Annette Bohn

Remembering and forecasting: The relation between autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking.

Episodic future thinking is a projection of the self into the future to mentally preexperience an event. Previous work has shown striking similarities between autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking in response to various experimental manipulations. This has nurtured the idea of a shared neurocognitive system underlying both processes. Here, undergraduates generated autobiographical memories and future event representations in response to cue words and requests for important events and rated their characteristics. Important and wordcued events differed markedly on almost all measures. Past, as compared with future, events were rated as more sensorially vivid and less relevant to life story and identity. However, in contrast to previous work, these main effects were qualified by a number of interactions, suggesting important functional differences between the two temporal directions. For both temporal directions, sensory imagery dropped, whereas self-narrative importance and reference to normative cultural life script events increased with increasing temporal distance.

Pleasantness bias in flashbulb memories: Positive and negative flashbulb memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall among East and West Germans

Flashbulb memories for the fall of the Berlin Wall were examined among 103 East and West Germans who considered the event as either highly positive or highly negative. The participants in the positive group rated their memories higher on measures of reliving and sensory imagery, whereas their memory for facts was less accurate than that of the participants in the negative group. The participants in the negative group had higher ratings on amount of consequences but had talked less about the event and considered it less central to their personal and national identity than did the participants in the positive group. In both groups, rehearsal and the centrality of the memory to the person’s identity and life story correlated positively with memory qualities. The results suggest that positive and negative emotions have different effects on the processing and long-term retention of flashbulb memories.

The Reminiscence Bump Reconsidered Children’s Prospective Life Stories Show a Bump in Young Adulthood

The reminiscence bump—the reporting of more memories from young adulthood than from other stages of life—is considered a hallmark of autobiographical memory research. The most prevalent explanations for this effect assume that events in young adulthood are favored because of the way they are encoded and maintained in long-term memory. Here we show that a similar increase of events in early adulthood is found when children narrate their personal futures. In Study 1, children wrote their future life stories. The events in these life stories were mostly life-script events, and their distribution showed a clear bump in young adulthood. In Study 2, children were prompted by word cues to write down events from their future lives. The events generated consisted mostly of non-life-script events, and those events did not show a bump in young adulthood. Our findings challenge prevailing explanations of the reminiscence bump and suggest that the cultural life script forms an overarching organizational principle for autobiographical memories and future representations across the life span.

A pancultural perspective on the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory

The fading affect bias (FAB) refers to the negative affect associated with autobiographical events fading faster than the positive affect associated with such events, a reliable and valid valence effect established by researchers in the USA. The present study examined the idea that the FAB is a ubiquitous emotion regulating phenomenon in autobiographical memory that is present in people from a variety of cultures. We tested for evidence of the FAB by sampling more than 2400 autobiographical event descriptions from 562 participants in 10 cultures around the world. Using variations on a common method, each sample evidenced a FAB: positive affect faded slower than negative affect did. Results suggest that in tandem with local norms and customs, the FAB may foster recovery from negative life events and promote the retention of the positive emotions, within and outside of the USA. We discuss these findings in the context of Keltner and Haidts levels of analysis theory of emotion and culture.

The future is bright and predictable: the development of prospective life stories across childhood and adolescence.

When do children develop the ability to imagine their future lives in terms of a coherent prospective life story? We investigated whether this ability develops in parallel with the ability to construct a life story for the past and narratives about single autobiographical events in the past and future. Four groups of school children aged 9 to 15 years imagined their future lives and produced past life stories, as well as a cultural life script (i.e., culturally shared assumptions as to the order and timing of important life events). They also produced narratives about single autobiographical events to take place in the near future or recent past. Past and prospective life story coherences developed in parallel across ages, that is, older children told more coherent life stories than younger children, irrespective of temporal direction. However, children produced more coherent stories about single events in the past than in the future. Across age groups, prospective life stories were shorter, contained more life script events and were more positive than past life stories. Life script normativity increased with age and predicted the coherence of prospective, but not of past, life stories. The findings indicate that the ability to tell coherent life stories for the past and future develops in parallel and relies on similar processes. Life script abilities might be a major factor in the development of past and prospective life story coherences but not for the development of single event story coherences.

Normative ideas of life and autobiographical reasoning in life narratives

Autobiographical reasoning is closely related to the development of normative ideas about life as measured by the cultural life script. The acquisition of a life script is an important prerequisite for autobiographical reasoning because children learn through the life script which events are expected to go into their life story, and when to expect certain events in life. Thus, the cultural life script not only helps organize autobiographical memories, but it also guides expectations for our future life stories. Therefore, the cultural life script should be considered the overarching principle of organizing autobiographical memories across the lifespan.

Living in history and living by the cultural life script: How older Germans date their autobiographical memories

This study examines predictions from two theories on the organisation of autobiographical memory: Cultural Life Script Theory which conceptualises the organisation of autobiographical memory by cultural schemata, and Transition Theory which proposes that people organise their memories in relation to personal events that changed the fabric of their daily lives, or in relation to negative collective public transitions, called the Living-in-History effect. Predictions from both theories were tested in forty-eight-old Germans from Berlin and Northern Germany. We tested whether the Living-in-History effect exists for both negative (the Second World War) and positive (Fall of Berlin Wall) collectively experienced events, and whether cultural life script events serve as a prominent strategy to date personal memories. Results showed a powerful, long-lasting Living-in History effect for the negative, but not the positive event. Berlin participants dated 26% of their memories in relation to the Second World War. Supporting cultural life script theory, life script events were frequently used to date personal memories. This provides evidence that people use a combination of culturally transmitted knowledge and knowledge based on personal experience to navigate through their autobiographical memories, and that experiencing war has a lasting impact on the organisation of autobiographical memories across the life span.

Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections

Episodic counterfactuals are imagined events that could have happened, but did not happen, in a person’s past. Such imagined past events are important aspects of mental life, affecting emotions, decisions, and behaviors. However, studies examining their phenomenological characteristics and content have been few. Here we introduced a new method to systematically compare self-generated episodic counterfactuals to self-generated episodic memories and future projections with regard to their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., imagery, emotional valence, and rehearsal) and content (e.g., reference to a cultural life script), and how these were affected by temporal distance (1 month, 1 year, 5+ years). The findings showed that the three types of events differed phenomenologically. First, episodic memories were remembered more easily, with more sensory details, and from a dominantly field perspective, as compared to both future projections and episodic counterfactuals. Second, episodic future projections were more positive, more voluntarily rehearsed, and more central to life story and identity than were both episodic memories and episodic counterfactuals. Third, episodic counterfactuals differed from both episodic memories and future projections by neither having the positivity bias of the future events nor the enhanced sensory details of the past events. Across all three event types, sensory details decreased, whereas importance, reference to a cultural life script, and centrality increased with increasing temporal distance. The findings show that imagined events are phenomenologically different from memories of experienced events, consistent with reality-monitoring theory, and that imagined future events are different from both actual and imagined past events, consistent with some theories of motivation.

Warm-up questions on early childhood memories affect the reported age of earliest memories in late adolescence

Researchers have recently used warm-up questions concerning childhood memories at specific early ages (e.g. 3 years of age) in an attempt to facilitate the retrieval process on the subsequent question regarding the earliest memory. Although this methodology may indeed facilitate the retrieval process by conducting the test in a manner resembling ordinary dialogue, the methodology might also unintentionally put further demand characteristics on the respondents. In the present study we systematically manipulated the target age (either 3 or 6 years of age) for the warm-up question preceding the ‘earliest memory’ question in order to test this possibility. The participants were 445 Danish high school students (M age=17.94). The results revealed that systematically manipulating the target age for the warm-up question had a strong impact on the age of the earliest memory reported by the adolescents. Participants who received warm-up questions with 3 years as the target age subsequently reported earlier first memories than the participants receiving warm-up questions with 6 years as the target age. These results have important implications for the methodology involved in research on childhood amnesia.

Why do I think and talk about it? Perceived functions and phenomenology of episodic counterfactual thinking compared with remembering and future thinking

People revisit situations from their past and imagine what could have happened had the situation played out differently. This form of hypothetical thinking is known as episodic counterfactual thinking. The reasons why people engage in episodic counterfactual thinking have not been examined in the same context with remembering the past and imagining the future. We addressed this gap, by focusing on the perceived functions and phenomenological characteristics of the most important episodic counterfactuals compared with episodic memories and future projections in younger adults. We base our analyses on four categories of functions previously identified for past events: reflective, social, generative, and ruminative. The reflective and social functions dominated across all events, with the reflective function being most pronounced for future projections, potentially suggesting a close connection between future projections and self-regulation and/or identity formation. Counter to predictions, the ruminative function was not rated higher for episodic counterfactuals than for other events; however, ratings of ruminative function showed unique correlations with the emotional intensity and involuntary remembering for episodic counterfactuals. Overall, these results suggest that episodic counterfactuals are used for self-reflection and social sharing more than they are used for rumination and generative concerns.