BACKGROUND Men and women show differences in performance on emotional processing tasks. Sex also interacts with personality traits to affect information processing. Here we examine effects of sex, and two personality traits that are differentially expressed in men and women - instrumentality and communality - on voluntary and involuntary memory for distressing video-footage. METHODS On sessio...

One of the methods that allow us to investigate the lateral organization of involuntary memory is priming. Originally this method was developed as a way to examine visual perception and visuomotor coordination in a cognitive paradigm. Eventually, however, it became clear that the capabilities of priming are much broader. Among other things it provides a unique possibility to examine involuntary...

Cognitive psychologists have often equaled retrieval of personal events with voluntary recall from autobiographical memory, but more recent research shows that autobiographical memories often come to mind involuntarily-that is, with no retrieval effort. Voluntary memories have been studied in numerous laboratory experiments in response to word-prompts, whereas involuntary memories primarily hav...

Involuntary episodic memories come to mind spontaneously--that is, with no preceding retrieval attempts. Such memories are frequent in daily life, in which they are predominantly positive and often triggered by situational features matching distinctive parts of the memory. However, individuals suffering from psychological disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, have stressful, repetit...

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are typically discussed in the context of negative memories such as trauma 'flashbacks'. However, IAMs occur frequently in everyday life and are predominantly positive. In spite of this, surprisingly little is known about how such positive IAMs arise. The trauma film paradigm is often used to generate negative IAMs. Recently an equivalent positive fi...

Although involuntary past and future mental time travel (MTT) has been examined outside the laboratory in diary studies, MTT has primarily been studied in the context of laboratory studies using voluntary construction tasks. In this study, we adapted and extended a paradigm previously used to elicit involuntary and voluntary memories (Schlagman & Kvavilashvili in Memory & Cognition, 36, 920-932...

Following the precedent set by Dorthe Berntsen's 2009 book, Involuntary Autobiographical Memory, this paper asks whether the mechanisms responsible for involuntarily recollected memories are distinct from those that are responsible for voluntarily recollected ones. Berntsen conjectures that these mechanisms are largely the same. Recent work has been thought to show that this is mistaken, but th...