Study Description

Study: Wang et al.(2007)

Aim: To investigate autobiographical memory for childhood events in three culture groups: US,
England and China. Also, to investigate the role of gender in autobiographical memory.

Method:
101 US college student, 104 from England and 97 from China were volunteered sampled and
recruited for this study. The study was conducted in their native languages.
Participants met with an experimenter in small groups and were asked to recall as many childhood
memories of events as they could in five minutes. Once they had remembered, they dated the memory,
putting down how old they were to the nearest month when the recalled event occurred. They then
rated each memory on five‐point scales regarding:
• How often they had thought/talked about the memory before
• How personally important the recalled experience was to them
• How detailed and clear the memory was
• How emotionally intense the experience was
• How negative or positive the experience was
• The source of the memory

Results:
All culture groups recalled more memory events that occurred in the later years of the infantile
amnesia period, on average, US participants recalled the greatest number of childhood memories,
followed by participants from England and lastly China.
In addition, women in all cultures recalled more childhood memories than did men across the five‐year
period. After filtering for memories that were only known from others, the Chinese group drew their
first memories from a reliably later age than did either of the Western groups who did not differ
significantly from each other.
The childhood memories most remembered were ones that had received a moderate amount of
rehearsal, were of moderate personal importance and slightly above average vividness. These
events were also of moderate emotional intensity and were mildly positive in nature. Finally, the
source of the memories was predominantly the participant rather than anyone else. With age,
memories became more vivid, more emotionally intense and more remembered on one’s own.

Conclusion:

The period of infantile amnesia differs in extent across cultures. The researchers argue that the
differences observed must largely be due to cultural influences.
An autonomous self‐construal may prioritize the early formation of a unique, detailed and articulate
personal history, resulting in earlier first memories and more childhood memories generally. In
contrast, a relational self‐construal may prioritize instead the retention of knowledge, not necessarily
in the form of autobiographical memories, which is related to experiences with predominately
interpersonal themes.
The gender difference may be an effect of socialization, as previous studies have shown that parents
engage in more elaborate memory conversations with daughters than with sons.
Therefore both the type of self‐construal in a culture and the cultural narrative practices may shape
memory development and directly affect autobiographical memory. This has a clear relationship to
cultural schemas in the shaping of memory.

Evaluation:

Strengths:
This is a controlled experiment that acknowledged that while there may be other variables that affect
autobiographical memory.
The retrieved memories were analyzed using several relevant factors to draw a conclusion.
Limitations:
It is possible that other variables affected the autobiographical memories of the participants
Over 75% of the participants in the US and English groups were female, and just under 50% in the
Chinese group was female. Given that women throughout had more childhood memories this may have
been a confounding variable.

Key terms and definitions:

Self-control: the way that members of different cultures learn to think about themselves in
relation to others

Autonomous self‐construal : a kind of self-control that focuses on the individual and central
to their own life

Relational self‐construal : a kind of self-control that sees the individual primarily in terms
of their relationships to others in the family and social network