Jefferson A. Singer

Mood Regulation and Memory: Repairing Sad Moods with Happy Memories

A total of 106 undergraduates participated in a study examining how individuals retrieve memories to repair negative moods. Participants first completed a measure of depression. Two weeks later, participants were assigned to either a sad or neutral mood induction. After mood induction, they recalled two memories, rated their affective responses to the memories, and indicated why they chose the valence and order of the memories. Consistent with mood-congruent recall, participants in the sad condition reported sadder memories than those in the neutral condition. However, participants with prior low depression scores tended to recall more positive second memories, whereas participants with higher prior depression scores recalled consecutive negative memories. Sixty-eight per cent of sad participants who retrieved a negative first and positive second memory mentioned mood repair as motivating the recruitment of the more positive second memory.

The Myth of Individualism-Collectivism: A Critical Review

Abstract The authors critically assess the dimension of individualism-collectivism (I-C) and its various uses in cross-cultural psychology. They argue that I-C research is characterized largely by insufficient conceptual clarity and a lack of systematic data. As a result, they call into question the utility of I-C as an explanatory tool for cultural variation in behavior, suggest alternative dimensions for cross-cultural research, and interpret the weaknesses of research on I-C as illustrative of a general trend in social psychology.

An Experimental Investigation of Specificity and Generality in Memory Narratives

Research in memory and personality has distinguished between memory narratives of specific events and summaries of many events blended together. This differentiation has been linked to both the hierarchical organization of memory and to individual differences in personality. Four experiments, with 506 subjects, were conducted to demonstrate that this single event/summary memory narrative distinction could be formalized and reliably scored, using both written and spoken memory narratives. Mean interrater agreement was 93 percent, Kappa = .78. The mean frequency of recall of single event memory narratives was 78 percent, summary memory narratives, 22 percent. It was also demonstrated that a request for personally significant memories relevant to ones self-understanding increases the number of summary memory narratives retrieved. Summary and single event memories were not significantly different in affective quality.

Self-Defining Memories, Scripts, and the Life Story: Narrative Identity in Personality and Psychotherapy

An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long-term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life-story memories, which in turn become self-defining memories when linked to an individuals enduring concerns. Self-defining memories that share repetitive emotion-outcome sequences yield narrative scripts, abstracted templates that filter cognitive-affective processing. The life story is the individuals overarching narrative that provides unity and purpose over the life course. Healthy narrative identity combines memory specificity with adaptive meaning-making to achieve insight and well-being, as demonstrated through a literature review of personality and clinical research, as well as new findings from our own research program. A clinical case study drawing on this narrative identity model is also presented with implications for treatment and research.

Older, wiser, and happier? Comparing older adults’ and college students’ self-defining memories

The present study compared self-defining memories in adults 50 years of age and older to the self-defining memories of college students. Findings are largely congruent with previous memory and ageing research, but shed additional light on how personal memories are employed to achieve a sense of identity and continuity in older adults. Older adults’ self-defining memories, compared to those of younger adults, were more positive in emotional tone, more summarised and less detailed, and more likely to contain integrative meaning. The implications of these findings for assessing normative personal memory in older adults are discussed along with more general observations about narrative identity in older adulthood.

New Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory: The Integration of Narrative Processing and Autobiographical Reasoning

Researchers from diverse psychological subdisciplines have increasingly turned their attention to the storied aspect of human thought. Narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning are 2 forms of this conscious thought. Narrative processing is the tendency to create thought units that use vivid imagery, sequential plots, characters, and salient goals. Autobiographical reasoning consists of interpreting and evaluating remembered experiences. Both forms of thought are discussed in D. P. McAdamss (2001) personality theory and D. B. Pillemers (2001) cognitive research. S. Bluck and T. Habermas (2001) highlight developmental aspects of narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning, particularly in adolescent identity formation. U. M. Staudinger (2001) illustrates how autobiographical reasoning about memories and life stories serves as a springboard for wisdom at different stages of the life cycle. Implications for integrating subdisciplines of psychology are discussed.

Depression and memory narrative type.

Research with autobiographical memories has distinguished between memory narratives of specific events and summaries of many events blended together. Depression has been associated with a reduced ability to retrieve and orally relate specific positive memories. This study explored the hedonic bias in memory through collection of written autobiographical memories from 90 nonclinical college students whose mood was assessed for depression. Participants with higher depression scores recalled significantly more summary memories in response to a request for a positive self-defining memory than did participants with lower depression scores. There were no significant differences in the number of single-event and summary memories when participants were asked for a negative memory. We used J. A. Singer and K. H. Moffitts (1991-1992) scoring system to distinguish between summarized and specific memory narratives.

Racial Identity of Children in Integrated, Predominantly White, and Black Schools.

Fourth-grade children in three school settings (integrated, Black, and White) were assessed by 3 methods: the Draw-A-Person test, the spontaneous self-concept test, and the picture test. The effect of schools population on a childs racial identity was studied. The children in the integrated school setting mentioned race and ethnicity significantly more often than did children in either of the other two settings. The children from both the integrated and the predominantly White schools also chose more friends from the outgroup than did the children in the predominantly Black school. The children in the non-integrated schools disliked other races more. All groups chose their own race when asked to indicate which child looked most like them. Contrary to the research hypothesis, the children in the predominantly White school produced drawings that depicted their race more obviously than did children from either of the other schools.

Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory's duality

Both Loewald’s relational theory of memory and the Self‐Memory System (SMS) of cognitive neuroscience describe a dual memory system, one system that is experience‐near sensory‐perceptual, and the other, symbolic and conceptual. In contrast to perspectives that locate therapeutic action in either altering implicit procedural memories or interpreting explicit historical content, we argue that psychological health emerges from effective integration of both memory systems, achieved through a combination of transference dynamics and analytic insight. We support this position by elaborating four key assumptions of the Loewaldian and SMS perspectives, followed by application to a clinical example. We highlight the power of certain integrative autobiographical memories called ‘self‐defining memories’ in assisting an understanding of transference dynamics and providing metaphoric touchstones to guide subsequent treatment.

A Social Interactional Model of Bereavement Narrative Disclosure

According to recent bereavement research, disclosing the narrative of ones loss does not per se promote emotional recovery. At the same time, social, personality, and developmental research suggests that telling personal stories is an important means of building identity and relationships throughout adulthood. Drawing on this literature, this review illustrates how bereavement narrative disclosure may be instrumental in addressing psychosocial challenges associated with bereavement (e.g., relationship formation, identity reconstruction, and meaning making). Multiple individual and social factors may affect how successful bereavement narrative disclosure is these challenges. Applying a social interactional model of memory telling, this review examines the influence of the relationship of narrator and listener, their personality characteristics, the content and structure of the narrative, the type of loss, and the time since the loss in facilitating or disrupting the putative goals of bereavement narrative disclosure. The utility of this model for clinicians working with bereaved individuals is also explored.