and concrete statements A rudimentary analysis of the qualities of the self-concept generated compared abstract and concrete statements. Echoing the findings of Kuhn and McPartland (1954), 80% of participants’ first selfconcepts were concrete (e.g. I am a singer; I am a daughter). There were no significant differences in fluency or personal importance based on concrete/abstract analysis (p > .4...

Visual imagery plays a fundamental role in autobiographical memory, but several aspects of this role remain unclear. We conducted three experiments to explore this relationship. In the first experiment, we examined the relation between the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memory and several measures of visual-imagery ability. We found no significant positive relation between imag...

BACKGROUND Stress and cortisol administration are known to have impairing effects on memory retrieval in healthy humans. These effects are reported to be altered in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but they have not yet been investigated in borderline personality disorder (BPD). METHOD In a placebo-controlled cross-over study, 71 women wi...

The aim of the present study is to examine relationships between emotional valence and intensity autobiographical memories phenomenological characteristics in context individual emotions memory types. Seven hundred sixty-four students (514 female, 250 male) from Dokuz Eylul University participated study. Participants were asked recall an childhood memory, a self-defining or romantic relationshi...

Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) tend to retrieve autobiographical memories with less episodic specificity, referred to as overgeneralised autobiographical memory. In line with evidence that autobiographical memory overlaps with one's capacity to imagine the future, recent work has also shown that individuals with PTSD also imagine themselves in the future with less episod...

The particularly high treatment gap in alcohol-dependence suggests the existence of important barriers to treatment decision and in particular difficulties in problem recognition. This study tested the relation between problem recognition and self-related memories. Forty-one recently detoxified alcohol-dependent individuals (AD) were compared to twenty alcoholic subjects that were abstinent for...

Research has revealed that clinical depression is related to reduced specificity and/or overgenerality in autobiographical memory. We set out to investigate this relationship by comparing depressed (n = 40) and nondepressed (n = 40) individuals not only in terms of autobiographical memory specificity/generality, but also in terms of narrative structure. Specificity was assessed with the Autobio...

This overview focuses on autobiographical odor memory and how information evoked by the olfactory sense may differ from memories evoked by visual or verbal information. Three key topics are addressed: (a) age distributions of evoked memories; (b) phenomenological experience; and (c) semantic processing. Current evidence suggests that memories triggered by olfactory information are localized to ...

The authors review competing theories concerning the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory. It is argued that the differences between these accounts, although important, may be more apparent than real. The crux of these disagreements lies not in what processes are important, but rather, the role these different processes play in the emergence of autobiographical memory and ...

Studies of childhood memory typically show that our earliest memories come from between three and four years of age. This finding is not universal, however. The age estimate varies across cultures and is affected by social influences. Research from the judgments and decision-making literature suggests that these estimates might also involve a judgment under uncertainty. Therefore, they might be...