were mediated by perceived shared relevance. Overall, the findings demonstrate important cognitive and social consequences of collective memory.

How communities forge collective memories has been a topic of long-standing interest among social scientists and, more recently, psychologists. However, researchers have typically focused on how what is overtly remembered becomes collectively remembered. Recently, though, Stone and colleagues have delineated different types of silence and their influence on how individuals and groups remember the past, what they termed, mnemonic silence. Here we focus on the importance of relatedness in understanding the mnemonic consequences of public silence. We begin by describing two common means of investigating collective memories: the social construction approach and the psychological approach. We subsequently discuss in detail a psychological paradigm, retrieval-induced forgetting, and demonstrate how this initially individual memory paradigm can and has been extended to social contexts in the form of public silence and may provide insights into larger sociological phenomenon, in our case, collective memories. We conclude by discussing avenues of future research and the benefits of including a psychological perspective in the field of collective memory.

The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven themes – autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, affect, space and institutional practices – are discussed. Each theme draws out a particular facet of the relationship between the content and contexts of vital memories and demonstrates that while vital memories frame problematic experiences, they remain essential for those who express them.

This article recognises the crucial role cultural and social contexts play in shaping individual and collective recollections. Such recollections involve multiple, intertwined levels of experience in the real world such as commemorating a war. Thus, the commemoration practised in a particular context deserves an empirical investigation. The methodological approach taken is naturalistic, as it situates commemoration as remembering and recollection in the real world of things and people. I consider the case of a war veterans’ reunion as an analogy for a pilgrimage, and in that pilgrimage-like transformative process, we can observe the dynamics of remembering that is mediated with artefacts and involves people’s interactions with the social environment. Furthermore, remembering, recollection and commemorating the war can be approached in terms of embodied interactions with culturally and historically organised materials. In this article, I will review the relevant literature on key topics and concepts including pilgrimage, transformation and liminality and communitas in order to create a theoretical framework. I present an analysis and discussion on the ethnographic fieldwork on the Burma Campaign (of the Second World War) veterans’ reunion. The article strives to contribute to the critical forum of memory research, highlighting the significance of a holistic and interdisciplinary exposition of the vital role context plays in the practice of commemorating war.

This article investigates the roles that interactive alignment of manual gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze play in small groups engaged in collaborative remembering. Qualitative analyses of a video corpus demonstrate that the coordination of these behaviors may contribute to joint remembering in various ways, depending upon the cognitive and communicative affordances of these behaviors. The observation that these behaviors are different in their nature and their contributory potential to shared remembering is corroborated by the results of a quantitative analysis, which suggests that co-speech gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze have different interactional dynamics. This supports the conclusion that in order to understand the role of multimodal alignment in the discourse of shared remembering, co-verbal behavior should not be treated as a homogeneous category. Finally, we discuss the potential of combined qualitative–quantitative approaches to inform the interplay of verbal and bodily coordination during interactive memory construction.

Personal remembering can be heavily influenced by the context in which it takes place, which includes external factors such as people, locations and things. These things can be physical, digital or a combination of both, such as digital photographs displayed on a physical screen. Together, these media and media carriers can act as memory cues, which in turn can be purposely created for the support of remembering experiences. The aim of this article is to show the challenges, potential and opportunities of this multidisciplinary research area, Materialising Memories, which creates interactive designs to be used in context. This will be illustrated through the presentation of two design case studies supporting photo sharing in everyday life: Cueb and 4Photos.

We review the contributions to this Special Issue that highlight the diverse ways in which memory takes place that go beyond the standard personal autobiographical memory and its reliance on internal imagery. We look at how contributors explore a highly individual memory of trauma and re-consider it as a complex, socially contested phenomenon. We next turn to a discussion of shared memory within dyads and then look at a contribution that examines bodily and gestural alignment during shared recollection among group members and/or families. From there, contributors raise considerations of collective memory in prisoner-of-war survivors and among football fans attending a World Cup event. The next contribution illustrates how collective forgetting creates social bonds in a similar manner to collective remembering. Finally, we show how the boundaries of memory are being stretched by digital technology through its influence on how we recall and share memories. Methodological innovations are also discussed.