Autobiographical Memory in Normative and Clinical populations: Contextual, Cultural

and Generational Variations

Khushi Bajaj
Department of Psychology,Christ University,Bangalore
MSC Clinical Psychology
Dr. Palanisamy V
17TH February,2023
Autobiographical Memory in Normative and Clinical populations: Contextual, Cultural
and Generational Variations

APA defines autobiographical memory as the recall of incidents or experiences that

one has faced in their life, not only mere incidents about oneself, but it also taps on the self-
related factual knowledge (APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.). In this essay, we are going
to explore the Autobiographical Memory in Normative and Clinical populations: Contextual,
Cultural and Generational Variations.
Autobiographical memory is a cognitive skill that helps people recall previously
experienced events and incorporate them into meaningful narrative. It basically serves three
purposes: Self-in-relation function, Self-definition function and Self-regulation function.
(Vanaken et al., 2020). The articles that were referred to consisted of a rich resource bank
regarding multiple facets of autobiographical memory, which we will be venturing into by
critically evaluating the research objectives and findings.
Autobiographical memory has a positive impact on listener’s social evaluations if it is
dictated in a coherent manner. This study was conducted by Vanaken and given the
importance of interpersonal relationships and an interpersonal model of mental health, it is a
clinically significant study(Vanaken et al., 2020).
The objective of the research was to look at how listeners' social perceptions of
memory coherence were affected. Being incoherent when expressing autobiographical
recollections will elicit more unfavourable social evaluations from listeners than coherent
sharing of autobiographical memories, according to the hypothesis. Sixteen Dutch narratives
Four positive and four negative themes were utilised for the cause, and each writer developed
a tale that was both cohesive and incomprehensible. The Narrative Coherence Coding System
(NCCS) was used to check for coherence; the coding method comprised three distinct aspects
(scores 0-3), therefore the total score runs from 0 to 9. A tale that is coherent receives a higher
score than one that is incoherent. Theme Coherent stories received a score of 9, whereas
incoherent ones received a score of 3 or 2. Seven impartial raters evaluated the emotional
valence (the degree of positivity or negativity of an experience) of 16 stories.- the amount of
positivity (+5) or negativity (-5) (Vanaken et al., 2020).
Positive and unpleasant emotional situations can both be shared in a social setting. It
was found that participants were more open to interacting with those who told coherent
stories than with those who told incoherent ones. Participants also felt more positively
towards those who told coherent stories than those who told incoherent ones.
participants placed higher faith in individuals who delivered cohesive stories than those who
told non-sensical ones.
In other words, when someone is discussing a happy occurrence, incoherence is seen more
negatively; conversely, when someone is discussing a terrible event, incoherence is perceived
less adversely. A higher score on psychological well-being was related to having positive
feelings towards the speaker. Higher levels of neuroticism seemed to be related to higher
amount of negative feelings towards the speaker (Vanaken et al., 2020).
It was found that the results were largely in line with the hypothesis. Though, the
article is fairly conclusive in itself, it has a few drawbacks in terms of social context, gender
and cultural differences. A broad socio-cultural perspective went beyond the scope of the
study, it would be more comprehensive to look at these variables and their covariance with
memory coherence, which was not covered in the present study and creates a scope for future
researchers. The sample comprised mostly of young females, which makes the results non-
generalisable on other populations. There is also a cultural difference in Western and Eastern
cultures in the terms of individualism and collectivism, that can be a major impact thrower on
autobiographical memory, though this concept has been completely dodged in the present
study. The study also talks about coherence being necessary establishing truthfulness in
communication, which I feel is an over-simplified assumption made in context with
autobiographical memory. To conclude, there is a reduction in attraction effect when effortful
processing is increased, lining with the dual processing theory (Vanaken et al., 2020).

Our next study looks at the intergenerational elements that affect how
autobiographical memories are passed down from one generation to the next. Middle-aged
children of older individuals from Beijing, China recalled significant parental memories, and
older persons from the same city reported a collection of their own major autobiographical
recollections. The parent-child pairs independently recalled the memories and gave
assessments on their mnemonic qualities. Consensus memories, or memories that both
parents and children saw as significant in the parent's life, were characterised by the
significant material impact that the events caused in their lives across generations. The
number of events passed down to children was influenced by parent-child contact, but this
effect was limited to the number of script-divergent events—those that did not appear in the
life script of a culture—and not the number of script-consistent events. (Gu et al., 2019).

Memories and culture are passed on through informal means known as

intergenerational transmission (Hirst & Manier, 2008). On looking at photo albums, in family
gatherings, parents and relatives recall experiences that may be happy or traumatising, and
these traumatic memories are passed on to their children (Kaitz et al., 2009).

The study at hand had basically two objectives, to describe the traits of
autobiographical memories that both parents and children may recall and value in their lives.
variables responsible to affect the autobiographical recollections that children have of their
parents. Data from child-parent pairs was gathered. A menu of 30 frequently selected
"essential life events" was originally given to the parents. Their tasks included identifying
which of these events they had personally experienced, listing additional life events they
thought were significant, rating all experienced events based on importance, transitional
impact, vividness, emotional valence, and intensity, estimating the dates of each event, and
indicating how socially desirable they thought each event was and whether they wanted their
children to experience it. These findings shed light on the process of how shared memories
are formed in a family (Gu et al., 2019).
This study answered two research hypotheses by showing that: (a) when parents
shared their autobiographical recollections of significant events with their kids, both parents
and kids agreed that the shared experiences resulted in a significant material change. (b)
Script-divergent events needed a larger parental motive to transmit than script-consistent
events, and they were transmitted more frequently when parents felt a stronger connection to
their offspring (Gu et al., 2019).
The study ventured problems with intergenerational transmission among Chinese
pairs of parent-children. It will need further research to see if these conclusions hold true
across cultural boundaries. Future researchers may also investigate and employ more
techniques to elicit memories from parents and kids. With the new approach, kids
remembered 10 significant parenting experiences. This raises the potential that some
significant occurrences were overlooked, or, alternatively, that not all of the reported events
were given the same weight by the kids. The study also mentions about the responsiveness of
the child to the information shared by the parent and its determination of likelihood that
parent will share another information with their child. The possibility of a clinical disorder is
completely ignored here, if a child is suffering from Schizophrenia or Autism, their affect is
likely to be flat and the parent cannot makes judgements ignoring their child’s condition.
Future studies can allow parents and kids to openly share their personal life stories and
compare them would be intriguing (Gu et al., 2019).

Self and memory are closely related; without the meta-representative self, we are
unable to access our own autobiography or feel connected to the past or future. Conway's
renowned self-memory system (SMS) explains how the objectives of the "working self"
dynamically drive the knowledge that we encode and retrieve. Current theories regarding
infantile amnesia emphasise the hypothesis that early amnesia may be mitigated by
advancements in the social, cognitive, and linguistic domains that qualitatively alter how
episodic memories are encoded and recovered and allow for the potential of autobiographical
preservation (Ross et al., 2019).

The self-concept provides a psychologically rich network of knowledge in which to

incorporate incoming information, which may operate as an effective anchor for memories.
The "self-reference effect" is an example of the self's supporting function in memory (SRE).
This article explains a mnemonic benefit for information that is encoded with respect to the
self (Rogers et al., 1977). Self-processed characteristic terms are better remembered. The
arrangement and development of the trait word within a vast body of pre-existing semantic
and autobiographical self-knowledge is assumed to be the source of the SRE (Kleinbaum &
Klein, 2012).

The objective of the study was to fill up information gap by looking at the relationship
between children's self-source monitoring, self-knowledge, and autobiographical memories
between the ages of 3 and 6 in an effort to understand how childhood amnesia (Ross et al.,
2019).Five measures evaluating autobiographical memory, self-description, memory for self-
performed action, self-relevant action, and receptive vocabulary were administered to each
child separately over the course of three sessions. According to earlier studies, source
monitoring skills, autobiographical recall, and self-descriptive details all improved with age
across early infancy.found that actions and objects encoded in a self-referential context had
the expected age-invariant memory benefit (Ross et al., 2019).
As a result of greater self-specific binding at encoding, it was expected that source memory
for self-referenced acts and objects would predict the volume of children's autobiographical
memory. The findings supported this hypothesis.Due to the fact that developing self-
knowledge creates a framework in long-term memory, it was also proposed that self-
description details would predict autobiographical memory. This connection was confirmed
once more.

One cannot claim to give clear evidence of the function of metacognitive

remembering since test the difference between remembering and knowing cannot be
explicitly tested, and the children do occasionally make source mistakes that indicate
knowledge rather than memory. In the given setup, we are unable to completely evaluate the
contribution of language to the reduction of infantile amnesia. The study has many future
implications as well, which create possibilities for future researchers: There are educational
implications where self-referential techniques might be used into teaching approaches to help
students retain information without using costly resources. It can also be used for clinical
interventions, self-processing issues may be an important element of autism (Ross et al.,
2019).

To conclude, we can say that Autobiographical memory as a construct may seem to

be concerning only personal life experiences. On the contrary, it is a much more complex
process that involves cultural context and other cognitive processes like coherence,
perception, understanding, attention which helps us retain its essence
 References

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