The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory: History, Theory, Research 3030695700, 9783030695705

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The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory History, Theory, Research Igor Sotgiu

The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory “Professor Sotgiu, an active autobiographical memory researcher, provides in a scholarly, clear fashion what his title implies. As an up-to-date monograph for general readers, more specialized researchers, and upper-level students, his book has no equal. Heated controversies are fairly presented. A broad range of historical figures share pages with more recent researchers to produce a unique and welcomed review.” —David Rubin, Duke University, USA “This book is refreshing in contextualizing this contemporary field in its 140-year history. Readers are guided down a fascinating path to explore the intellectual evolution of humans’ obsession with their personal pasts. By presenting a comprehensive overview of both pioneering and current research, Sotgiu provides a carefully reasoned exploration of the intricacies of recalling and sharing the early, happy, meaningful and difficult events that make up a life.” —Susan Bluck, University of Florida, USA “Rigorous, clear and pleasant to read, this book offers us a model of effective communication of science.” —Bernard Rimé, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Igor Sotgiu

The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory History, Theory, Research

Igor Sotgiu Department of Human and Social Sciences University of Bergamo Bergamo, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-69570-5 ISBN 978-3-030-69571-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Adél Békefi, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Epigraph

The next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing. —Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography If a man thinks at all, he cannot well be a stranger to the true state of this account;—he must be privy to his own thoughts and desires;—he must remember his past pursuits, and know certainly the true springs and motives which, in general, have governed the actions of his life. —Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

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Acknowledgements

This book was first written in Italian and then translated into English. The greatest part of the translation work was done by Isabelle Johnson. I’d like to thank her especially for her enthusiasm and valuable professional contribution. I also would like to express my deep gratitude to other people I was in touch with during the writing of the book. Giuseppe Fornari encouraged me to read some classic autobiographies that helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural dimensions of the psychological processes at the heart of this book. Serge Nicolas promptly replied to all my questions about Victor Henri’s writings. Luciano Mecacci, on the other hand, kindly provided me with helpful clarifications regarding the Russian, Italian and English editions of the essay The Man with a Shattered World. The History of a Brain Wound by Alexander Luria. When looking for difficult to find bibliographic resources, I also benefited from the kind assistance of Alessandra Riggio and Elena Caruso, both of whom

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work at the University of Bergamo’s interlibrary loan services. Furthermore, I would like to thank all those friends and colleagues who generously offered their time to talk to me about my book project, especially Tommaso Costa and Stefania Consonni. Last but not least, I wish to thank my mother, father, sister and Simona for their support.

Contents

1

Introduction: An Obsession With the Past References

2

A “Brief ” History of the Psychology of Autobiographical Memory 2.1 Pioneering Contributions 2.2 The Points of View of the Various Psychology Schools (1879–1975) 2.3 Ulric Neisser and the 1976 Turning Point 2.4 The Contemporary Panorama References

3 The Content and Organisation of Autobiographical Memory 3.1 The Autobiographical Memory Network 3.2 Life Stories 3.3 The Narrative Organisation of Autobiographical Memory

1 14 17 19 46 57 62 81 93 94 100 105

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3.4 The Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Autobiographical Narrative References

113 120

4 The Functions of Autobiographical Memory 4.1 Deciding and Acting 4.2 Sharing 4.3 Reflecting About Oneself 4.4 Forgetting References

127 129 135 140 146 153

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Conclusions: What Is Autobiographical Memory? References

Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

A schematic of the Rubin’s basic systems model (Adapted with permission from “The basic systems model of autobiographical memory”, by D. C. Rubin, in D. Berntsen & D. C. Rubin (Eds.), Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches (pp. 11–32), 2012, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 2012 by Cambridge University Press) Hypothetical developmental trajectories for some of the basic systems included in the Rubin’s model (Reprinted with permission from “The basic systems model of autobiographical memory”, by D. C. Rubin, in D. Berntsen & D. C. Rubin (Eds.), Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches (pp. 11–32), 2012, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 2012 by Cambridge University Press)

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Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

List of Figures

The content and organisation of autobiographical memory according to the Conway’s model (Adapted with permission from “Autobiographical knowledge and autobiographical memories”, by M. A. Conway, in D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: Studies in autobiographical memory (pp. 67–93), 1996, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 1996 by Cambridge University Press) The alternate encapsulation of autobiographical memories and autobiographical narratives according to the Smorti’s model (Reprinted with permission from “Why narrating changes memory: a contribution to an integrative model of memory and narrative processes”, by A. Smorti and C. Fioretti, 2016, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50, pp. 296–319. Copyright 2016 by Springer Nature) Core brain regions involved in autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking (Reprinted with permission from “Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain”, by D. L. Schacter, D. R. Addis and R. L. Buckner, 2007, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, pp. 657–661. Copyright 2007 by Springer Nature) The social propagation of emotional information embedded in autobiographical memory (Reprinted with permission from “Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review”, by B. Rimé, 2009, Emotion Review, 1(1), pp. 60–85. Copyright 2009 by SAGE Publications) Summary of findings from the Walker et al.’s (1997) studies on the fading affect bias (Reprinted with permission from “Life is pleasant—And memory helps to keep it that way!”, by W. R. Walker, J. J. Skowronski and C. P. Thompson, 2003, Review of General Psychology, 7 (2), pp. 203–210. Copyright 2003 by SAGE Publications)

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Main research areas and themes in the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory Types of coherence and their definitions according to the Bluck and Habermas model of life story Main features of narratives according to Bruner

79 104 107

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List of Boxes

Box 2.1 Box 2.2 Box 3.1 Box 4.1

The Galton’s breakfast questionnaire Examples of personal memories of the breakfast table Examples of happy autobiographical memory narratives Examples of turning point narratives

25 26 111 142

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1 Introduction: An Obsession With the Past

What I am about to present here is the second book I have written during my career as university researcher and professor in the psychology of cognitive and emotional processes. The first (Sotgiu, 2013) dealt with a theme which has unfortunately been neglected by scientific psychology for much of its history but which would seem to be much in vogue at present: happiness. This first work required me to embark on philosophical and historical research which left me convinced that happiness has long been a veritable human obsession and continues to be such. From Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus to Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by way of St Augustine and St Thomas, all the great centre-stage players in philosophical thought have devoted considerable attention in their work to the concept of happiness and to setting out the objective and subjective conditions which foster or hinder our pursuit of a happy life—that of individuals and the groups, communities and societies they are part of. It is, however, significant that philosophy is not the only discipline to have turned its spotlight on the happiness theme. Religions all around the world have elaborated more or less explicit thoughts on happiness (these have been designed, ideally, to guide the faithful of the various religions in decisions relating to behaviour, values © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2_1

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and everyday ethical and moral norms). With their artistic creations, poets, men of letters and painters in all historical eras and all over the world have made fundamentally important contributions to thinking on happiness. And politics has played an important part in this field, too. In the United States Declaration of Independence—signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776—the pursuit of happiness was defined an inalienable human right on a par with life and liberty. The idea of happiness as a right belonging to all citizens was one of the principles underlying the French Revolution and the other revolutionary movements that followed in its wake. Lastly, plans and action to foster happiness, at both individual and social levels, have found a place on the political agendas of various contemporary nations, from the United Kingdom to Bhutan (see Mulgan, 2013). Thus, whilst this is undoubtedly a rough outline (for more in-depth considerations see McMahon, 2006; Minois, 2009; White, 2006), I hope to have persuaded readers that the pursuit of happiness has been a feature of human life right through history and probably the driving force behind the lion’s share of our actions and adventures through the centuries, both individual and collective, thus fostering civilisation’s progress. However, it was during work on this book that I took stock of the fact that human history may have been marked by a much more pervasive and powerful obsession than the pursuit of happiness. I am talking about our obsession with the past. Not long ago American scholar and journalist Michael Malone published an interesting monograph—The Guardian of All Things. The Epic Story of Human Memory (Malone, 2012)—which set out the wide range of tools (cognitive, expressive and technological) which human beings have mobilised over our evolutionary and cultural history to commit the past to memory and keep track of our experiences, ideas and knowledge. For Malone, prehistoric rock art was probably the first tool serving this purpose. The art painted and carved onto rocks by our ancestors features animals, anthropomorphic figures, huts, tools, combat, hunting scenes and many other images, symbols and decorative elements which are more difficult to interpret. If, on the one hand, the depiction of these contents

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certainly played an important role in ritual, magical and propitiatory activities—something which would explain wall paintings and carvings having frequently been hidden in difficult to access caves and sites— on the other, these early art forms represented the first form of external human memory, namely an extra-psychological space which was planned and implemented with extraordinary expertise and in which our ancestors were able to leave behind information on themselves, their everyday lives and the natural context in which these played out. We have no way of knowing whether our earliest ancestors conceived of passing their artistic creations and the meanings they codified on to posterity. Luckily for us, however, a great deal of this rock art has resisted the wear and tear of thousands of years and survived to the contemporary era. Recent, eminent archaeological research has shown that the oldest prehistoric rock art sites are in the Cantabria region of northern Spain and date back approximately 65,000 years (Hoffmann et al., 2018). We are in the Middle Palaeolithic, an era in which Europe was still inhabited by Homo neanderthalensis. It is, however, to the arrival on the scene of Homo sapiens, modern man, that the bulk of the rock art which we know today is to be attributed. This art has been found in various geographical areas in all five continents and been dated to diverse periods beginning around 40,000 years ago. It is interesting to observe that if prehistoric rock art can be considered the first expression of the human obsession with the past and its commemoration, as human civilisation progressed this obsession changed shape constantly. As Malone (2012) has highlighted, a second significant watershed in this respect was the invention of writing, which many scholars see as marking the passage from prehistory to history, namely from a prehistoric world in which the past was commemorated via still very limited archiving systems (rock art) to the historic era and the dissemination of external memory systems with very high archiving capacities (writing and a great many cultural and technological artefacts which came to fruition in its wake). The earliest forms of written communication of human language— Sumerian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics—made their first appearance around 5000 years ago, in the Bronze Age (Harari, 2012).

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In much the same way as with rock art, the invention of these forms of writing—together with the many others developed in subsequent eras (such as Phoenician, Arabic script and the Greek and Latin alphabets)— responded to a specific need, recording the past. But what past was it? Trading deeds and transactions, tax records, laws, poems, myths, legends, stories, tales, religious prayers, witness accounts, personal missives. This was the information contained in the documents created by means of the first writing systems invented by man, documents which have reached us despite the sequence of natural and manmade events (such as floods, earthquakes and wars) which jeopardised them. It is once again Malone’s (2012) interesting book which reminds us how much energy our ancestors put into designing and bringing to fruition physical writing supports capable of memorising the past in the most efficient way possible, that is for as long as possible. If the Sumerians made use of clay tablets for this purpose, the Egyptians used papyrus leaves. Frequently gathered up into long rolls, Egyptian papyruses had various advantages over Sumerian tablets. Egyptian papyruses were lighter and less bulky and for this reason easier to store, characteristics which ensured they spread rapidly first in the Middle East and then in Europe. This is when the first libraries emerged as large papyrus and papyrus roll deposits capable of storing huge quantities of past news, data, information and accounts. Many scholars believe that the oldest of these was the library in Alexandria, Egypt. Founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the third century BC—and probably destroyed in 48 BC in a fire—it is believed to have held over 500,000 rolls of papyrus (Casson, 2001). A further turning point in the creation of physical supports for writing was the invention of paper in China in 105 AD under the Han dynasty (de Biasi, 1999). Paper had a number of extremely significant advantages over the writing supports—not only clay and papyrus but also wax and parchment—which preceded it. First and foremost, it was soft and lightweight and thus could be folded and bound easily and another factor which should not be underestimated was its very low production costs. It was on the strength of these characteristics that, from 300 AD onwards, the first books written entirely on paper appeared, once again in China. And it was yet again in China, seven centuries later, that artisan

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Bi Sheng (990–1051) designed and built the first movable type system for printing, in terracotta (Han, 2015). Having begun in the Far East, paper reached Europe only in the twelfth century, that is approximately one thousand years after it was invented. It was, however, precisely in Europe that an extraordinarily important technological invention emerged, one which revolutionised the creation and dissemination of written texts on paper—the printing press. The brainchild of German businessman Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468), it was a moveable type system made using a special lead, tin and antimony alloy. Hard wearing and effective, it was the printing press which finally made multiple copies of a single book possible in relatively rapid time frames and at very low costs, something which had not been possible with the printing techniques developed in the centuries which preceded it (in Europe like in other parts of the world). Over just one hundred years—from 1450 to 1550—tens of thousands of books of all sorts were thus printed and sold: religious and theological works, philosophy and law books, medical treatises, accounting and grammar books, dictionaries, chess manuals, chivalrous novels and a great deal more (de Biasi, 1999). In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the dissemination of printed books on paper gathered pace leading to a constant increase in the numbers of libraries, both private and public, which made a fundamentally important contribution to the dissemination of culture and scientific knowledge, above all from the nineteenth century onwards. As we know, however, the culmination of the book’s success has been in modern times. Today, at least in the most highly developed nations in industrial and economic terms, almost every home has a mini book collection in it and in some cases a full-blown library. It is thanks to books that contemporary man finally has access to huge knowledge, news and information on the main spheres of human knowledge: history, culture, science and religion. After centuries of relentless technological advance, the past has now become a common asset, shared heritage, within everyone’s reach. In any examination of the history of the book, and more generally the evolution of the human obsession with conserving the past, special

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attention is undoubtedly due to the popularity of the autobiography, a book genre dealing with a specific form of the past, the autobiographical past, namely the memories stored in the mind of a single individual, the writer in this case, who—in contrast to authors of other literary genres— is both narrator and centre-stage player in the stories he or she tells. Whilst work with autobiographical contents dating to antiquity (e.g. Anabasis of Xenophon) and the Middle Ages (think of St. Augustine’s Confessions) is not difficult to find, the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the first true autobiography, in the modern sense of the word, was written as late as the second half of the eighteenth century (see Smith & Watson, 2010). I am naturally thinking of The Confessions of great Geneva man of letters and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778). Understanding the innovative and, in many respects, revolutionary scope of this work, written from 1765 to 1770, requires citing the words with which Rousseau himself (1782–1789/2012) presented the book to his readers. I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellowmortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work. Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime. (p. 12)

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In the excerpt cited above Rousseau underlines the unique and, to some extent, intrepid, nature of his work (“I have entered upon a performance which is without example”) which he sees as a matter of stripping himself naked, hiding nothing from his readers, including his less noble actions1 —something he sees none of the authors of autobiographical works that had preceded him as having done, however many details of their lives they revealed.2 Once again in the opening passage to The Confessions cited above, Rousseau boldly declares that no-one will be capable of emulating him in the future (“I have entered upon a performance … whose accomplishment will have no imitator”). We now know that things didn’t turn out that way. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Carlo Goldoni (1707– 1793), Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832), Stendhal (1783–1842), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), John Ruskin (1819–1900), Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), Mark Twain (1835–1910), Francis Galton (1822–1911), Henry Adams (1838– 1918), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Mary Antin (1881–1949), Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Pablo Neruda (1904– 1973), Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Marc Chagall (1887–1985), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Georges Simenon (1903–1989), Salvador Dalì (1904–1989), Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989), Elias Canetti (1905– 1994), Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), Eric Kandel (1929–), Irvin Yalom (1931–): these are just some of the eminent writers, poets, artists, philosophers, scientists and even psychologists who, from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards and the years following on from

1 Among

other things Rousseau confesses to having abandoned the five children born of his relationship with Thérèse Levasseur at an orphanage. 2 In Book X of The Confessions, Rousseau (1782–1789/2012) cites, for example, the case of French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592): “I had always laughed at the false ingenuousness of Montaigne, who, feigning to confess his faults, takes great care not to give himself any, except such as are amiable; whilst I, who have ever thought, and still think myself, considering everything, the best of men, felt there is no human being, however pure he maybe, who does not internally conceal some odious vice” (p. 604).

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the publication of Rousseau’s The Confessions, decided to kiss and tell, entirely or partially and each in their own way.3 It is interesting to note that in the contemporary world it is no longer only intellectuals who publish autobiographies. Singers, actors, football players, tennis players, boxers, TV personalities and entrepreneurs venture increasingly frequently into existential accounts and their autobiographies are often extremely successful, at least in sales terms. It is equally interesting to note that in addition to becoming a literary genre in its own right, autobiographies—together with memoires and autobiographical novels4 —are an extremely precious source of information on the psychological functioning of the human memory (Brockmeier, 2015; McGovern, 2007). With their marked capacity for introspective observation, the writers of these works succeeded in supplying extremely detailed and, at the same time sophisticated, descriptions of the various forms taken by autobiographical memories and the impact these have had on the present life of the person recalling and writing them. An example is this further passage from Rousseau’s (1782–1789/2012) The Confessions. Near thirty years passed away from my leaving Bossey, without once recalling the place to my mind with any degree of satisfaction; but after having passed the prime of life, as I decline into old age (while more recent occurrences are wearing out apace) I feel these remembrances revive and imprint themselves on my heart, with a force and charm that every day acquires fresh strength; as if, feeling life fleet from me, I endeavored to catch it again by its commencement. The most trifling incident of those happy days delight me, for no other reason than being of those days. I recall every circumstance of time, place, and persons; I see the maid or footman busy in the chamber, a swallow entering the window, a fly settling on my hand while repeating my lessons. I see the whole 3 For

more on the contents of the autobiographies of some of these authors, see the work of Buckley (1984), Jolly (2001), McGovern (2007), Tomonari (2008) and Smith and Watson (2010). 4 Examples of very famous autobiographical novel writers include Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Fëdor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Italo Svevo (1861–1928) and James Joyce (1882–1941). Memoir writers, on the other hand, include Silvio Pellico (1789– 1854), Lawrence of Arabia (1888–1935), Primo Levi (1919–1987) and Marek Edelman (1919– 2009).

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economy of the apartment; on the right hand Mr. Lambercier’s closet, with a print representing all the popes, a barometer, a large almanac, the windows of the house (which stood in a hollow at the bottom of the garden) shaded by raspberry shrubs, whose shoots sometimes found entrance; I am sensible the reader has no occasion to know all this, but I feel a kind of necessity for relating it. (p. 31)

When he wrote this Rousseau was well past fifty, not a young age for an eighteenth-century man. The events described in this excerpt refer to a period in which he was around 12–13, however. He underlines that the memories associated with that period of his existence were much easier to source and more vivid and detailed than those of other periods of his life (“I feel these remembrances revive and imprint themselves on my heart, with a force and charm that every day acquires fresh strength”). However non-scientific the language used, Rousseau’s observations (we might call them metacognitive) describe a phenomenon which is welldocumented in much contemporary research on human memory, the so-called reminiscence bump. When an adult or elderly person is asked to recall the most important events in his or her autobiographical past, it is episodes in the second and third decades of life (the period between 10 and 30, for clarity’s sake) which spring to mind and are cited more frequently than those relating to other phases of life, before or after the period in question (see Fitzgerald & Broadbridge, 2012; Munawar et al., 2018; Rubin, 2002). Note that Rousseau was writing in the second half of the eighteenth century (1765–1770, as we have seen) and was thus two centuries ahead of contemporary psychology discoveries. I have paused to consider the history of autobiography here because its popularity as a literary genre documents a need felt by many—first and foremost writers, as we have seen, but not limited to them—to remember, recount, share and hopefully pass on the story of their lives in an exemplary way. It is, however, important to underline that whilst it has become a highly popular expressive medium, autobiographical writing is not the only contemporary tool with which people can evoke, represent, cherish, share and pass on their pasts. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards an important role has been played by photography, which enables people to keep track of a multiplicity of

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contents relating to the autobiographical past: people, animals, objects, places. Moving forward in history to the second half of the twentieth century, extraordinary IT and communication technology progress has irreversibly and radically altered our personal relationship with our pasts. If we were to examine the contents of the PCs, tablets and smartphones of the majority of our friends and acquaintances (as well, naturally, as our own) we would get an instant insight into the fact that people of all ages and cultures conserve a significant part of their autobiographical pasts in the form of photos, videos and written and voice messages. The same type of content is also to be found in the personal pages of users of the most popular social media: Facebook and Instagram. And, as we all know, the storage capacity, efficiency and accessibility of all these past archiving systems are constantly on the rise. In fact, in the wake of the development and proliferation of new technological memory intermediaries (Assmann, 1999/2011)—icons, sounds and, increasingly frequently, multi-media—we all to some extent record, save and, in a great many cases, share great swathes of our autobiographical stories with other people. Our obsession with the past would thus seem to have reached its apex today (Baxter, 1999). And the most surprising thing is that—unlike rock art, clay and wax tablets, papyrus, parchment, codices, incunabula and books printed using the most avantgarde techniques—digital autobiographical contents, at least those saved on the web, are practically indestructible. And it is perhaps for this very reason that we are in such a rush to make new ones. The invention, sale and widespread dissemination of artificial memory archives must not, however, prompt us to overlook the extraordinary capacity of natural , i.e. human, memory. This latter is undoubtedly bound up with the phylogenetic evolution of nature’s most complex organ, the human brain. With its billions of neurons and even vaster number of connections between these, the huge volume of information which can be recorded and stored in an individual (healthy) brain is truly incredible, although not unlimited. Scientist Edward Wilson (2014), the father of sociobiology, has stressed that the ability to select and use the information stored in the tissues making up our brains is a distinctive feature of Homo sapiens

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and one which probably gave our ancestors the edge in their struggle for survival and adaptation to their natural environment. Lastly, it should not be ruled out that it may have been precisely the phylogenetic evolution of these cognitive capacities which allowed Homo sapiens to achieve its supremacy over all the planet’s other forms of life. It is within the complex, stratified historical, technological, cultural and evolutionary framework outlined thus far that the psychology of autobiographical memory, the subject of this book, takes its place. Neglected for a significant part of the history of psychology, the psychological processes involved in encoding, retaining and retrieving informational contents regarding our autobiographical pasts are central to the contemporary psychology debate. A straightforward examination of the global scientific psychology literature bibliographical database, PsycINFO, produced by the American Psychological Association, provides an insight into the validity of this hypothesis. In 2019, 291 autobiographical memory contributions were published (including articles, books, book chapters and doctoral theses), a figure which is anything but negligible and indicative of significant interest by contemporary psychologists in the theme of this book. On the other hand, this same bibliographical research in earlier years and decades highlights the fact that interest in autobiographical memory began to make itself felt to a significant extent only in the noughties.5 Precisely in the wake of the recent popularity of the psychology of autobiographical memory, recent years have seen the publication of a range of academic books on this theme (see, for example, Berntsen & Rubin, 2012; Mace, 2010, 2019; Watson & Berntsen, 2015). Often the result of the joint efforts of a range of scholars and researchers, these collective works contain systematic and in some cases critical analyses of the theoretical and empirical literature relating to the psychological processes at work when we memorise our autobiographical pasts. These analyses are undoubtedly of use in bringing into sharper focus theoretical and methodological issues central to a psychological research field

5 For

a clearer view of international autobiographical memory literature evolutions, I repeated this bibliographical research for the following years: 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. The number of contributions was, respectively, 1, 25, 109 and 243.

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in such rapid expansion and with such fuzzy borders. All this notwithstanding, these books have certain weaknesses, in my opinion. First and foremost, their accounts of the discoveries made by contemporary psychologists are frequently fragmentary and it is thus difficult for readers to obtain a clear and coherent overview of developments in research sectors which frequently adopt profoundly different methods of enquiry and take on themes and issues which are, for the most part, circumscribed. Furthermore, precise references to the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory are almost always lacking, making it difficult to keep track of those past scholars whose pioneering contributions influenced contemporary research and, as I will show on many occasions during this book, sometimes anticipated the most significant results of this latter. It is for all these reasons that the approach I have chosen here is very different from that taken in these books. Rather than attempting what would be a very difficult task for a single scholar—an all-encompassing account of all the available literature on the subject—this book will focus on a limited number of themes, those relating to the historical, theoretical and empirical foundations of the psychology of autobiographical memory. In addition to this, introductory, chapter, the book is divided up into four chapters. Chapter 2 describes the birth and historical development of the psychology of autobiographical memory from 1879, the year the first research contribution to this field was published, to the present day. I would like to stress that the objective of this part of the book is to give a voice to some of the key players in the history of psychology who devoted considerable attention to the issue of autobiographical memory and related mental processes, psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Ulric Neisser. Alongside this, a second but no less important objective will be pursued, namely first identifying and then comparing the contributions made by the main psychology schools to the topic of this book. This analytical approach, spanning a period of almost a century and a half, will enable me to identify periods in which a large number of empirical

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and theoretical contributions were made and those in which the autobiographical memory topic was relegated to the margins of the psychological debate. Chapter 3 reviews the main theoretical approaches to the content and organisation of autobiographical memory from the 1980s onwards, namely which information forms our remembered pasts and how this information links up. To this end, special attention will be paid to the contributions made by those psychologists who, in the wake of the cognitive revolution, enquired in depth into the cognitive processes and knowledge structures capable of mentally representing the autobiographical past. Other topics addressed in this chapter include the emerging life story construct, the techniques used to analyse the narrative organisation of autobiographical memories, and the relationship between the autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative concepts. Chapter 4 deals with a topic that has attracted the attention of psychologists, in recent years in particular (but which, as I will explain in Chapter 2, had already been the subject of considerable attention in early twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalysis), namely the functions of autobiographical memory. Drawing on theory and empirical research developed in this area, I will seek to set out the main reasons prompting people to recall the events and information making up their life story plots. To this end, this chapter will focus on the conscious or unconscious aims pursued by the rememberer: preparing for everyday problems and opportunities (in the present and future); sharing one’s past with other people; reflecting about one’s identity and life story; forgetting personal experiences with the potential to threaten the self. Chapter 5 includes some final thoughts on the concept of autobiographical memory. Specifically, I will describe this concept by referring to two metaphors, each emphasising certain distinctive characteristics and functions of the mental processes relating to autobiographical memory: (1) the autobiographical memory as an archive, (2) the autobiographical memory as a book. I hope that the choice of themes examined in this book will respond adequately to the needs of those for whom it is intended: undergraduates and graduate psychology students, on one hand, and researchers and

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scholars (from psychology or related fields, such as philosophy, sociology, law, anthropology and literary studies), on the other. As far as students are concerned, my hope is that the book will be used in courses dealing with cognitive psychology and the history of the psychological sciences. Considering the book’s approach, I also hope that it will foster a critical approach in students to the concepts, theories and psychological phenomena examined, with the intention of going beyond straightforward textbook contents and notions. Lastly, as regards other potential readers—researchers and scholars— my hope is that the book may offer them precious elements serving to provide a historical perspective to both the empirical research outcomes and the hypotheses and arguments incorporated into theoretical models by means of which these outcomes are generally summed up, explained and interpreted. As we have seen, many of the academic books published in recent years have treated the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory in a cursory and superficial way (or worse, sometimes even ignoring it altogether). This is, however, a highly debatable decision in a theoretical and research field which, if only for nominalistic reasons, should put the past and memory in the forefront. One of the main objectives of this book is to correct this trend, which is also present in many other fields of contemporary psychology research.

References Assmann, A. (2011). Cultural memory and Western civilization: Functions, media, archives. Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1999). Baxter, C. (Ed.). (1999). The business of memory. The art of remembering in an age of forgetting. Graywolf Press. Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (Eds.). (2012). Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches. Cambridge University Press. Brockmeier, J. (2015). Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process. Oxford University Press. Buckley, J. H. (1984). The turning key: Autobiography and the subjective impulse since 1800. Harvard University Press.

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Casson, L. (2001). Libraries in the ancient world . Yale University Press. de Biasi, P.-M. (1999). Le papier. Une aventure au quotidien [Paper. A daily adventure]. Gallimard. Fitzgerald, J. M., & Broadbridge, C. L. (2012). Theory and research in autobiographical memory: A life-span developmental perspective. In D. Berntsen & D. C. Rubin (Eds.), Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches (pp. 246–266). Cambridge University Press. Han, Q. (2015). Lecture 2 Printing. In Y. Lu (Ed.), A history of Chinese science and technology (Vol. 2, pp. 194–238). Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press and Springer. Harari, Y. N. (2012). From animals into gods: A brief history of humankind . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Hoffmann, D. L., Standish, C. D., García-Diez, M., Pettitt, P. B., Milton, J. A., Zilh˘ao, J., Alcolea-González, J. J., Cantalejo-Duarte, P., Collado, H., de Balbin, R., Lorblanchet, M., Ramos-Muñoz, J., Weniger, G.-Ch., & Pike, A. W. G. (2018). The U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art. Science, 359 (6378), 912–915. Jolly, M. (Ed.). (2001). Encyclopedia of life writing. Autobiographical and biographical forms (Vols. 1–2). Fitzroy Dearborn. Mace, J. H. (Ed.). (2010). The act of remembering: Toward an understanding of how we recall the past. Wiley-Blackwell. Mace, J. H. (Ed.). (2019). The organization and structure of autobiographical memory. Oxford University Press. Malone, M. (2012). The guardian of all things: The epic story of human memory. St. Martin’s Griffin. McGovern, T. W. (2007). Memory’s stories: Interdisciplinary readings of multicultural life narratives. University Press of America. McMahon, D. M. (2006). Happiness: A history. Atlantic Monthly Press. Minois, G. (2009). L’âge d’or. Histoire de la poursuite du bonheur [The golden age. History of the pursuit of happiness]. Librairie Arthème Fayard. Mulgan, G. (2013). Well-being and public policy. In S. David, I. Boniwell & A. Conley Ayers (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of happiness (pp. 326–336). Oxford University Press. Munawar, K., Kuhn, S. K., & Haque, S. (2018). Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systematic review. PLoS ONE, 13(12), e0208595. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208595. Rousseau, J. J. (2012). The confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (W. Conyngham Mallory, Trans.). The Floating Press (Ebook) (Original work published 1782–1789).

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Rubin, D. C. (2002). Autobiographical memory across the lifespan. In P. Graf & N. Ohta (Eds.), Lifespan development of human memory (pp. 159–184). MIT Press. Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2010). Reading autobiography. A guide for interpreting life narratives (2nd ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Sotgiu, I. (2013). Psicologia della felicità e dell’infelicità [Psychology of happiness and unhappiness]. Carocci. Tomonari, N. (2008). Constructing subjectivities: Autobiographies in modern Japan. Lexington Books. Watson, L. A., & Berntsen, D. (Eds.). (2015). Clinical perspectives in autobiographical memory. Cambridge University Press. White, N. (2006). A brief history of happiness. Blackwell. Wilson, E. O. (2014). The meaning of human existence. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

2 A “Brief” History of the Psychology of Autobiographical Memory

The aim of this chapter is to retrace the genesis and historical development of the psychology of autobiographical memory. The adjective “brief ” in the chapter’s title encompasses two messages for the reader. The first, and unquestionably more prosaic of the two, relates to the fact that the historical overview in this section will be relatively concise, or brief, and thus occupy more limited space than it might have in a more exclusively historiographical volume. And unfortunately no such work has, to date, been published. The second message conjured up by the word “brief ” is a matter of the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory’s timeframe. As I will demonstrate in detail in this chapter, the psychology of autobiographical memory spanned two phases separated by a long interval. The first phase took place from the late 1870s to the early years of the twentieth century, coinciding with the founding of scientific psychology and the advent of this latter. The second phase, on the other hand, is much more recent, beginning in the second half of the 1970s—and thus a little over 40 years ago—and is still underway. It is interesting to observe that, taken together, these two phases cover an 80-year period, i.e. a fairly limited time frame, as compared to the overall history of scientific © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2_2

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psychology (around 140 years, if we take 1879 as the discipline’s date of birth, i.e. the year in which the first experimental psychology laboratory was set up in Leipzig in Germany). These, however, approximate tallies highlight an important fact with which to begin our contextualisation of the theoretical and research field which is the subject of this volume: the psychology of autobiographical memory is a short-lived field of investigation. It is a history which is certainly less long—but no less interesting and complex—than those of many other sectors of psychological research whose histories have been more continuous and, in some case, parallel to that of scientific psychology as a whole (this, for example, is the case of the psychology of sensation and the psychology of perception). This chapter has been divided up into four principal sections. Section 2.1 considers the pioneering contributions of four scholars— Francis Galton, Victor and Catherine Henri, Sigmund Freud—whose theories and research can be located in what I referred to as the first phase of the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory above. Subsequently, Sect. 2.2 seeks to retrace the contributions to the study of autobiographical memory made by the main psychology schools which succeeded one another in the period from 1879—which, as we have seen, is generally considered to be scientific psychology’s date of birth—to the first half of the 1970s. In so doing, I will pay particular attention to an analysis of the long interlude referred to above—approximately 1920–1970—during which time autobiographical memory was absent from the psychological debate. The chapter continues with two further Sects. 2.3 and 2.4 devoted to the psychology of autobiographical memory’s more recent history—coinciding with what I have referred to as the second phase of this field of investigation. More precisely, Sect. 2.3 examines the theoretical and empirical contribution of one of Cognitivism’s primary exponents—Ulric Neisser. In the second half of the 1970s, it was, in fact, precisely Neisser who brought autobiographical memory back to the centre of the theoretical and empirical debate on cognitive processes. Lastly, Sect. 2.4, which brings this chapter to an end, seeks to describe the theoretical models and research areas characterising the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory panorama.

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Pioneering Contributions

2.1.1 Francis Galton Francis Galton (1822–1911) was the first to analyse the psychological processes underlying the recall of autobiographical events. Before describing the individual investigations made by Galton in this field, some general information on the life of this great scientist who worked in England from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth century may be of interest. Cousin of great biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Galton was interested in many and varied disciplinary fields such as geology, meteorology, genetics, statistics, anthropometry and, naturally, psychology. The quantity of research which Galton developed in each of these fields is truly remarkable. Note, for example, that his most important scientific biography—The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (Pearson, 1914–1930)—comprises three volumes and a grand total of over 1300 pages! It was statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), author of this voluminous work, who underlined that the extraordinary successes achieved by his friend and colleague Galton derived precisely from the latter’s eclectic approach to scientific knowledge. This acute consideration is expressed elegantly in an excerpt from Pearson’s work (1914–1930), which is set out here. Because Galton was a specialist in few, if any directions, because he appreciated without stint many forms of human activity, he was able to achieve in many spheres, where the established powers with greater craftsmanship but narrower outlook had failed to recognise that there were still verities to be ascertained. (vol. 1, p. 4)

In a great many history of psychology books and textbooks, Galton is remembered essentially for two reasons: his studies on the inheritance of genius (Galton, 1869) and for having been the principal theorist of eugenics, namely the science whose objective is to perfect the evolution

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of the human species by incentivising sexual reproduction between men and women without mental and physical defects1 (Galton, 1901, 1904). A careful examination of Galton’s psychology work, however, shows that, in addition to these two research lines, he also worked on a series of experimental studies on what he called human “intellectual faculties” (Galton, 1883). In this programme—which he developed towards the end of the 1870s and, that is, at a time in which psychology was attempting with some difficulty to distinguish its objects and research methods from those of other sciences—Galton focused his attention on the human mind’s capacity to generate ideas, associations, thoughts, representations and images. It was precisely by studying these intellectual faculties that Galton measured up to the subject of autobiographical memory, a theme, however—it is important to clarify this right away—which was never the main focus of his psychological research. There are two empirical studies in particular in which Galton offers descriptions of the psychological processes bound up with memory of autobiographical events: the first study—whose results were presented in two articles which are in actual fact very similar and were both published in 1879 (Psychometric Facts, Galton, 1879a; Psychometric Experiments, Galton, 1879b)—enquired into mental association formation; the second, on the other hand, examined the human capacity for visual imagery (Statistics of Mental Imagery, Galton, 1880). I will now look in detail at the main characteristics of these two investigations, which took place very close together.

1The

term eugenics (from the Greek eugenes, literally “well-born” and thus being born with good qualities) was coined by Galton himself. For Galton, eugenics was to have been a branch of science free from any sort of political or cultural conditioning and entirely focused on the objective of improving the human condition as far as possible. In an article published in the journal Nature (1904), Galton threw light on his perspective on eugenics in this way: “Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities of a race. But what is meant by improvement? We must leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion on account of the most almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. The essentials of eugenics may, however, be easily defined. All would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill fitted for their part in life. In short, that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be” (p. 82). Unfortunately, with the advent of Nazism and other twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies, Galton’s progressive messages were tragically distorted and eugenics was used to justify some of humanity’s worst crimes.

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The first study (Galton, 1879a, 1879b) involved just one participant—Galton himself—who decided to subject his own mental associations to self-observation, thus taking on the twofold role of researcher, on the one hand, and experimental subject on the other. As Galton explained in both the articles reporting the results of his research, the idea for it came to him as he strolled around the streets of central London, the city in which he spent much of his life. Galton’s description of this walk is especially evocative and worth citing here: I occupied myself during a walk from the Athenaeum Club, along Pall Mall to St. James’s Street, a distance of some 450 yards, in keeping a halfglance on what went on in my mind, as I looked with intent scrutiny at the successive objects that caught my eye. The instant each new idea arose, it was absolutely dismissed, and another was allowed to occupy its place. I never permitted my mind to ramble into any bye-paths, but strictly limited its work to the formation of nascent ideas in association with the several objects that I saw. The ideas were, therefore, too fleeting to leave more than vague impressions in my memory. Nevertheless, I retained enough of what had taken place to be amazed at the amount of work my brain had performed. I was aware that my mind had travelled, during that brief walk, in the most discursive manner throughout the experiences of my whole life; that it had entered as an habitual guest into numberless localities that it had certainly never visited under the light of full consciousness for many years; and, in short, I inferred that my everyday brain work was incomparably more active, and that my ideas travelled far wider afield, than I had previously any distinct conception of. (Galton, 1879a, p. 425)

Whilst over the days and weeks that followed Galton repeated this mental experiment, retracing his steps along the same stretch of road and exerting the same concentration on the arduous task of scrutinising his own thoughts, he soon realised that a much more rigorous approach than that used in these solitary walks through London’s streets was required. It was thus that he came up with an experimental procedure based on supplying himself verbal cues (words, in particular) and on introspective

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observation of the mental associations (or ideas2 ) triggered by these cues. Let us look in detail at the characteristics of this procedure. In both the articles cited above, Galton (1879a, 1879b) explains that he selected a group of 75 words (e.g. “abbey”, “abyss”, “ablution”, “afternoon”) and printed them on cards. His experimental trials took the following form: Galton came into visual contact with one word at a time after which he carefully observed his thoughts with the intention of identifying the first two associations to take shape in his mind as an effect of simple exposure to the cue words. Whilst Galton does not explicitly say so, it is reasonable to assume that his experimental sessions took place at a location whose characteristics were similar to those of a modern laboratory of experimental psychology. In fact, in addition to observing his thought flows, Galton also had to undertake two further tasks which required peace and quiet: (1) measuring the time employed by his mind in shaping the two mental associations triggered by his cue word; (2) setting the contents of his mental associations down in writing immediately after these had come to his consciousness. It is important to highlight that four separate trials were required for each selected word, each separated by an interval of around one month. In its entirety, the experiment thus covered a threemonth time period, including 300 trials (75 words × 4 trials) and, theoretically speaking, could have activated a maximum of 600 mental associations (300 trials × 2 mental associations). The experimental procedure described above enabled Galton to analyse the psychological processes involved in mental association formation both qualitatively and quantitatively. As far as qualitative analysis was concerned, he focused on the contents of the mental associations which emerged during the various experimental trials, demonstrating that a significant part of these—though not the majority—took the form of sense images: visions, smells, tastes, sounds and tactile sensations. Galton also noted that many of the sense images which took shape in his mind derived from specific episodes experienced in his youth and childhood. In other words, these were full-blown “autobiographical memories” (an expression which Galton himself never used, it should be noted). 2 In

Galton’s writings, the expressions “mental association” and “idea” are used interchangeably.

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As far as quantitative analysis is concerned, on the other hand, Galton used chronograph measurements to calculate the time employed by his mind to shape a single idea or mental association. He estimated that the idea formation process required, on average, just over a second. This led him to conclude that the human mind is capable of elaborating a huge quantity of information: according to his calculations 50 ideas per minute or 3000 ideas per hour. In addition to supplying these estimates, Galton also calculated the occurrence frequency of the mental associations which emerged during the four sessions required by his experimental procedure. In this respect, he discovered that the majority of his mental associations (67% to be exact) cropped up two or more times over the course of the experiment’s four sessions. It is important to note that these are probably the most interesting quantitative data which Galton’s experimental study supplies us with. From the starting point of this, he hypothesised that repeated access to memory representations of episodes from the personal past might be associated with the activation of forms of cognitive reconstruction capable of modifying the contents of these representations in a significant way. We recollect the memories of incidents, or the memories of those memories, rather than the incidents themselves; and the original impression… receives successive modifications at each step until it is strangely condensed and transformed. (Galton, 1879a, p. 429)

Galton’s experiment can be fitted into the introspectionist approach which was such a feature of the majority of the experimental psychology studies carried out in the period spanning the end of the 1870s and the early twentieth century. As is well-known, the introspection method has been much criticised over the course of scientific psychology’s history. One of these criticisms relates to the fact that introspection—as applied in the period mentioned above—implied a total juxtaposition between the figure of the experimenter and that of the experimental subject. And thus the psychologists using it could not respect one of the key criteria in the work of a scientist—objectivity. A careful examination of Galton’s experiment, however, shows that the observer-observed subject juxtaposition was not its main limitation. Empirical investigations of

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autobiographical memory cannot do without introspective observations, and the fact that these latter are done by people trained in the use of scientific methods is ultimately not of enormous relevance. In fact, it should be remembered that, from the 1970s onwards, certain very wellknown psychologists (e.g. Baddeley, 2012; Berntsen, 1999; Larsen, 1992; Linton, 1978, 1986; Wagenaar, 1986; White, 2020) have subjected their own personal memories to experimental scientific enquiry, following in Galton’s footsteps, and, in my opinion, these are probably some of the most interesting empirical studies to be found in the contemporary autobiographical memory literature. Returning to Galton, the primary problem in his experiment actually relates to the fact that he applied the cue word technique which he himself designed to himself alone and this naturally ruled out the potential for drawing any sort of conclusion on inter-individual constancy or variability in the psychological processes bound up with the formation of mental associations with autobiographical contents. In truth, we do not know whether Galton invited other people to take part in his 300 selfobservations over a three-month period. What we do know, however, is that taking part in an experiment of this sort requires enormous motivation and patience, qualities unfortunately not possessed by many (experimental psychologists included, alas!). Galton himself (1879a), in fact, defined it “the most fatiguing and distasteful mental experience” (p. 426) that he had ever undergone. The impossibility of generalising his results to other people and the cumbersome nature of the data collection process: these were certainly the reasons behind Galton’s early abandonment of the self-observation of his own mental processes in favour of alternative methodological approaches. We have thus come to the second study in which Galton took on the autobiographical memory theme. The main objective of this study (Galton, 1880)—published in Mind , one of the period’s most prestigious scientific journals—was analysing the way in which people of different ages remember an everyday life situation which is a part of all (or almost all) of our lives: breakfast. To this end, Galton devised a short questionnaire with which he hoped to enquire into the mental

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images3 which take shape when people think of a specific element in this situation: the breakfast table.4 Box 2.1 shows the full text of Galton’s questionnaire. As we can see, it comprised a series of questions which did not require participants to formulate especially elaborate replies, with these latter to be brief judgements on the main characteristics of their mental images (illumination, definition, colouring ), using reply categories to be found, for the most part, in the text of the questions in the survey. Box 2.1: The Galton’s breakfast questionnaire (from Galton, 1880, pp. 301–302) Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object—suppose it is your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye. 1. Illumination. Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene? 2. Definition Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a real scene? 3. Colouring Are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?

The research sample itself included 272 British citizens, all male, 172 of whom were teenagers and 100 adults. Galton gives no information on how he recruited and selected his sample. One thing should be said, 3 With

this expression, Galton meant mental images of a visual type only. is important to underline that, in contrast to the cue word technique experiment, this investigation focused exclusively on memories we might call “recent”. The study participants were, in fact, invited to think of their breakfast that same day and thus they were asked to recall a mundane personal episode that occurred just a few hours before they filled in the questionnaire.

4 It

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however: it was one of the first surveys in the history of psychology and, considering the era in which it took place and the means of communication then available, participant numbers were extremely high. On the other hand, it was precisely the size of his sample that required Galton to identify data analysis procedures capable of representing the research participants’ response tendencies. He proceeded thus: first of all, he analysed the various ways in which the study participants verbally described the illumination, definition and colours of their mental images and then, from the starting point of these, he subdivided the sample into seven sub-groups, each of which he associated with a different level of visual imagery. Leaving to one side the more sophisticated details of the statistical procedures used by Galton to divide up his sample, the results of his analysis showed that the participants judged and described their memories in highly variable ways, independently of age. Some subjects referred to having a vivid mental image of their breakfast tables and could remember the objects on it, how these were arranged, what colours they were, their brightness and many other even more specific details very accurately. Other participants, on the other hand, had rather confused images which stopped them from visualising the objects present in the remembered scene and their colours. Others again attributed a moderate degree of vividness to their images, neither too high nor too low. Box 2.2 is a transcription of some of the descriptions provided by these groups of participants. Box 2.2: Examples of personal memories of the breakfast table (adapted from Galton, 1880, pp. 310–313) “The image is perfectly clear. I can see every feature in everyone’s face and everything on the table with great clearness. The light is quite as bright as reality”. “I see the colours just as if they were before me, and perfectly natural”. “To me the picture seems quite clear and the brightness equal to the real scene. I cannot see the whole scene at the same instant, but I see one thing at once and can turn my eye mentally to another object very quickly, so that I soon get the whole scene before my mind”.

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“Brightness probably at least from one-half to two-thirds of the original. Definition varies very much, one or two objects being much more distinct than the others, but the latter come out clearly if attention be paid to them”. “The image is dim, dark, and smaller than the actual scene, and the objects nearest to me show most distinctly. The whole picture is more or less of a dark green tint”. “My powers are zero. To my consciousness there is almost no association of memory with objective visual impressions. I recollect the table, but do not see it”. “The colours are very dim”.

The considerable variability in Galton’s participants’ visual imagery capacity is not in itself surprising. Quite the contrary. It was coherent with the research Galton himself did on other intellectual faculties, in which the results were also highly variable in inter-individual terms. All the same, this breakfast table memories study is of historical importance for at least two reasons. First of all, it introduced a series of empirical criteria with which to assess phenomenological characteristics in autobiographical memory for the first time, namely the subjective experience of remembering the personal past: in this specific case the illumination, definition and colours of the breakfast table. In the second place, it was one of the very first studies in the history of psychology to which statistics were applied.5 In conclusion, it would seem to me to be important to underline that Galton’s principal merit was having been the first to come up with methods by which to enquire empirically into the memory of events with autobiographical contents. And the rigour and validity of both Galton’s methods (the cue word technique and the breakfast questionnaire) have been confirmed by the fact that they have been reproposed on occasions, 5 In

this respect, it should be remembered that Galton always argued forcefully for the need for psychology to equip itself with methodologies designed to generate quantitative descriptions of mental phenomena. Psychometry is the word which Galton (1879b) coined to describe this theoretical and methodological orientation, which he defined as “the art of imposing measurement and number upon operations of the mind” (p. 149).

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in admittedly adapted form, in a great many contemporary studies on autobiographical memory and mental imagery (Berntsen & Hall, 2004; Brewer & Schommer-Aikins, 2006; Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974; Crovitz & Quina-Holland, 1976; Robinson, 1976; Rubin et al., 1986). With all due respect to the authors presented subsequently, I believe that there is no doubt that Galton was the founding father of the psychology of autobiographical memory.

2.1.2 Victor and Catherine Henri The second pioneering contribution to the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory was research into first childhood memories by a French couple: Victor and Catherine Henri (Enquête sur les Premiers Souvenirs de l’enfance [A Survey on the Earliest Memories of Childhood], Henri & Henri, 1897). We unfortunately know little of Catherine Henri’s human and scientific biography. But there is one thing we do definitely know: that she was one of the very first women in the world to publish scientific work in the experimental psychology field. As compared to his wife, Victor Henri’s life (1872–1940) and intellectual work are well-documented (see Nicolas, 1994). Although his contribution has only recently been rediscovered and reassessed, Henri was a figure of a certain importance in late nineteenth-century experimental psychology. Let us see what this was based on, by briefly retracing some of the most significant steps in his academic and scientific career. After studying mathematics, physics and chemistry, in 1892 Victor Henri decided on further study in the psychology field, working as assistant at the Sorbonne’s Laboratory of Physiological Psychology, Paris. At the age of 21, he worked under the guidance of a further great French psychologist, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) who, together with Theodor Simon (1873–1961), has gone down in history for having designed and used the first psychological test assessing human intelligence. Alfred Binet and Victor Henri worked together for around ten years (from 1892 to 1902). It was a highly fertile period for these two French psychologists, who together founded Individual Psychology, a theoretical and

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research approach which, in the wake of Galton’s psychological research programme begun just a few years earlier, proposed to investigate the individual differences in what they called the higher mental processes such as memory, mental imagery, reasoning, aesthetic sensibility and moral sentiments (Binet & Henri, 1896). It should be underlined that the Individual Psychology project was entirely original and innovative for late nineteenth-century psychology. As is well-known, this period was characterised by the predominance of Structuralism which focused on the analysis of the elementary components of conscious psychic experiences: e.g. the sensations and affective states (see Titchener, 1901–1905; Wundt, 1896/1897). For Binet and Henri (1896) if, on the one hand, the adoption by Structuralism of an elementistic perspective could favour the identification of general laws of basic psychological functioning, on the other this perspective was extremely unsuited to detecting individual differences in the higher mental processes. This theoretical belief is effectively summarised in the following excerpt from the article La Psychologie Individuelle [Individual Psychology], originally published in French in the L’Année Psychologique journal in 1896 (Binet & Henri, 1896), and recently translated into English by French psychology historian Serge Nicolas and his colleagues (2014, p. 19). The more a process is complicated and higher level, more it varies according to individuals: feelings vary from one individual to another, but less than memory, memory of feelings varies less than memory of ideas, etc. Thus the result is that if we want to study the differences existing between two individuals, we have to begin by the more intellectual and complicated processes, and that it is only second that we have to consider the simple and elementary processes. It is nevertheless the contrary that is done by the large majority of authors who have tackled this question.

It is within the Individual Psychology perspective that the research done by Victor Henri together with his wife Catherine is to be contextualised. The Henris’ seminal study was first published in French, once again in the L’Année Psychologique journal in 1897 (Henry & Henri, 1897). An English translation of this work has recently been published

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as an appendix to the article Victor and Catherine Henri on Earliest Recollections, written by Nicolas and his colleagues (2013, pp. 362–374), and published, once again, in the L’Année Psychologique journal. From here on I will refer to this version. For this study, the couple made use of a questionnaire which was sent to a range of school and university institutions in four countries: France, England, Russia and the United States. The total number of questionnaires filled in was 123. In contrast to Galton’s breakfast table study, the Henris’ research sample was made up of both men and women with participants being mainly students and teachers (high school and university). The sample varied in age from 16 to 65, with a majority in the 16–25 age bracket. It is important to underline that the authors’ idea of bringing people from four different countries into their study was entirely original. A comparison between countries could, in fact, have thrown light on aspects of both cultural constancy and cultural variability in the psychological processes underlying the recall of autobiographical episodes from childhood. Unfortunately, however, the Henris’ good intentions did not entirely bear fruit. A careful reading of the sample characteristics described by the couple (see Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 363), in fact, shows that the participants’ geographical distribution was extremely non-homogeneous: 75 came from Russia, 35 from France, 7 from England and only 6 from the United States. These imbalanced numbers thus ruled out any cross-national comparison. The Henris’ questionnaire was made up exclusively of open-ended questions. Participants could thus freely express their opinions on the subject of the enquiry and were not required to make use of options and response scales given a priori by the researchers. Example questions include “What is the earliest memory of your childhood that you have? Please describe it as fully as possible, indicating how clear it is, the way it appears, and your age when the remembered event occurred”, “Did the remembered event have some sort of importance in your childhood, and if so, what was it?”, “What is the second-earliest event of your childhood? What do you remember? Is there a great lapse of time between these two events?” and “Do you have memories of your childhood in dreams, and what are those memories?” (see Nicolas et al., 2013, pp. 362–363).

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Interestingly, Victor and Catherine Henri’s decision not to use pre-set response formats was clearly entirely in line with the theoretical principles of Individual Psychology, which was the framework of their study (see Binet & Henri, 1896). Avoiding using such formats and giving participants the freedom to organise their answers as preferred increased the two researchers’ chances of bringing out individual differences in the psychological processes at the heart of their investigation. But let us now move on to a consideration of the principal results obtained by Victor and Catherine Henri. The questionnaire developed by the French couple was made up of 11 main questions. But the focus of attention was essentially one question, the fourth, which asked participants to describe their very first memories of childhood and specify their age at the time of the event narrated (i.e. “What is the earliest memory of your childhood that you have? Please describe it as fully as possible, indicating how clear it is, the way it appears, and your age when the remembered event occurred”). The Henris found that 74% of the sample dated their first memory to 2–4 years of age. The response range was a very wide one, however: of a total of 123 participants, 16 cited events which happened at an age ranging from 6 months to one and a half whilst 14 cited 5–8 years of age as their earliest memory. Moving on to the contents of these memories, analysis of the narratives reported by participants showed that the bulk of the sample conjured up emotionally intense experiences (both positive and negative). These included the birth of a sibling, a first day at school, the death of a loved one (a family member, for example), having been operated on and having witnessed an accident. The Henris also noted that a minority of the sample—a very small one—reported autobiographical episodes which they defined “banal”, that is relating to emotionally neutral scenes from everyday life which we might call ordinary: for example, a detail from a laid table or a scene in which a participant saw him or herself in the act of breaking off a branch from a bush during a walk (see Nicolas et al., 2013, pp. 367–368). In addition to analysing the emotional content of these narratives, the Henris also paid particular attention to how participants described the phenomenological characteristics of their autobiographical memories.

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They found that the lion’s share of the memories reported by participants took the form of visual sensory images. The clarity of these images varied significantly, however, in relation to the type of information included in the remembered episode. As the Henris observed: Objects, colors, the nature of the lighting are represented with a great deal of clarity. People, on the contrary, are poorly represented—their general form is visible, but few or no details of the face, and often it is not known whether someone is a man or a woman. (Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 369)

It is worth bearing in mind that the observations reported above did not relate to the entirety of the memories analysed by the Henris, whose characteristics varied and sometimes significantly, in accordance with the type of experiences recalled by the participants. The Henris themselves noted, in fact, that when people (and not objects) were central to the original episode, the clarity of the mental images concerned could be extremely high. The following autobiographical narratives, provided by two of the participants in the Henris’ investigation, demonstrate this very well: My father was holding me in his arms at the window of a ground-floor apartment where we lived; swinging me from right to left, he had me play hide-and-seek with one of his friends, whose bearded, laughing face is still present to me in memory. This memory dates from an age when I could barely walk and could not yet talk. I was about two years old. (Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 369) I vaguely remember some garden, longer than it was wide, planted with vegetables and flowers, somehow enclosed, more hedge than wall, with a wooden door painted in green. The image of this garden is floating and vague, like the memory itself; only the door is conserved in my memory with truly surprising precision of detail. I still see it now, with its leather hinges nailed to a rough stake, rotted by dampness; and hanging from this door I see a precocious child, the terror of all the little boys his age, who is swinging, legs stretched out, hands taut, his body huddled up into a mass, his face in a grimace, his eyes shining with malice through the tumbling locks of his bushy red hair, cynically grotesque. There is a cracking sound; all the little children flee like a flock of frightened sparrows: he

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faster than the others, letting out two or three piercing and ironic shrieks along the way. All the details of this scene have remained very precise in my memory; but I cannot say that I remember that boy’s mocking cries today. I no longer hear them. My age at the time: 16 months, 18 months, 2 years at the very most. (Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 369)

There are other examples of autobiographical narratives like these in the Henris’ article, well documenting adults’ capacity to go back in time to specific events and situations in their childhoods both emotional and banal. This very valuable material, together with the Henris’ interpretation of it, makes the study to all intents and purposes a milestone in the psychology of autobiographical memory. As we will shortly see, the Henris’ results were Sigmund Freud’s starting point for his theory on the earliest childhood memories. In more recent years, this pioneering study has inspired a significant volume of empirical studies on childhood memory which were also based on the survey method (e.g. Kihlstrom & Harackiewicz, 1982; Kingo et al., 2013; MacDonald et al., 2000; Mullen, 1994). I will bring this section to an end by recalling a curious aspect in Victor Henri’s scientific biography. In the years following on from this study done with his wife Catherine, Victor Henri decided to shift the focus of his interests from psychology to the natural sciences. It was thus that, in 1907, he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Sorbonne and, in 1913, adjunct Director of the same university’s Physiology Laboratory. In the decades that followed, and right up to his death in 1940, Victor Henri successfully continued his studies in the fields of biology and physical chemistry and he held prestigious academic positions at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Liège (Belgium). It is proof of his genius that the results and recognition he achieved in the natural science field were even greater than that accorded him in psychology (see Nicolas, 1994).

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2.1.3 Sigmund Freud Together with psychosomatic symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetting of names or words, free associations, emotions and non-verbal forms of communication of various sorts, autobiographical memories are an essential source of information for an understanding of the origins of people’s psychological disorders and any action on these with suitable psychotherapeutic techniques. In fact, as the past continually comes out in any clinical session, it would be no exaggeration to say that autobiographical memories are probably a clinical psychologist’s most important source of information. And the great Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—the author whose work brings this part of the chapter on the pioneers of the psychology of autobiographical memory to an end—was well-aware of this. As compared to those of Galton and Victor Henri, Freud’s human and scientific biography is certainly much better known, and for this reason, there is no need to go back over it in detail here (for in-depth information see Gay, 2006; Jones, 1953). Before proceeding to describe the specific contributions made by Freud to the study of autobiographical memory, it would seem to me to be useful to remind readers that Freud is the founder of Psychoanalysis, one of the greatest of psychology’s currents, set up in Austria in the early twentieth century before progressively spreading across Europe and around the world. It is still, today, one of the most important and influential approaches in contemporary clinical psychology (Charles, 2018; Gabbard et al., 2012). It would be simplistic to call Psychoanalysis a psychotherapeutic approach which developed over time for the purposes of acting on specific psychic pathologies such as hysteria, neurosis and depression. Certainly, this was and is Psychoanalysis’s main mission. However, many of Freud’s own writings make clear that Psychoanalysis had at least two additional purposes (see Freud, 1925/1959a, 1926/1959b, 1933/1964). First of all, it proposed a theory of the human psyche capable of explaining the mental life as a whole: the pathological and normal. In the second place, it put itself forward as a wide-ranging scientific discipline capable of applying its theoretical concepts and empirical discoveries

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to various fields of human knowledge ranging from mythology to religion, history of civilisation, literature and pedagogy. None of Freud’s contributions can be fully understood without taking account of these peculiarities of the psychoanalytical paradigm, which offers a unique vantage point on human beings and the functioning of their psyches. However, many criticisms—some of them bitter (Grünbaum, 1984; Popper, 1969; Robinson, 1993)—have been levelled at it. Returning to autobiographical memory, this is a theme present in all Freud’s work, from his first writings in the so-called pre-psychoanalytical period to his more mature work in which he brought his scientific and cultural adventure to an end (Ross, 1991; Terdiman, 2010). This volume is not the place for a systematic examination of the evolution in Freud’s thought on autobiographical memory and, more generally, human memory, for space reasons. Given this, I have decided to focus my attention on the two classic themes studied in his work, which occupy a significant space in the contemporary autobiographical memory debate, too. The first theme relates to the ways in which adults mentally represent their earliest childhood memories and the meaning these memories acquire in their personal life stories. The second theme, closely bound up with the first, relates to the so-called childhood amnesia phenomenon (also known as infantile amnesia), namely an inability to recall the very earliest years of their lives by a large majority of adults.6 As we saw in the previous section, childhood memories were the centre of Victor and Catherine Henri’s survey, whose results were published for the first time in 1897. In an article published just two years later—entitled Screen Memories—Freud (1899/1962) expressed great interest in this research. The analysis he proposed on its results, however, reveals a very different approach to autobiographical memory from that of the Henris. Readers will remember that the latter emphasised that the lion’s share of their survey participants associated their childhoods with powerfully emotional episodes. Freud, who was clearly not enamoured of statistics and quantitative analysis, attributed no importance whatsoever to this purely numerical data. What struck him was rather those few participants 6 For

Freud (1905/1953b), this amnesia period continues “up to their sixth or eighth year” (p. 174).

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who cited autobiographical episodes which the Henris defined “banal” to the extent that they were not bound up with intense emotions. In the previous section, I reported certain examples of these banal memories which the Henris’ participants recalled in visual image form (a laid table, a branch of a tree broken off, etc.). As Freud (1899/1962) explained: The Henris describe such case as rare. In my experience, based for the most part, it is true, on neurotics, they are quite frequent. One of the subjects of the Henris’ investigation made an attempt at explaining the occurrence of these mnemic images, whose innocence makes them so mysterious, and his explanation seems to me very much to the point. He thinks that in such cases the relevant scene may perhaps have been only incompletely retained in the memory, and that that may be why it seems so unenlightening; the parts that have been forgotten probably contained everything that made the experience noteworthy. I am able to confirm the truth of this view, though I should prefer to speak of these elements of the experience being omitted rather than forgotten. (p. 306)

It is clear from the excerpt cited above that, for Freud, not only does the human mind carefully select the episodes which form its earliest childhood memories but it also enacts a very clear choice between the various elements making up memories of the individual episode selected. Whilst it might appear counter-intuitive, it is the most banal and irrelevant episodes and details which are most likely to be retained in the memory, not the most meaningful episodes and details. For the father of Psychoanalysis, the mind’s tendency to prefer banal to meaningful memory contents is to be explained by examining the conflicts present in the individual’s psychic life. These latter juxtapose two categories of psychological forces, those which prompt the individual to faithfully conserve significant episodes and details associated with their original experiences and the forces working against this happening. For Freud, for the mind to fix an autobiographical episode in people’s memories, these two force categories must necessarily reach agreement, a compromise, which he describes thus: The compromise is this. What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself—in this respect the resistance gets its way;

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what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one … The result of the conflict is therefore that, instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one. And since the elements of the experience which aroused objection were precisely the important ones, the substituted memory will necessarily lack those important elements and will in consequence most probably strike us as trivial. It will seem incomprehensible to us because we are inclined to look for the reason for its retention in its own content, whereas in fact that retention is due to the relation holding between its own content and a different one which has been suppressed. (Freud, 1899/1962, p. 307)

In the excerpt cited, Freud explains that banal memories get the upper hand over significant memories because the former, in contrast to the latter, are free of elements capable of triggering and nurturing individuals’ psychological conflicts. The psychological mechanism on which the elimination of memory contents of a conflictual nature depends was called repression by Freud. He used an entirely original expression for the memories generated following on from this repression—screen memories. The arguments presented thus far supply valuable elements for the description of the psychological mechanisms at work in the formation process of early childhood memories. A stumbling block remains, however. How can these autobiographical episodes—or details from these—which the human mind has repressed for their ability to generate psychological conflict be identified? Responding to this question does not, for Freud, require surveys like that of the Henris. Freud is very clear on this. Examining the contents of individual childhood episodes, as the Henris did, in no way helps to cast light on the psychological processes underlying repression.7 Bringing out

7 Freud

is explicit regarding his doubts on the use of surveys as a childhood memory enquiry method in chapter four of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (see Freud, 1901/1960, p. 46). It is worth remembering that the Henris themselves were well aware of the limitations inherent to the survey method. In the conclusion to their article, they note: “One must not expect to obtain a complete solution to a question in a survey—rather, it makes it possible to indicate the areas that must be studied. A survey always remains superficial, it does not say why [emphasis added] things are the way they are” (Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 374).

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and enquiring into these processes requires participants directly interacting and sharing their memories with researchers, in order to take an active part in the exploration, analysis and interpretation of their autobiographical pasts. It is on the basis of these arguments that Freud decided to investigate childhood memories using a completely different approach from the survey method: the psychoanalytical method. The psychoanalytical method requires persons to conjure up their autobiographical pasts in the presence of a psychoanalyst and thus within the context of clinical dialogues taking place more than once a week and for relatively long periods (generally several years). It is important to underline that this method, in contrast to questionnaires and many other methods used in psychology, grants access to individuals’ entire stories or, at least, considerable portions of these. For each episode told by the individual undergoing clinical treatment, the psychoanalyst is thus given the chance to reconstruct the dense network of relationships linking the episode discussed with other episodes cited by the individual analysed and thus available in his or her memory. With specific reference to childhood memories, the psychoanalyst can thus find out how significant autobiographical episodes have been “covered” by other episodes—earlier or older or simultaneous in time terms—which may appear banal but are not. In the article cited above, Freud (1899/1962) uses the psychoanalytical method to analyse the earliest childhood memories of a presumed patient who he describes thus: The subject of this observation is a man of university education, aged thirty-eight. Though his own profession lies in a very different field, he has taken an interest in psychological questions ever since I was able to relieve him of a slight phobia by means of psycho-analysis. (p. 309)

I have referred to this patient as “presumed” not only because he was classified by Freud (1899/1962) as an individual “who is not at all or only very slightly neurotic” (p. 309), but also because we now know that this patient was Freud himself having evidently decided, on this specific occasion, not to reveal the analysis he had undertaken on himself to his readers.

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The following excerpt reports the narrative of a screen memory told by the patient in question during a psychoanalytic session—a session which clearly never took place, given the above. I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow-land, green and thickly grown; in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers— evidently common dandelions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage and in front of the cottage door two women are standing chatting busily, a peasant-woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children’s nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the two others are my boy cousin, who is a year older than me, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by mutual agreement, we—the two boys—fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact given some; the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious—and at that point the scene breaks off. (Freud, 1899/1962, p. 311)

The episode reported is fairly typical to the everyday lives of children aged two or three, namely the action of playing in a field with other children. The episode is in itself banal. However, Freud discovers that each of the details making up the scene (e.g. the presence of a girl child, the colour of the flowers, the taste of the bread) were valuable clues with which to access other episodes from the life of the individual remembering, much more significant ones, which might be a very long way away, time-wise, from the episode recalled by the individual. As an example, Freud discovers that the yellow of the flowers in the memory scene was very similar to the colour of a dress worn by a girl the patient had fallen in love with at the age of 17, but whom he had never spoken to of his passion resulting in considerable suffering. Now, it is extremely clear that, whilst closely related on a symbolic level, the two memory details cited (the yellow of the flowers and the

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yellow of the dress) referred to two completely different autobiographical episodes: the first, dating to childhood, seemed emotionally neutral; the second, more recent, was linked to an emotionally painful experience which, as Freud himself underlined, had profoundly affected the patient’s personality development (his own, as we have seen). Coherently with his repression theory, Freud thus developed an entirely original interpretation of the reasons behind certain details (the yellow of the flowers in the example analysed) having acquired such a central role in the patient’s childhood memories. On the basis of this, the memory salience of these details derived from the fact that they had replaced other memories relating to problematical aspects of the patient’s life (still in reference to the example cited here, his memory of his passion for the girl dressed in yellow and the emotional suffering associated with this experience). Essentially, Freud thus saw this as confirming his idea by which screen memories, and those relating to childhood in particular, perform a very precise role for the human mind, enabling individuals to keep certain important psychological conflicts away from their consciousness. Freud presents sophisticated analyses of his patients’ childhood memories in various works: in addition to the 1899 article cited, his famous essay The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901/1960) and an article, less well-known to the general public, in which Freud uses two clinical cases to interpret a childhood memory cited in the autobiography of great German man of letters Johann Wolfgang Goethe (A Childhood Recollection From “Dichtung und Wahrheit” , Freud, 1917/1955). All the analyses put forward in these writings are undoubtedly extremely fascinating and offer readers a first-hand insight into the enormous potential of the psychoanalytical method: first of all, its ability to enable researchers—psychoanalysts in this case—to sound out and interpret the whole stories of individuals under psychoanalytic treatment (thus going beyond an analysis of individual autobiographical episodes). The more general theoretical principles which Freud derives from an analysis and interpretation of the unique and one-of-a-kind autobiographical stories of his patients are equally interesting, however. I would like now to illustrate one of these principles in detail, that relating to the formation of the visual images which frequently accompany childhood memories.

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Also formulated in the Screen Memories article (Freud, 1899/1962), this principle affirms that visual autobiographical memories of childhood events can be divided up into two categories. The first category comprises those memories in which individuals observe the event evoked as if they were living it a second time and thus from the viewpoint adopted during the original event (i.e. not seeing themselves in this situation). The second category—larger in numerical terms, according to Freud—encompasses those memories in which individuals adopt an external viewpoint on the scene evoked: these are thus cases in which individuals see an image of themselves, thus generating the same subjective impression we would have if we watched a film in which we ourselves were characters.8 The father of Psychoanalysis was convinced that the different visual perspective from which individuals observe their autobiographical memories can reveal valuable information on the forms of cognitive processing to which the original experiences were subjected. In particular, he hypothesises that memories viewed from within faithfully reproduce individuals’ past original experiences. By contrast, memories viewed from outside are, he argues, more likely to incorporate the information and details with which individuals come into contact after the original experiences take place. The following excerpt, also taken from Screen Memories (Freud, 1899/1962), effectively sums up this general autobiographical memory functioning principle which Freud applied to the specific case of childhood memories: In the majority of significant and in other respects unimpeachable childhood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself; he sees this child, however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him. The Henris duly draw attention to the fact that many of those taking part in their investigation expressly emphasized this peculiarity of childhood scenes. Now it is 8 In

contemporary literature, these two very different forms of memory experiences are referred to as first-person memories and third -person memories, respectively (see Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Rice & Rubin, 2009). Other expressions used with a certain frequency to describe these same experiences are field memories and observer memories (Nigro & Neisser, 1983; Robinson & Swanson, 1993).

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evident that such a picture cannot be an exact repetition of the impression that was originally received. For the subject was then in the middle of the situation and was attending not to himself but to the external world. Whenever in a memory the subject himself appears in this way as an object among other objects this contrast between the acting and the recollecting ego may be taken as evidence that the original impression has been worked over. It looks as though a memory-trace from childhood had here been translated back into a plastic and visual form at a later date— the date of the memory’s arousal. But no reproduction of the original impression has ever entered the subject’s consciousness. (p. 321)

It is interesting to observe that Freud’s idea by which childhood memories seen from outside are unfaithful reproductions of the individual’s past accords well with Galton’s (1879a) thesis on the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory (see Sect. 2.1.1). This convergence between the two authors is clearer in this next excerpt, which concludes Freud’s (1899/1962) article on screen memories. It may be indeed questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (p. 322)

The screen memory theme is linked to that of childhood amnesia, a further important Freudian contribution to the psychology of autobiographical memory which I will examine in this section. The first writings in which Freud examines the childhood amnesia phenomenon coincide with those in which he introduces and examines the screen memory concept (Freud, 1899/1962, 1901/1960) which was fully discussed in the pages above.

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In the Screen Memories article cited, Freud underlined that adults’ incapacity to remember their earliest years cannot be explained by children’s presumed limited cognitive and emotional capabilities, arguing that “a normally developed child of three or four already exhibits an enormous amount of highly organized mental functioning in the comparisons and inferences which he makes and in the expression of his feelings” (Freud, 1899/1962, p. 304). In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905/1953b, p. 175) and Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1916–1917/1961, p. 200), Freud went further in his appreciation of children’s basic psychological competencies, stating that it is precisely during infancy that the memory is at its most efficient. The reason is apparently simple: as the stimuli and information children are subjected to through their lives are far fewer than those of teenagers and adults, or the elderly, children— Freud argued—should be able to fix experiences in their memory more easily than individuals at a later stage of their life cycle. This is the theory. In actual fact, as is shown by the Henris’ research (see Sect. 2.1.2) and by a great deal of contemporary investigations (Bauer et al., 2014; Kihlstrom & Harackiewicz, 1982; MacDonald et al., 2000; Mullen, 1994; Wang et al., 2004), the lion’s share of the episodes experienced in the earliest years of our lives leaves no trace in the autobiographical memories of adults. Why this is the case is an enigma to which Freud sought a solution. Let us see how. As we have seen in relation to screen memories, including to explain childhood amnesia, Freud (1905/1953b) used the repression concept by which he argued that the earliest childhood experiences are not available to adult memories because they have been removed from the consciousness as a result of their conflictual psychological nature. Far from considering childhood a joyful, serene period, Freud (1905/1953b, 1926/1959c) was convinced that it was a phase in life in which a number of traumatic events occurred which could potentially have a profound impact on adult personality development. He included the following in these traumatic events:

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Observations of sexual activities between adults, or sexual experiences of his own with an adult or another child (no rare events); or, again, overhearing conversations, understood either at the time or retrospectively, from which the child thought it could draw conclusions about mysterious or uncanny matters; or, again, remarks or actions by the child himself which give evidence of significant attitudes of affection or enmity towards other people. (Freud, 1926/1959c, p. 216)

Fortunately, not all the trauma categories listed above are considered equally likely to take place in a child’s life: for example, sexual abuse by an adult is certainly less frequent than hearing conversations about subjects which might be called “mysterious” or “uncanny”, to use the terms used by Freud. Leaving such considerations on the frequency of the various childhood traumas to one side, it should be underlined that, for Freud (1899/1962, 1916–1917/1961), conflictual psychological experiences—those, that is, with the power to threaten a child’s identity and personality development to some extent—can be detected in the childhoods of all adults. According to Freud, it is precisely on this experiential material that repression primarily acts with this latter—analogously to what we have seen for screen memory formation—taking the form of a psychological defence mechanism. Having reiterated the defensive functions of repression, it is important to clarify that people pushing away significant autobiographical episodes from their consciousness, however remote and a source of psychological conflict, does not mean that these episodes are definitively expunged from the mind. According to the Freudian theory of repression, forgotten childhood episodes are relegated to the unconscious and it is thus in this part of the human psyche—certainly obscure, hidden and difficult to access—that they can be found. For Freud, the road a psychologist (or a researcher) should travel in his or her attempts to access the childhood memories repressed by an adult is once again the psychoanalytic treatment which represented, for him, the most suitable psychological procedure with which to explore and understand the unconscious psyche. Of the various techniques available to Psychoanalysis, there was one in particular which, for Freud, seemed

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to significantly increase the likelihood of forgotten childhood memories being rediscovered: the interpretation of dreams from whose application the whole psychoanalytical movement began (Freud, 1900/1953a). The following extract, taken from Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1916–1917/1961), illustrates the central importance of dreams for access to repressed childhood memories clearly. In psycho-analytic treatments we are invariably faced by the task of filling up these gaps in the memory of childhood; and in so far as the treatment is to any extent successful—that is to say, extremely frequently—we also succeed in bringing to light the content of these forgotten years of childhood. Those impressions had never been really forgotten, they were only inaccessible, latent, and had formed part of the unconscious. But it can come about that they emerge from the unconscious spontaneously, and this happens in connection with dreams. It appears that dream-life knows how to find access to these latent, infantile experiences. (p. 201)

With this reference to the relationship between dreams and childhood memory, I believe we can consider this description of Freud’s most significant contributions to the study of psychological processes linked to autobiographical memory closed. Considering the ample space devoted to Freud here and his importance for psychology’s historical development, I believe some final comment on the scientific legacy left by the father of Psychoanalysis to be due. His is certainly a more unwieldy legacy than those of the other pioneers of the psychology of autobiographical memory considered thus far. If, in fact, in a similar way to Galton and the Henris, Freud developed a method with which to enquire in-depth into what people remember of their lives and how they remember it, the latter did not, however, stop there. He also enquired into why people remember what they do. It is important to underline that this extended perspective was, in many ways, revolutionary. It marked the passage from a purely descriptive-phenomenological analysis of autobiographical memory to an analysis which we might call motivational , in the sense that it was designed to describe and explain the “motives”—in the psychological sense of the word—prompting an individual to remember in a certain way (or forget) a certain period of his or her life or a specific experience or detail associated with it (see Conway,

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2006; Habermas, 2012). From this latter, it should also be highlighted that Freud’s interest in these motivational aspects of autobiographical memory placed the more general theme of the functions of autobiographical memory centre-stage in psychological enquiry, a subject I will return to in Chapter 4.

2.2

The Points of View of the Various Psychology Schools (1879–1975)

Galton’s contribution and that of the Henris and Freud’s are all to be dated to diverse periods between the end of the 1870s and the early years of the twentieth century, in what I have called the psychology of autobiographical memory’s “first phase”. As I emphasised in my introduction of the current chapter, psychological science was at its inception. It was, in fact, in this period that the first two great schools of scientific psychology were founded: Structuralism and Functionalism. What was autobiographical memory’s place in these two schools of thought? Before responding to this question, a few introductory remarks on the psychologists who contributed to the birth and development of these two schools may be opportune. Structuralism is linked to the names of two great scholars, both of whom were European: German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), universally considered to have been the founder of modern psychology, and English psychologist Edward Titchener (1867–1927), who trained at the Leipzig Experimental Psychology Laboratory under Wundt himself. If Wundt can be considered “simply” one of Structuralism’s precursors, Titchener is to be accorded the title of founder and principal exponent of a current which developed, in particular, in the United States (where Titchener moved in 1892 and worked untiringly until his death in 1927).9 In contrast to Structuralism, all Functionalism’s main exponents were American. Its founder was William 9 It

was Titchener who first coined the expression structural psychology in an article published in 1898 in the Philosophical Review journal. For more on the relationship between Titchener’s approach and that of Wundt, see Schultz and Schultz (2011).

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James (1842–1910), who published what was to become the new school’s manifesto in 1890, Principles of Psychology. In the decades that followed, Functionalism developed further, thanks to the contribution of at least three scholars: James Angell (1869–1949), John Dewey (1859–1952) and Harvey Carr (1883–1954), who took part in the so-called Chicago School. Returning to the question asked above—“What was autobiographical memory’s place in these two schools of thought?”—one relatively simple way of answering is to analyse the writings of the authors cited here and, in particular, those which best reflect the theoretical and empirical framework of the schools they were part of (see Angell, 1904; Carr, 1925; Dewey, 1886; James, 1890; Titchener, 1901–1905, 1910; Wundt, 1896/1897). The results of this analysis show that the autobiographical memory theme did not trigger much interest among structuralist psychologists. It was absent from Titchener’s writings, despite his having supplied highly accurate descriptions of the mental images associated with memories of artificial stimuli given in laboratory conditions, these same stimuli which were used in a great many experiments conducted by structuralist psychologists on sensory, perceptual and attentional processes (see Titchener, 1901–1905, 1910). Neither was the autobiographical memory issue central to the work of Titchener’s teacher, Wundt, who limited himself to certain cursory remarks on it in a brief passage in Grundriss der Psychologie [Outlines of Psychology], as follows. The character of memory-ideas is intimately connected with the complex nature of the memory-processes. The description of these ideas as weaker, but otherwise faithful, copies of the direct sensible idea, is as far out of the way as it could possibly be. Memory-images and direct sensible ideas differ not only in quality and intensity, but most emphatically in their elementary composition. We may diminish the intensity of a sensible impression as much as we like, but so long as it is perceptible at all it is an essentially different compound from a memory-idea. The incompleteness of the memory-idea is much more characteristic than the small intensity of its sensational elements. For example, when I remember an acquaintance, the image I have of his face and figure are not mere obscure reproductions of what I have in consciousness when I look directly at

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him, but most of the features do not exist at all in the reproduced ideas. (Wundt, 1896/1897, pp. 246–247)

In this passage, Wundt forcefully underlines the discrepancy between our perceptions of the real world (accurate and detailed) and our memory representations of these perceptions (incomplete and imprecise). To demonstrate this discrepancy, Wundt cites a specific category of autobiographical memories: our recollections of the faces of people we know which, according to Wundt, are incomplete and inaccurate.10 Autobiographical memory certainly received greater attention in the context of Functionalism, thanks to the contributions of James and Angell, above all. James (1890) started from the idea that all memories have an autobiographical component. For him, this component was not, however, bound up, as we might imagine, with an individual’s capacity to locate a certain personal event in time terms and thus to the fact of being able to report when that event took place. As he wrote in Principles of Psychology Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence. It must have that “warmth and intimacy” which were so 10 Careful readers will not have missed the similarity between this example and the observations made by the Henris in the context of their childhood memory survey (see Nicolas et al., 2013, p. 369; see Sect. 2.1.2 of the current volume). While Wundt makes no reference to these observations (apparently unsurprising, as the Henris’ article came out in 1897, a year later, that is, than Grundriss der Psychologie), it is extremely likely that he had had access to at least part of the data supplied by the French couple. My reason for formulating this hypothesis relates to a detail in Victor Henri’s scientific biography which I have not mentioned but will comment on here. From October 1894 to March 1896, Victor Henri spent a period of study at the Leipzig Experimental Psychology Laboratory, working under Wundt’s direct supervision. As Serge Nicolas has noted (1994; see also Nicolas et al., 2013), it was during this period that Victor Henri decided to undertake his survey on early childhood memories with his wife. Further proof of this lies in the fact that the questionnaire used for this research was published in the early months of 1895 in a grand total of three journals (L’Annéé Psychologique, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, Psychological Review) and that in each of these the list of questions was followed by an invitation to readers—formulated by Henri himself—to send in answers by post, directly to Leipzig, where he then lived (see Henri, 1895a, 1895b, 1895c). Returning to the relationship between the Henris and Wundt, we thus have a valid reason to believe that Wundt could not have been unaware of the results, however preliminary, of research which was conceived and carried out precisely by one of the young scholars who regularly attended his laboratory.

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often spoken of in the chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences “appropriated” by the thinker as his own. A general feeling of the past direction in time, then, a particular date conceived as lying along that direction, and defined by its name or phenomenal contents, an event imagined as located therein, and owned as part of my experience—such are the elements of every act of memory. (p. 650)

The excerpt cited above suggests that, for James, juxtaposing autobiographical memory to other memory systems which conserve nonautobiographical memories is misleading. For Functionalism’s founder, memory is autobiographical and non-autobiographical memories do not exist. It is interesting to note that this conception of memory is entirely coherent with the more general description James (1890) provided on the mind and its contents: a continuous, dynamic and constantly changing current in which “every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness” (p. 225). “Every thought” then, and thus thoughts dealing with the autobiographical past, too. Almost 15 years after Principles of Psychology was published, Angell (1904) returned to speak of autobiographical memory in a further work of great importance for the development of the functionalist school. I am referring to the book Psychology. An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness, a formidable summary of the principal approaches to psychological research in this era. In this work, Angell describes what is perhaps the most representative category of autobiographical memories: emotional autobiographical memories. In line with the Henris’ arguments (see Sect. 2.1.2), for Angell it is the experiences featuring strong emotions which are most likely to leave vivid and longlasting traces in the human memory. He cites, as an example, the case of terror experiences: “The details of some episode in which we have been greatly terrified may linger in our memories with a vividness which rivals the distinctness of the original experience” (p. 195). For Angell (1904), the vividness of emotional experience memories is to be traced back to the capacity these experiences have to stimulate and modify the brain tissues involved in encoding, retaining and

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recalling the autobiographical past irreversibly. In this respect, it is important to specify that Angell was convinced that all autobiographical experiences—and thus not only those involving terror or other salient emotions—left some trace in neural terms. On the basis of this argument, he argues that the past cannot be cancelled out of the human mind, a conclusion which is entirely similar to that reached—a very different theoretical framework notwithstanding—by the great Freud himself. The following excerpt, also taken from Psychology, effectively summarises Angell’s point of view on the persistence of autobiographical memories. It is probable that no item of our lives is ever literally and entirely forgotten. Even if we find it impossible, as we sometimes do, voluntarily to recall a certain idea, we must believe that the experience in which we originally encountered it has left its indelible impress upon the substance of the brain, whose action will in consequence be somewhat different from that which it might have manifested had the experience in question never befallen us. (p. 192)

Beyond the work of James and Angell, certain considerations of a general nature on the functioning of autobiographical memory are also to be found in the work of a further two exponents of the functionalist school cited above: Dewey and Carr. In one of his first contributions of a psychological nature—Psychology, a book which came out four years earlier than James’ Principles of Psychology—Dewey (1886) focused his attention on the connections people are capable of establishing between the various events making up their autobiographical stories. In this respect, he argues that: When we are unable to refer an image definitely to any time, it simply means that we cannot place it with reference to other experiences. We know that it has come in our past experiences, but where it came we do not know. Ability to put events in their proper time relation depends, accordingly, upon ability to connect our various experiences with each other. Events are always dated relatively to other events; never absolutely. And, apart from this unification of events as members of one series, there

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is, accordingly, no reference of images to any given time, and hence, strictly speaking, no memory. (pp. 188–189)

In the excerpt cited above, the idea by which autobiographical memory is to be seen as a whole of diverse contents which are, however, closely linked together and located by the individual concerned along a time continuum emerged. Dewey thus formulated the first psychological hypothesis on the organisation of autobiographical memory, a theme which is now central to a lively debate involving a by no means negligible number of researchers (see Mace, 2019; see also Chapter 3 in this book). Carr’s contribution—as the exponent of the more mature functionalist school version—focused primarily on an analysis of the factors influencing autobiographical memory performance. In this regard, in his book Psychology. A Study of Mental Activity (Carr, 1925), he argues that the quantity and quality of autobiographical memories are closely bound up with the environmental conditions in which the events and experiences making up the individual’s past are recollected. In particular, if these environmental conditions coincide with those in which the episodes recollected originally took place, the chances that the individual concerned recovers vivid, accurate and detailed memories in the long term are good. Vice versa, if the autobiographical episode encoding context and its retrieval context are different, then people’s memories are much more likely to be blurred, partial and lacking in detail. Further light is cast on this general functioning of autobiographical memory principle—now known as the encoding specificity principle (see Tulving, 1983; Tulving & Thomson, 1973)—in the following example made by Carr (1925, p. 251): A person long absent from his early home environment will experience considerable difficulty in recalling the various incidents connected with his youthful activities, while his mind will be flooded with such memories upon a return to these familiar scenes.

From what we have seen thus far, it seems clear that functionalist psychologists showed much greater sensitivity to the autobiographical memory theme than structuralist psychologists. This greater sensitivity

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should not surprise us, however. Whilst Structuralism focused on basic psychological processes—sensation, perception and attention—Functionalism extended psychology’s vision to the higher mental activities, too, and autobiographical memory is a paradigmatic example of this. All this notwithstanding, it is worth remembering that the observations formulated by James, Angell, Dewey and Carr were all exclusively theoretical or anecdotal in nature. In fact, none of these authors ever embarked on empirical research on the subject. Functionalist psychologists’ lack of interest in empirical research into autobiographical memory is also demonstrated by the limited consideration that these authors had for the pioneering contributions which had preceded or accompanied the affirmation of the functionalist orientation. In fact, if Galton’s research certainly attracted James’ interest—with the latter illustrating and discussing the former’s results in various chapters of Principles of Psychology—this research was, however, presented as an example of studies on associations and mental images rather than into memories of personal experiences. An even worse fate befell the other pioneering contributions to autobiographical memory described in the first part of this chapter: the Henris’ survey (see Sect. 2.1.2) and Freud’s analysis of clinical cases (see Sect. 2.1.3). Although both Angell’s and Carr’s books were published in 1904 and 1925, respectively—and thus years after the Henris’ (Henri & Henri, 1897) and Freud’s work (1899/1962, 1901/1960) was published—these make not the slightest reference to either, thus relegating them to the margins of the period’s psychological debate on memory. It is important to underline that these failings by functionalist psychologists are less serious if compared to those of the exponents of a further two great psychology schools: Gestalt psychology and Behaviourism. Despite the key role both played in the development of early to midtwentieth-century scientific psychology, both these schools—the first of German, the second of American, origin—left the autobiographical memory theme out of their research agendas altogether. We will analyse the most representative texts of the two currents referred to above in the same way as those of Structuralism and Functionalism were analysed above for its use in understanding the reasons behind this exclusion.

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Kurt Koffka’s (1886–1941) Principles of Gestalt Psychology is probably the work which best summarises the ideas and principles espoused by the scholars who founded the Gestalt approach or at least contributed to it. Published in the United States in 1935, the book comprises a grand total of two chapters on memory (the tenth and eleventh) and these are anything but brief. Whilst the first is theoretical in nature, the second is a review of the research of the day, much of which done directly by psychologists belonging to the Gestalt school, such as Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962) and Koffka himself. It is important to underline that neither of these two chapters analyses themes specifically relating to autobiographical memory—at least in the way that it had been conceptualised by the other scholars who had taken an interest in the subject thus far and whose contributions we have examined here: Galton, the Henris, Freud and the various exponents of the functionalist school. Koffka focused mainly on describing the mental operations activated when a person has to memorise “simple” physical stimuli—in the cognitive, emotional and social sense—namely stimuli which had no precise and direct links with the intrinsically complex and personal meaning packed events forming individuals’ autobiographical past. In particular, Koffka elaborated extremely accurate descriptions of the psychological processes underlying remembering sounds and images and, that is, stimuli potentially easy to manipulate and reproduce in the place chosen for the experiments done by Gestalt scholars: the laboratory. As we touched on previously, autobiographical memory’s exclusion from the scientific psychology of the first half of the twentieth century also encompassed Behaviourism. The founder of this school was John Broadus Watson (1878–1958), who was also the author of two classics which anyone wanting to study Behaviourism in greater depth must absolutely read: Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (Watson, 1919) and Behaviorism (Watson, 1924). These volumes contain interesting theoretical and empirical analyses which help us to understand the reasons underlying autobiographical memory’s absence from the behavioural psychology agenda. In both these texts, Watson conceptualised memory as manifesting a wide range of behavioural habits whose formation depends on associative learning which, in turn, allows powerful connections between physical stimuli

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from the environment and the organism’s response to them to be established. Tennis playing, swimming, taking dictation, saying aloud an old poem learned in childhood, repeating an arithmetic calculus under your breath, saying the name of a person or object after a great deal of time has passed since we first learnt it: these are Watson’s examples of the everyday life behavioural habits (either implicit or explicit) in which human memory comes into play (see Watson, 1919, p. 304). As can be seen, recollecting episodes with autobiographical content is not present in Watson’s list. It is easy to understand why. Both recording and analysing this type of behavioural habit would, in fact, require a much more in-depth enquiry into the thoughts, judgements and subjective feelings of those undergoing psychological observation. For Watson (1919, 1924), and the other eminent scholars who contributed to the development of the behaviourist perspective—such as Clark Hull (1884–1952), Edwin Ray Guthrie (1886–1959) and Burrhus Skinner (1904–1990)—thoughts, judgements and subjective feelings did not fall into the behavioural psychology field of enquiry whose only object of study was manifest behaviour and thus the whole of responses— motor, visceral and verbal—which the body has learnt to associate with the stimuli given by the environment. The following definition, taken from Watson’s (1924) book Behaviorism, can help to further clarify the behaviourist conception of memory, a conception in which there is no space for the subjective aspects of the psyche’s functioning. By “memory” … we mean nothing except the fact that when we meet a stimulus again after an absence, we do the old habitual thing (say the old words and show the old visceral emotional behavior) that we learned to do when we were in the presence of that stimulus in the first place. (p. 190)

When Behaviourism declined at the end of the 1950s, people’s mental lives returned to centre-stage in the psychology debate. This was made possible by the affirmation of the Cognitivism current, also founded in the United States and the last great twentieth-century psychology school I will refer to here.

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The years in which this school first formed—i.e. the 1960s and 1970s—were years which saw a huge expansion in psychological knowledge of the human memory.11 Once again, however, this progress did not encompass autobiographical memory, which was unfortunately not able to carve out a specific space for itself in the agendas of the first cognitive researchers, or at least not right away. A change in sensitivity towards this theme—which, as we will shortly see, was not as radical as it might have been—only took place from 1972 onwards, the year in which the Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist Endel Tulving (1927–) published an important theoretical essay for the history of the psychology of memory: Episodic and Semantic Memory.12 In this contribution, Tulving (1972) compared the main characteristics of the two systems which, in his theoretical model, constituted the structure of the long-term explicit memory: episodic memory, which can be defined as the warehouse in which memories of personal episodes with a well-defined time and space context are stored (e.g. “Yesterday I went to Cinema Capitol to see an old film by Federico Fellini”, “In the summer of 1999 I visited Paris”) and semantic memory, which conserves knowledge of an impersonal nature which we make use of in our language and, more generally, in our interactions with the world around us (e.g. knowing how to define the word “freedom”, remembering the names of the days of the week, knowing that Paris is the capital of France and that France is part of the European Union, remembering the year World War I broke out, knowing the dollar to euro exchange rate formula and so on). As will be clear to readers, the above-mentioned definition of the episodic memory concept encompasses explicit references to the autobiographical component of memory. Unfortunately, the empirical studies into episodic memory carried out in the years immediately subsequent 11The

most important research carried out in this period includes the following: Sperling’s (1960) experiments on iconic memory; Brown and McNeill’s (1966) study on the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon; Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) theoretical model dividing up the memory into three subsystems (sensory register, short-term store, long-term store); research into semantic networks by Collins and Quillian (1969); and, lastly, Baddeley and Warrington’s (1970) study into the distinction between short- and long-term memory in amnesia patients. 12The essay was part of an essay collection edited by Tulving himself together with his colleague Wayne Donaldson, entitled Organization of Memory (Tulving & Donaldson, 1972).

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to Tulving’s essay (1972) followed a methodological framework which gathered no information on this component. Specifically, the experiential tasks used in this work consisted of verbal learning tests by which researchers assessed people’s ability to recognise and recall target words, the latter being included in lists whose complexity and number of items varied from one experiment to another (see Tulving & Thomson, 1973; Watkins & Tulving, 1975). In a much more recent period, Tulving (2002) himself gave the reasons for which these tests were entirely unsuited to enquiring into the functioning of the autobiographical memory: first and foremost, it did not allow the time and space context of the episodic memories cited by the experimental subjects to be identified and, second, it did not allow information about the conscious awareness that accompanies the act of remembering personal episodes to be gathered.13 In conclusion, it seems to me to be important to highlight that the advent of Cognitivism had a generally positive impact on the psychology of autobiographical memory field. In fact, it was thanks to the introduction of the concept of episodic memory that autobiographical memory managed to carve out a place for itself in 1970s scientific psychology (after a several decades’ long hiatus characterised by the dominance of Gestalt psychology and Behaviourism). On the other hand, it is important to recognise that the results of the earliest research into episodic memory must be considered extremely disappointing for essentially methodological reasons, as we saw above. Naturally, it should be clarified that the balance sheet drawn up here summarises the state of knowledge up to the mid -1970s at which point a new and much more fertile phase for the psychology of autobiographical memory was ushered in. That which I referred to as the “second phase” in the introduction to this chapter and which would never have begun without the theoretical and empirical contribution of one of the great centre-stage players in the history of psychology: naturalised US psychologist of German origin Ulric Neisser (1928–2012).

13Tulving

(1985, 2002) used the term autonoetic consciousness to indicate this component of episodic remembering.

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Ulric Neisser and the 1976 Turning Point

If we consider the historical development of psychology as a whole, a certain number of decisive watershed dates for its evolution can be identified. However, symbolic and conventional these might be, their value as reference points for students and scholars finding their way around the vast sphere of theories and research into the human psyche cannot, for the most part, be denied. Some of these dates mark events which we might call “institutional”. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, 1879 is, for example, generally considered by psychology historians to be psychology’s official date of birth as an autonomous scientific discipline. This was the year, in fact, in which Wundt founded the first experimental psychology laboratory—the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie—based at the University of Leipzig. Other symbolic dates in psychology’s history are the years in which certain important scientific essays and articles announcing the birth of specific schools of thought or theoretical approaches were published. In 1913, for example, Watson published an article entitled Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It in the journal Psychological Review, thereby inaugurating Behaviourism. Taking a great leap forward in time, the year 2000 was the year in which Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2000a) edited an important monographic issue for American Psychologist —another scientific journal of great importance in the international panorama—which collected a series of essays on themes generally little studied by twentieth-century psychologists (such as happiness, subjective well-being, optimism and creativity). In the same way as Watson’s essay, the publication of this monographic issue—and in particular the introduction by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000b) themselves—marked the advent of a new theoretical, empirical and professional orientation in contemporary psychology: Positive Psychology. Returning to the psychology of autobiographical memory, it is certainly possible to identify certain emblematic dates in the history of this theoretical and empirical field, too. Of these, the most significant, I believe, is 1976, the year one of the most important works in twentiethcentury psychology was published—Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser. In this work, Neisser

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launched a bitter attack on Cognitivism’s classic methodological framework, an approach which had met with huge success in the 1970s thanks to a fundamental text written by Neisser himself, Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967), published only nine years before Cognition and Reality.14 Neisser’s attack (1976) targeted two aspects of the empirical research carried out by cognitive psychologists: (1) the choice of the lab as an exclusive setting in enquiries into mental processes; (2) the use of experimental procedures and tasks exclusively based on abstract and artificial stimuli. Neisser observed that the limited “ecological validity” of Cognitivism’s experiments applied to all its main fields of investigation: perception, attention, imagery, language and memory, naturally. With specific reference to this area, he argued: The fact is that we have almost no systematic knowledge about memory as it occurs in the course of ordinary life. Almost all the phenomena that a contemporary theory must explain are highly artificial: recall of word lists or nonsense syllables, identification of photographs that were included in a long series inflicted on the subject earlier, and so on. … More important, we still have almost no systematic information about how a person remembers events he has witnessed …, people he has met, messages he must carry, or where he has left his pipe. Until we know more about memory in the natural contexts where it develops and is normally used, theorizing is premature. (pp. 141–142)

The excerpt cited makes it clear that, at least until the mid-1970s, autobiographical memory was not a field of interest to cognitive psychologists. The situation changed radically when Cognition and Reality was published in 1976, which revolutionised thinking around the relationship between individuals and the environment in which their cognitive activities take place. The success of this work blazed the way for a new theoretical perspective within the psychological sciences: the ecological approach to the study of cognition, whose main objective was describing 14 In

an autobiographical essay published five years before his death, Neisser (2007) felt the need to clarify that in historical terms according to him the status of founder of the cognitive movement was incorrect: “I was not really the father of cognitive psychology, only the godfather who gave it a name. The name itself was not even very original, given that the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies was already functioning” (p. 297).

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and explaining the functioning of human cognition from the starting point of an analysis of the way it is expressed and manifests in the real world rather than in the artificial environment of the research laboratory. It was thus that the idea of launching a programme of ecological studies on human memory spread rapidly through many universities and research centres and not only in North America. In the opening presentation to the first edition of the Practical Aspects of Memory conference held in Cardiff (UK) in 1978, it was Neisser (1978) himself who reiterated the importance for the psychology of the day of further study into analysing and understanding the so-called everyday memory. In this contribution— whose cogency has made it a psychology classic—Neisser cast further light on his opinions on the theme of autobiographical memory, underlining the central role which research in this sector would play in the years to come. In particular, in one of the most significant excerpts from his speech, he argued: What we want to know, I think, is how people use their own past experiences in meeting the present and the future. We would like to understand how this happens under natural conditions: the circumstances in which it occurs, the forms it takes, the variables on which it depends, the differences between individuals in their uses of the past. “Natural conditions” does not mean in the jungle or on the desert, unless that happens to be where our subjects live. It means in school and at home, on the job and in the course of thought, as carefree children and as reflective old men and women. Because changes in the social and cultural environment can change the uses of the past, we will have to study many settings. The psychological laboratory is the easiest of these settings in which to work, but it is also among the least interesting; we ourselves are the only people who spend much time there voluntarily. (pp. 13–14)15

15 Neisser’s presentation—Memory: What Are the Important Questions? —was first published in the volume Practical Aspects of Memory (Gruneberg et al., 1978) which comprised the Cardiff conference proceedings. A few years later, this same text was reprinted in a volume edited by Neisser (1982)—Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts—a collection of research articles and theoretical essays written by the scholars who had contributed significantly to the emergence and affirmation of the ecological approach to the study of memory.

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Naturally, Neisser was well aware of the difficulties inherent in applying the ecological approach to the study of memories of personal experiences. Observing a psychological phenomenon in a naturalistic and, at the same time, scientific way is, in fact, an extremely complex matter. It requires eliminating (or at least limiting) the biasing effects linked to the (real or virtual) presence of the researcher observing the phenomenon. Furthermore, it is important that the researcher accurately selects the contexts in which observations take place. These should, in fact, adequately represent the whole range of everyday life events and situations in which the observed individual’s cognitive activities take place. As Neisser himself stressed (1978, p. 14), if the psychological phenomena observed in a natural context are autobiographical memories, a third difficulty is to be added to the two described above. This relates to the fact that the psychological processes involved in representing the autobiographical past have a much wider time frame than the processes at play in other aspects of the mind’s functioning. In this respect, it is useful to remember that, in empirical research into memories of autobiographical events, the time separating the event being studied from its recall can be relatively long as well as highly variable (hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades or even a whole life). As it is reasonable to assume that the multitude of life experiences individuals accumulate during these time intervals are closely related to the contents of their memories, it is thus extremely important for researchers to acquire specific information on these experiences and assess their impact on the memory construction process in the present. It is, however, a highly complex operation in methodological terms and one which has not always been paid the requisite attention. Luckily, the methodological problems illustrated above did not discourage Neisser from enquiring empirically into the characteristics and functioning of autobiographical memory in accordance with a purely ecological approach. Of Neisser’s various empirical studies in this field, I would like to mention four. The first (John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study, Neisser, 1981) contains an analysis of the testimony given by White House advisor John Dean in the context of the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. The second

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(Point of View in Personal Memories, Nigro & Neisser, 1983) investigated the visual observation perspective (internal and external) adopted by individuals during introspective examination of their autobiographical memories. Lastly, the third and fourth analysed personal memories of two public events which were accorded considerable media attention in the 1980s: the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle (Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News About Challenger, Neisser & Harsch, 1992) and the 1989 San Francisco Bay area earthquake in California (Remembering the Earthquake: Direct Experience vs. Hearing the News, Neisser et al., 1996). It is important to underline that Neisser did not simply conduct theoretical analyses and empirical enquiries into the functioning of autobiographical memory in the various everyday life contexts, more or less on his own. Over the course of his extremely long scientific career, and above all as professor at Emory University (1983–1996), he also worked tirelessly to make the psychology of autobiographical memory a research field in its own right with its own well-defined character and identity within the overall psychological sciences panorama. This was, to a considerable extent, due to the organisation by Neisser and those closest to him of three international conferences. These meetings—held at Emory University in 1985, 1990 and 1991—were a valuable opportunity for dialogue and experience sharing for all researchers interested in applying the ecological perspective to the study of autobiographical memories in those years. The theoretical and empirical contributions presented at these conferences were later published in three prestigious volumes which, over time, became autobiographical memory classics: Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory (Neisser & Winograd, 1988), Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of “Flashbulb” Memories (Winograd & Neisser, 1992) and The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self -Narrative (Neisser & Fivush, 1994). Given their scientific and historical importance, some of the contributions to these three books will be the subject of this and the remaining chapters in this book.

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The Contemporary Panorama

The historical overview provided thus far has been based on an analysis of the theories and research of a certain number of authors which is extremely limited overall. At the end of the 1980s, the situation changed radically, however. It was precisely due to Neisser’s efforts that the number of researchers and scholars turning to the autobiographical memory theme increased significantly in this period. This positive trend continued over the 1990s. Lastly, as we saw in Chapter 1, from the starting point of the noughties, the psychology of autobiographical memory became a highly visible research sector within the contemporary psychology panorama. In a fairly recent work, Danish psychologist Dorthe Berntsen and American psychologist David Rubin retraced the main phases of the contemporary history of the psychology of autobiographical memory (see Berntsen & Rubin, 2012). These two scholars believe that two of the various factors which have contributed to the recent affirmation of this field may have played an especially important role. The first relates to the setting up, once again from the late 1980s onwards, of certain scientific journals which showed a willingness to extend their vision beyond the confines of the experimental psychology of memory to encompass theoretical and empirical contributions which fit well into the ecological approach inaugurated by Neisser, such as Applied Cognitive Psychology (founded in 1987) and Memory (founded in 1995). The second factor which Berntsen and Rubin see as having fostered the contemporary popularity of the psychology of autobiographical memory is bound up with the founding of certain international research centres specialising in this field and thus capable of attracting and training young scholars from all over the world. As we saw in the previous section, in the 1980s and 1990s an important role in this sense was played by the research group coordinated by Neisser at Emory University (the Emory Cognition Project ). As far as the current panorama is concerned, the most important research centre is in Europe, in Denmark to be exact: Aarhus University’s Center on Autobiographical Memory Research which was founded in 2010 and is currently presided over by Dorthe Berntsen.

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In addition to the two factors described above (new scientific journals and research centres), there may be a third reason behind the contemporary affirmation of the psychology of autobiographical memory: the interdisciplinary character of this field of enquiry. Since the advent of scientific psychology, researchers interested in autobiographical memory have come from a wide range of fields: Galton and Victor Henri, for example, were essentially experimental psychologists, and Freud was a clinical psychologist. As far as the contemporary era is concerned, it is significant to note that the autobiographical memory theme intersects with all the main psychology research fields: cognitive psychology, psychobiology and the neurosciences, developmental psychology, clinical psychology and social psychology. And that’s not all. Today, autobiographical memory is also attracting the interest of scholars from other Humanities disciplines such as sociology (Goodson, 2017; Jedlowski, 2001), philosophy (Rowlands, 2016), literary criticism and the history of literature (Assmann, 1999/2011; Ender, 2005; Nalbantian, 2003; Saunders, 2010). It is important to note that the formation of an increasingly broad and interconnected international community of autobiographical memory scholars has had a wide-ranging positive impact on the whole sector of investigation analysed here. I will examine two of these here. A first consequence relates to the fact that frequent scientific exchanges have led to contemporary psychologists interested in autobiographical memory finally reaching agreement on a name for their field of investigation. Now, the expression “autobiographical memory” for the study of the psychological processes and phenomena bound up with recollecting personal experiences might seem natural. In actual fact, however, with Neisser as the sole exception, none of the authors cited in the previous sections ever used it. Galton preferred to speak of “mental associations”, “ideas” and “mental imagery”. The Henris and Freud used the expression “childhood memories”, without specifying further. Lastly, functionalist psychologists chose even more generic terms. It was only in 1986 that the expression “autobiographical memory” officially appeared in the psychology literature. And this, too, is a symbolic date. It was in 1986 that Autobiographical Memory was published, a collection of essays edited by David Rubin and comprising

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essays from some of the most representative scholars of the psychology of autobiographical memory of the day. What is noteworthy about this is that it was the first book in the history of psychological sciences to use the expression “autobiographical memory” in its title. And everything changed after its publication. Like it or not autobiographical memory is now the label used by practically all the psychologists working in this sector. A second positive impact linked to the psychology of autobiographical memory’s recent expansion relates to the fact that, in addition to having reached agreement on a name to give to their field of study, contemporary psychologists seem also to have achieved wide-ranging agreement on how to define the autobiographical memory concept and its main features. This can be summed up by the following twelve affirmations. 1. In very general terms, the concept of autobiographical memory indicates individuals’ capacity to recollect the vast volume of information from their pasts, namely: events of a private nature (e.g. the birth of a child), public events (e.g. a natural calamity), subjective experiences (e.g. feelings of fear) and non-episodic personal data (e.g. knowing one’s address or the name of the town of birth).16 2. The concept of autobiographical memory comprises the whole of the psychological processes bound up in the phase involving encoding and retention of the information which makes up an individual’s past as well as the retrieval phase. 3. Autobiographical memory is a multi-faceted process comprising neurobiological, cognitive, emotional, social, cultural and linguistic components. 4. Autobiographical memory performs its functions thanks to the support of a further two memory systems which have been studied in-depth by cognitive psychologists (and were examined in Sect. 2.2 of this chapter): semantic memory (i.e. remembering general knowledge of the world) and episodic memory (i.e. remembering personal experiences with a time and space context). 16This

specific memory contents category is frequently called personal semantic memories (see Kopelman et al., 1989).

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5. Access to the contents of autobiographical memory can be both voluntary and involuntary. 6. Autobiographical memory is a selective process capable of recording, storing and recollecting only part of the information forming an individual’s past. 7. Autobiographical memory is a reconstructive process: autobiographical memories are not a faithful reproduction of the events originally experienced. 8. Remembering an autobiographical episode (either voluntarily or involuntarily) is bound up with the reactivation of feeling states, emotions, sensory images and bodily sensations which, in some cases, can be very similar to those experienced by the individual on the occasion of the original event: remembering a personal experience is a little like living it a second time. 9. A significant portion of the memories stored in the autobiographical memory is made up of memories of experiences of an emotional nature which have self-definition implications. 10. As autobiographical memories are recalled in the present, studying the autobiographical memory comprises an in-depth enquiry into the ways individuals perceive, judge and interpret the meaning their past experiences have for them today. 11. Autobiographical memory is an essential component of the whole of psychological processes which enables individuals to “travel mentally through time”, moving backwards towards the past or forwards towards the future. 12. Autobiographical memory is also linked to other important aspects of the psyche’s functioning, such as identity, personality, selfnarrative, motivation, emotions, visual imagery and metacognition. These twelve affirmations, however generic, supply a reference framework within which the theoretical and empirical contributions of the vast majority of psychologists studying autobiographical memory today can be placed. Naturally, being able to identify a series of points of convergence does not imply that contemporary psychology of the autobiographical memory is free of all internal debate. Arguments and debates between the

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scholars working in this field are frequent and are sometimes extremely heated (on this subject, see, for example, Brewin, 2007, 2016; Conway, 1997; Dodier, 2019; Loftus & Davis, 2006; Rubin et al., 2016; Schacter, 1995; Sotgiu & Mormont, 2008; Sotgiu & Rusconi, 2014). Despite this, contemporary autobiographical memory debates relate to none of the twelve affirmations set out above. Keeping the attributes of the concept of autobiographical memory on which widespread agreement exists in mind, we will now move on to a description of the main theoretical and research perspectives characterising the psychology of autobiographical memory’s more recent history.

2.4.1 Theoretical Models In this section, I will describe two theories which are very popular today in the cognitive psychology literature because, in addition to offering a sufficiently detailed description of the functioning of autobiographical memory, they rest on relatively solid empirical foundations. The first is David Rubin’s basic systems model (Rubin, 2005, 2006, 2012), from a scholar referred to previously in this chapter. The second is English psychologist Martin Conway’s self -memory system model (Conway, 2005; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Conway et al., 2004). We will now examine the main ideas around which these models have taken shape. For Rubin (2012), autobiographical memory performs its functions thanks to the activities of a group of distinct cognitive systems which Rubin calls basic systems, each of which has a specific neural underlayer. These systems include: – event memory, located in the hippocampus17 ; – search and retrieval, located in the frontal lobes18 ;

17This

system’s task is to transfer autobiographical information from the short-term to the long-term memory (Rubin, 2012, p. 14). 18The functions of this system, entirely similar to those performed by the working memory system, comprise identifying and temporarily retaining information making up episodic autobiographical memories (Rubin, 2006, p. 284).

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– emotions, located in the various structures and regions forming the limbic system; – language, located in the frontal and temporal lobes in the dominant hemisphere for this function; – the narrative system, located in the frontal lobes; – the five sensory systems (vision, audition, gustation, olfaction, tactile), located in the respective sensory cortices; – spatial imagery, located in many areas of the brain (including the visual cortices, located in the occipital lobes and the hippocampus). Figure 2.1 represents the various systems listed above in schematic form, together with the connection networks by which they perform their respective functions.

Fig. 2.1 A schematic of the Rubin’s basic systems model (Adapted with permission from “The basic systems model of autobiographical memory”, by D. C. Rubin, in D. Berntsen & D. C. Rubin (Eds.), Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches (pp. 11–32), 2012, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 2012 by Cambridge University Press)

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Rubin (2006, 2012) hypothesised that the construction of autobiographical memories is linked to a complex coordination (or integration) activity performed by the individual basic systems and the brain structures to which each of these systems are anchored in biological terms. To this end, Rubin distinguished between two forms of coordination: general coordination and specific coordination. General coordination involves large regions of the brain, both cortical and subcortical. These impact on all three basic systems shown to the left in Fig. 2.1: search and retrieval, emotion, and event memory. As far as specific coordination is concerned, this is the task of two distinct neural systems which perform more specific and less complex cognitive functions than the basic systems cited here. According to Rubin, these subsystems comprise: the visual cortices which integrate the sensory information coming from the visual, auditory, tactile and spatial systems; and the orbitofrontal cortex which integrates the sensory information coming from the tactile, olfactory and gustatory systems (see boxes with a dotted outline positioned to the right of Fig. 2.1). In addition to describing the cognitive and neural architecture of autobiographical memory, Rubin (2006, 2012) also formulated interesting hypotheses on the ontogenetic development of this complex activity of the human mind—a development which is clearly connected with the ontogenetic evolution of the individual basic systems which, Rubin argues, make up autobiographical memory. The graph in Fig. 2.2 shows the possible development trajectory of the cognitive capacities associated with four of the basic systems identified by Rubin (2012): language, the narrative system, vision and the search and retrieval system. As is clear from this, no single ontogenetic development trajectory applying to all the basic systems shown exists. The cognitive abilities associated with language and the narrative system grow significantly from birth to the age of thirty and are then stable over subsequent phases of life. Their evolutionary trajectory is not entirely parallel, however, as the linguistic abilities reach a higher level than the narrative abilities. As far as the cognitive abilities involved in search and retrieval system are concerned, these also develop significantly over the first three decades of life, before progressively declining in subsequent years. The visual

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Fig. 2.2 Hypothetical developmental trajectories for some of the basic systems included in the Rubin’s model (Reprinted with permission from “The basic systems model of autobiographical memory”, by D. C. Rubin, in D. Berntsen & D. C. Rubin (Eds.), Understanding autobiographical memory. Theories and approaches (pp. 11–32), 2012, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 2012 by Cambridge University Press)

abilities, lastly, decrease substantially from birth onwards; however, this decline significantly slows from the third decade onwards.19 In a similar way to Rubin, Conway (2005), Conway and PleydellPearce (2000) and Conway et al. (2004) constructed a theoretical model supplying a detailed description of the cognitive and neural bases of autobiographical memory. However, this model differs from Rubin’s in that it focuses to a greater extent on the concept of self. Let’s look at how. For Conway (2005; see also Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), autobiographical memory functions thanks to the contribution of two cognitive

19 Very recently, Rubin (2019) has proposed combining the basic systems model with a broad theoretical approach applying to memory in general which he called the dimensional model . This new integrated theory’s main contribution consists in finding a clear location for autobiographical memory within the wide realm of memory phenomena. Indeed, Rubin holds that three fundamental properties distinguish autobiographical memory from other kinds of memory: (1) it is a self-referential mental activity, (2) it involves an ability to mentally construct scenes (which, in turn, enables a sense of reliving), and (3) it is an explicit form of remembering.

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systems: the working self and the autobiographical memory knowledge base. For Conway, the working self is the whole of psychological processes which enables a person to organise, coordinate and manage the activities he or she is involved in, in the here and now, in what Conway et al. (2004, p. 502) call the individual’s psychological present. The working self performs three main functions: (1) categorising an individual’s goals in a specific context (time, space and relational); (2) establishing a hierarchy between these goals; and (3) activating the whole of judgements, behaviours and emotional responses facilitating individuals in their achievement of their goals at that time. As Conway and PleydellPearce (2000) recognised, the term “working self ” was chosen because it explicitly relates to the concept of working memory (Baddeley, 1986) and particularly “to the notion that a core part of working memory is a set of control processes that coordinate and modulate other computationally separate systems” (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000, p. 265). By “autobiographical memory knowledge base”, Conway (2005) means the whole of an individual’s mental representations of his or her autobiographical past. It is important to note that these representations can differ considerably in relation to their content and level of abstraction: some of them include information relating to autobiographical episodes which can be placed exactly in time and space terms (“On 22nd November 2000 I obtained an M.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Turin”); others are a matter of generic autobiographical information (such as the knowledge an individual elaborates about his or her “lifetime periods” or “life themes”).20 Conway (2005), Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and Conway et al. (2004) hypothesised that the working self and autobiographical memory knowledge base interact constantly during the everyday lives of the individuals remembering. Practically speaking, this means that if an individual is engaged in some activity, objectives pursued at that moment can determine the recollection and use in the psychological present of specific information stored in the autobiographical memory knowledge 20 For more on Conway’s hypotheses on the specific cognitive structures which form the autobiographical memory knowledge base, see Sect. 3.1 of Chapter 3.

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base (if, for example, I am cooking a steak I may remember the afternoon I went to the butcher to buy it and the contents of the conversation I had with the butcher on a specific cut of meat on display at the counter). On the other hand, recollecting (voluntarily or involuntarily) contents in an autobiographical memory knowledge base is a mnestic act which may have significant repercussions on the type of goals pursued by an individual at a specific time, the priority assigned to them and the way an individual chooses to facilitate their achievement (if, for example, I were to cast my mind back to a pleasant trip to Venice in 2019 with my current girlfriend, I might decide to break off whatever I am doing temporarily with the goal of reserving another trip there). A further important theme paid special attention in Conway’s model is the accuracy of mental representations of the autobiographical past. For Conway (2005) and Conway et al. (2004), this property of autobiographical memories varies in accordance with the push and pull of two categories of opposing psychological demands or forces: correspondence and self -coherence. When the demand for correspondence prevails, the individual concerned represents his or her personal experiences as faithfully as possible to personal lived experiences—and autobiographical memories in this situation are thus extremely accurate. By contrast, when the demand for self-coherence prevails, individuals tend to reconstruct their experiences in such a way as to make them coherent with their own self-images—in this latter situation autobiographical memories are thus very inaccurate and may contain distorted or even entirely false information. As Conway has hypothesised, where psychological or neurological suffering is absent, autobiographical memory works in such a way as to ensure the greatest possible balance between correspondence and self-coherence demands. In fact, the more balanced these psychological forces are, the more the rememberer will be capable of dealing with and adapting to environmental challenges. A last aspect of Conway’s self-memory system model which merits taking into consideration relates to the hypothesis contained in it on the neural substrate of autobiographical memory. According to Conway (2005), the processes underlying the encoding and retrieval of memories stored in the autobiographical memory knowledge base are regulated by two distinct, though interconnected, neural systems: one

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involving extended regions of the temporal and occipital lobes (which Conway called the temporo-occipital system) and one which involves the frontal and temporal lobes (fronto-temporal system). The temporooccipital system deals with the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories and that is—it is important to stress this once again—memories linked to personal experiences with a specific space-time context. The fronto-temporal system, on the other hand, deals with the encoding and retrieval of autobiographical information of a semantic and conceptual type which has to do with the general meanings and knowledge which an individual develops around his or her self and life story. Conway hypothesised that the ontogenetic development of the fronto-temporal system takes place at a subsequent stage as compared to the ontogenetic development of the temporo-occipital system. In other words, human beings, Conway believes, first acquire an ability to recall specific events from their lives21 and only later acquire the ability to generate thoughts and semantic representations around their individual experiences.

2.4.2 Research Areas As happens in many areas of scientific psychology, much greater energy has been expended in research of an empirical type in the autobiographical memory field than in the development of theoretical models (Baddeley, 2012). Well aware of the impossibility of a complete and thoroughgoing overview of the contemporary psychology of the autobiographical memory’s empirical research area here, I will simply summarise the most representative areas alone and, that is, those which have attracted the greatest number of researchers and on which the lion’s share of the scientific publications of recent decades have converged. I would argue that there are eight of these. The first of these research areas enquires into the basic functioning of autobiographical memory, comprising, in particular, those researchers who investigate the content, organisation and functions of autobiographical 21 Most recent research indicates that this ability emerges at 2–3 years of age (see Fivush et al., 2011).

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memory (see Chaps. 3 and 4 of the current volume). Other subjects at the heart of this area are the accuracy and phenomenological qualities of autobiographical memories, the role played by language and self-narrative in reconstructing the autobiographical past, mental rumination and social sharing of autobiographical memories, traumatic and emotional autobiographical memory, and, lastly the effects of culture on autobiographical memory (Brewer, 1992; Levine & Pizarro, 2004; Reisberg & Heuer, 2004; Rimé, 2004; Ross & Wang, 2011; Sotgiu & Mormont, 2008; Sotgiu & Rusconi, 2014; Wang, 2013). The second area relates to the ontogenetic development of autobiographical memory. Research in this sphere enquires into how the ability to encode, store and retrieve the autobiographical past evolves in life cycle’s main phases: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Here the research themes which have prompted the greatest interest are childhood amnesia, the effects of parental reminiscence style on the coherence and organisation of autobiographical memories, the relationship between the development of narrative abilities and the identity construction process, and, lastly, the reminiscence bump phenomenon (see Chapter 1), studied, above all, in adults and the elderly (Bauer, 2007; Fitzgerald & Broadbridge, 2012; Fivush, 2018; Fivush et al., 2011; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). The third area is involuntary autobiographical memories, i.e. those memories which crop up spontaneously without individuals making any conscious effort to recollect them. It is crucial to highlight that this field of study—launched only 25 years ago (Berntsen, 1996)—triggered something of a Copernican revolution within the psychology of memory in general and thus not only in the more circumscribed sphere of psychology of autobiographical memory. From the starting point of the second half of the nineteenth century and up until the mid-1990s, practically all memory psychologists (both autobiographical and otherwise) conceptualised the process of remembering—a stimulus but also a more complex event—as an exclusively intentional mental activity whose study thus required research participants to voluntarily recall their memories. We have now comprehensively moved beyond this. On the strength of innovative research methods, a large number of studies have demonstrated that remembering personal experiences can be involuntary

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as well as voluntary (Berntsen, 1996, 1999, 2001; Berntsen & Hall, 2004; Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008). The themes at the heart of this research include, in particular, the frequency of involuntary autobiographical memories in everyday life, the factors affecting the occurrence of involuntary autobiographical memories, the similarities and differences between involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories, and, lastly, the similarities and differences between involuntary autobiographical memories and episodic simulations of future events (see Berntsen, 2009; Mace, 2010; Talarico & Mace, 2010). The fourth area enquires into the so-called flashbulb memories phenomenon. In contemporary literature, the flashbulb memories concept refers to individuals remembering circumstances in which they heard about a high emotional impact public event with potential social impact, such as a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, a technological accident, the resignation of a political leader or the death of a religious leader or very famous public figure. The distinctive characteristics of flashbulb memories are persistence over time (they can be recalled in detail even many years later), considerable vividness and the high degree of confidence people have in their memories’ accuracy. It is precisely these attributes which have triggered a lively debate—both theoretical and empirical—around the nature of the psychological mechanisms at work in the formation, maintenance and recollection of flashbulb memories (see Brown & Kulik, 1977; Christianson, 1992a; McCloskey, 1992; McCloskey et al., 1988; Schmidt & Bohannon, 1988; Talarico & Rubin, 2007). In particular, this debate has divided scholars into two camps. On the one hand, it has been argued that flashbulb memories are special memories which take shape as a result of a specific cognitive and neural mechanism which is activated only in the presence of high emotional and social impact events such as those referred to above. From this perspective, flashbulb memories thus belong to a group of memories which are to be considered qualitatively different from other memories stored in individuals’ long-term autobiographical memories. By contrast, a second group of researchers has argued that no unique or special category is required for flashbulb memories and that no distinct memory mechanism to that presiding over the formation, maintenance and recollection of autobiographical memories as a whole is

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required. According to the authors in this camp, flashbulb memories are “ordinary”, normal memories and not qualitatively different from other everyday autobiographical memories which, in specific circumstances, can also demonstrate the same phenomenological features as those of flashbulb memories: longevity, vividness and confidence. It is important to note that, in addition to this debate, contemporary flashbulb memory scholars have also studied other themes relating to this fascinating phenomenon. These include the psychological mechanisms underlying the formation and maintenance of flashbulb memories; assessment of the accuracy of flashbulb memories; the cognitive, emotional, social and cultural factors influencing the phenomenological characteristics of flashbulb memories; the relationship between flashbulb memories and event memories; and, lastly, measurement issues in the study of flashbulb memories (Hirst & Phelps, 2015; Luminet & Curci, 2018). The fifth area relates to the neurological correlates of autobiographical memory. This line of investigation encompasses all the research—done using modern neuroimaging techniques (such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography)—which has enabled the areas of the brain used in recalling autobiographical events to be located. Specifically, the subjects at the heart of this field of study include the neural correlates of vivid and emotionally intense autobiographical memories, the neural correlates of recent and remote autobiographical memories, the consolidation of memory traces, and, lastly, the techniques of autobiographical memory elicitation and their effects on neural activity (Cabeza & St. Jacques, 2007; Moscovitch, 2012; St. Jacques, 2012; Suardi et al., 2016; Svoboda et al., 2006). An overall balance sheet of the results of this research highlights that the functioning of the autobiographical memory is linked to the activation of a large number of brain regions and structures such as the prefrontal cortex, the cingulate cortex, the visual cortex, the precuneus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the insula, the anterior thalamus and other even smaller neural sites. It is, I believe, not out of place to note here that these results are to be treated with a certain caution on the grounds of the methodological weaknesses of neuroimaging techniquebased studies. In my opinion, the most significant of these weaknesses relates to the difficulty in enquiring in an in-depth way into the contents

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of the memories recollected by individuals undergoing brain scans. As the speech organs and consequent head movements interfere with neural activity recording, those taking part in neuroimaging studies have no way of verbalising and sharing their memories with the researchers.22 As will be clear to the reader, the search for an exact correspondence between modified subjective experience and modified brain activity is thus an extremely problematical issue for neuroscientists attempting to study the autobiographical memory. The sixth, seventh and eighth research areas deal with themes of great relevance to professional as well as scientific psychology. The sixth area is eyewitness memory. Studies carried out in this context comprise both experimental research and field studies. Participants in the former include those—generally university students—who witnessed crimes which were reproduced in artificial laboratory contexts: this can involve film projections (such as a kidnapping or a physical attack) or the simulation of a real-world event in which there are both experimental subjects and confederates recruited by the researchers for the purposes of acting according to specific instructions (which the former are clearly unaware of ). Those taking part in the field research were, on the other hand, direct witnesses to real-life crimes including, primarily, perpetrators and victims and also all the other people involved, even indirectly, in such events. Despite the considerable distance between these in methodological terms, experimental studies and field studies have explored essentially identical themes. Certain examples of these themes include the effects of stress on memory accuracy, memory for faces, memory for weapons, children’s suggestibility and, lastly, techniques for improving eyewitness testimony (Christianson, 1992b, 2007; Deffenbacher et al., 2004; Eisen et al., 2002; Lindsay et al., 2007; Toglia et al., 2007; Wells et al., 2006). It should be underlined that the results achieved in all of these subject fields can be a significant help for forensic and investigative psychologists or that specific category of psychology professionals which works with the legal and police authorities for the

22Those

taking part can express judgements of a quantitative type on the phenomenological features of their recollections: for example, pressing a button to answer questions such as “On a scale from 0 to 10 how vivid is your recollection? ”

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purposes of assessing the mnestic capacity of the victims, perpetrators and witnesses to crimes punishable with prison sentences. The seventh area enquires into the autobiographical memory alterations associated with psychopathological syndromes such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder and dissociative disorders. The main objective of the research done in this field is, on the one hand, to describe the deficit and anomalies characterising the autobiographical memories of individuals from the clinical population and, on the other, understanding the role these memory alterations play in the onset and development of the psychopathology itself. Specific research themes comprise psychogenic amnesia, false memories, the overgeneral autobiographical memory phenomenon (i.e. difficulties in recalling personal episodes with a specific space and time context) and, lastly, intrusiveness and fragmentation of autobiographical memories for traumatic and stressful experiences (Bedard-Gilligan & Zoellner, 2012; Brewin, 2011; Gleaves et al., 2004; McNally, 2003; Sotgiu & Mormont, 2008; Sotgiu & Rusconi, 2014; Watson & Berntsen, 2015). In the same way as eyewitness research, clinical studies into autobiographical memory have important application implications. These relate to the development of clinical treatments capable of limiting—and in the luckiest cases eliminating—memory disorders and the symptoms of psychological malaise associated with the various syndromes cited above (Ehlers et al., 2004; Neshat-Doost et al., 2013; Raes et al., 2009). The eighth and last area considered here enquires into the autobiographical memory alterations associated with neurological disorders with various causes such as herpesviral encephalitis, post-anoxic encephalopathy, cerebrovascular diseases (like cerebral ischemia or haemorrhage), head injuries, brain tumours, Korsakoff syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. The subjects most studied in this field relate to the various forms of autobiographical amnesia which affect patients suffering from the pathologies listed above (e.g. global amnesia, anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia, hippocampal amnesia, visual memorydeficit amnesia), confabulations, impaired identity and sense of self, and the relationship between episodic and semantic memory (Baddeley & Wilson, 1986; Della Sala et al., 1992; El Haj et al., 2015). As far as the application implications of the studies done in this field are concerned,

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these relate to the predisposition to neuropsychology rehabilitation work designed to preserve and stimulate the residual autobiographical memory capacities of patients with neurological damage (Baird & Samson, 2014; Brindley et al., 2011). Table 2.1 summarises the themes enquired into in each of the eight research areas illustrated in this section in schematic form. I would like to underline that an analytical description of the specific contributions—theoretical, empirical and professional—from the various fields of investigation described is outside the scope of this book. I hope, however, that the contents of this section, together with the (essential) reference bibliography that I cited in the previous pages, may help readers to acquire a general overview of the main approaches taken in contemporary psychology research into the autobiographical memory. A more specific picture may certainly emerge after we have examined the themes at the centre of the next two chapters: Chapter 3—which analyses the content and organisation of autobiographical memory—and Chapter 4—which deals with its functions. Further consideration and assessment of the state of the psychology of autobiographical memory art will thus have to wait until Chapter 5, the book’s last.

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Table 2.1 Main research areas and themes in the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory Research areas

Themes

1. Basic functioning of autobiographical memory

– Content, organisation and functions of autobiographical memory – Accuracy and phenomenological qualities of autobiographical memories – Language and self-narrative – Mental rumination and social sharing of autobiographical memories – Traumatic and emotional autobiographical memory – Effects of culture on autobiographical memory – Childhood amnesia – Effects of parental reminiscence style on the coherence and organisation of autobiographical memories – Relationship between the development of narrative abilities and the process of identity construction – Reminiscence bump – Frequency of involuntary autobiographical memories – Factors affecting the occurrence of involuntary autobiographical memories – Similarities and differences between involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories – Similarities and differences between involuntary autobiographical memories and episodic simulations of future events

2. Ontogenetic development of autobiographical memory

3. Involuntary autobiographical memories

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Research areas

Themes

4. Flashbulb memories

– Psychological mechanisms underlying the formation and maintenance of flashbulb memories – Accuracy of flashbulb memories – Cognitive, emotional, social and cultural factors influencing the phenomenological characteristics of flashbulb memories – Relationship between flashbulb memories and event memories – Measurement issues in the study of flashbulb memories – Neural correlates of vivid and emotionally intense autobiographical memories – Neural correlates of recent and remote autobiographical memories – Consolidation of memory traces – Techniques of autobiographical memory elicitation and their effects on neural activity – Effects of stress on memory accuracy – Memory for faces – Memory for weapons – Children’s suggestibility – Techniques for improving eyewitness testimony – Psychogenic amnesia – False memories – Overgeneral autobiographical memory – Intrusiveness and fragmentation of autobiographical memories for traumatic and stressful experiences

5. Neural correlates of autobiographical memory

6. Eyewitness memory

7. Autobiographical memory alterations associated with psychopathological syndromes

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Research areas

Themes

8. Autobiographical memory alterations associated with neurological disorders

– – – –

Amnestic syndromes Confabulations Impaired identity and sense of self Relationship between episodic and semantic memory

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3 The Content and Organisation of Autobiographical Memory

The objective of this chapter is to offer readers a review of the main theoretical approaches to have analysed the content of autobiographical memory (the mental representations of events constituting a person’s autobiography) and the organisation of autobiographical memory (the psychological processes by which individuals form connections between their various personal memories). As we might imagine, these are themes which bring the human mind’s symbolisation capacities to the forefront. We should, thus, not be surprised by the fact that a considerable proportion of the theories developed in this field fit into the Cognitivism and Cognitive Science spheres, the two great contemporary psychology currents, that is, which have placed an analysis of the cognitive structures—schemas, concepts, categories, mental images and memories, of course—by which the human mind succeeds in representing, storing, processing, organising and interpreting the huge volume of data it is exposed to from the outside world centre-stage in their respective research programmes. Historically speaking, the study of the content and organisation of autobiographical memory began in the mid-1980s and has continued uninterruptedly to today. This has, thus, occupied what, in Chapter 2, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2_3

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I referred to as the “second phase” in the history of the psychology of autobiographical memory which—it may be useful to reiterate here— began in 1976 with the publication of Neisser’s Cognition and Reality. This chapter is split up into four sections. Section 3.1 analyses and discusses the theoretical models which have likened autobiographical memory to a network of mental representations which incorporate distinct segments of the rememberer’s life: lifetime periods (lasting months or years), events or even specific instants in which something specific happened. Section 3.2, on the other hand, deals with the theoretical models which have described individuals’ ability to connect up their autobiographical experiences into a full-blown story, an autobiographical tale (expressed in words or simply thought) with a coherent and intelligible structure. Section 3.3 describes the narrative component of autobiographical memory in depth, together with the techniques used to assess an autobiographical narrative’s organisation and coherence. Section 3.4, lastly, looks at a frequently neglected theme in books on autobiographical memory, one which is of central importance to an understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues to be examined later on, namely the relationship between the autobiographical memory and the autobiographical narrative concepts.

3.1

The Autobiographical Memory Network

Many contemporary scholars concur in conceptualising autobiographical memory as a great information and knowledge network whose inner organisation is hierarchical in nature (Barsalou, 1988; Brown, 2016; Conway, 1996; Linton, 1986; Schooler & Herrmann, 1992). The best-known theoretical model in this field is undoubtedly Martin Conway’s (1996; see also Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), author of the self-memory system model which we examined in Chapter 2 (see Sect. 2.4.1). For Conway (1996), the information present in the autobiographical memory is organised into three distinct and hierarchically organised levels: (1) lifetime periods; (2) general events; (3) event-specific knowledge. The primary difference between these levels relates to the degree

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of abstraction (or specificity) of the autobiographical information within them. Whilst lifetime periods incorporate the more abstract autobiographical information, event-specific knowledge—as is suggested by this organisational level’s name—incorporates information with the maximum degree of specificity. General events are, on the other hand, halfway between the two, less abstract than the lifetime periods, but more so than event-specific knowledge. To better understand the meaning of Conway’s theoretical proposal, I will now describe the main characteristics of the three notions it hinges on in greater detail. Lifetime periods are bound up with experiences generating significant transitions in an individual’s life. They represent a range of information including places, people, activities, plans, beliefs, emotions and so on. Certain examples are “When I attended my philosophy degree course”, “When I was living in London”, “When I was living in that house on 12 Tottenham Court Road”, “When I was going out with Melissa”, “When I worked as a nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital”. As these examples make clear, lifetime periods generally cover a well-defined time span, however varied the actual time frame involved which can, in fact, range from periods lasting several months (e.g. “When I was going out with Melissa”) to periods lasting years or even decades (e.g. “When I was living in London”). Conway (1996) noted that there can be overlaps in time frame terms between the various autobiographical periods: for example, the period “When I lived in that house on 12 Tottenham Court Road” might have overlapped with “When I was going out with Melissa” and the period “when I lived in London”. Lastly, Conway also underlined that clearly distinct lifetime periods in time frame terms can refer to a single higher order autobiographical theme: thus, for example, the “My first marriage” period, the “My second marriage” period and the “My third marriage” period all fit into the family autobiographical theme. The second organisational autobiographical memory level identified by Conway (1996) is what he calls general events, encompassing at least two types of autobiographical events: events occurring just once in an individual’s life, as well as events occurring several times. “The trip to Costa Rica to celebrate my thirtieth wedding anniversary”, “New Year 2004 spent in Paris with Victoria”, “My first date with Samantha”, “The birth of my third child”, “My last day of work before retirement”: these

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are all examples of events which take place only once in an individual’s life (these are also referred to as single events, cf. Barsalou, 1988). On the other hand, “Underground journeys to the university”, “Sundays spent in Caroline’s company”, “End of year dinners with colleagues”, “Swimming training on Wednesday afternoons”, “Mondays at the film club”: these are all examples of events which may be repeated at regular intervals (these are also called repeated or categoric events, see Conway, 2005, p. 608). It is important to underline that, just like the lifetime periods, general events, both repeated and one-off, are frequently bound up with experiences marking significant transitions in an individual’s autobiographical history. An important role in this sense is that played by those events which the person concerned experienced for the first time in his or her life such as: “A first kiss”, “A first university exam”, “A first concert”, “A first holiday without my parents”, “A first day at work” (for more on this see Robinson, 1992). The third level of autobiographical memory organisation included in Conway’s model is event-specific knowledge. With this expression, Conway (1996) refers to the individual details making up a memory of a general event. Consider, for example, the general event “My first date with Elizabeth” (which, in Conway’s distinctions, belongs to the “single” general event category). The event-specific knowledge relating to this specific autobiographical experience can include a large quantity of details which may be highly differentiated but share the fact of referring to distinct and clearly identifiable aspects of the event, such as: “The revolting odour of the waste bin underneath Elizabeth’s house”, “The red colour of the top Elizabeth wore”, “The bitter taste of the tea I drank at the bar”, “The great happiness I felt when we said goodbye and she said she’d like to see me again”. Images, odours, flavours, sounds, tactile sensations, emotions, feelings and states of mind: this is the knowledge of the autobiographical past which has the highest degree of specificity and concreteness and which—as a large volume of studies confirms (Byrne et al., 2001; D’Argembeau et al., 2003; Johnson et al., 1988; Porter & Birt, 2001; Sotgiu, 2016, 2019; Sotgiu & Galati, 2007)—can leave vivid and persistent traces in our memories. Figure 3.1 represents the three autobiographical memory organisation levels included in Conway’s model schematically. It also illustrates

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Fig. 3.1 The content and organisation of autobiographical memory according to the Conway’s model (Adapted with permission from “Autobiographical knowledge and autobiographical memories”, by M. A. Conway, in D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: Studies in autobiographical memory (pp. 67–93), 1996, Cambridge University Press, Copyright 1996 by Cambridge University Press)

certain extremely typical autobiographical memory examples which may help readers to understand the nature of the contents stored at each of Conway’s nested levels. As the examples displayed show, Conway (1996) conceives of autobiographical memory as a network in which each individual nodal point represents a diverse content in an individual’s life story. This network can be activated in various directions. Proceeding top downwards moves us from abstract contents to increasingly specific contents: in Fig. 3.1 the “Engagement to Valentina” lifetime period is linked to “First meeting at the Mythos club” (an event which might, in turn, be linked to specific details such as the “Music was very loud”, “Valentina was smiling”, “I felt totally at ease”). Proceeding from below, on the other hand, moves us progressively from concrete to increasingly abstract contents with the general event “First day at university” associated with lifetime period “Master’s degree studies in New York”.

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In addition to these vertical trajectories, Conway’s model (1996) also allows for horizontal trajectories, namely link-ups between memories whose degree of abstraction is identical or, at any rate, very similar. As can be seen in Fig. 3.1, these horizontal links can, however, be identified solely in two of the three organisation levels in Conway’s model: the general events and event-specific knowledge levels. Conway’s autobiographical memory organisation model has been very well received in the contemporary cognitive psychology panorama as it offers a highly accurate classification and description of the main informational content categories forming autobiographical memory.1 However, criticisms have also been levelled at it, two of which I believe merit special attention. The first of these criticisms relates to the model’s lack of horizontal links between the contents occupying the most abstract level of autobiographical memory organisation: the lifetime periods. As Belli and Al Baghal (2016) have emphasised, Conway neglected a fundamentally important and well-documented fact at the empirical level, too, namely that when people reconstruct their pasts they make direct links between lifetime periods referring to different autobiographical themes (see Barsalou, 1988). Returning to Fig. 3.1 once again, it would thus be legitimate to hypothesise the presence of horizontal trajectories linking up romantic relationships theme lifetime periods with education theme lifetime periods: thus, for example, the “Engagement to Mary” period (relevant to the romantic relationships theme) might link up with the “Undergraduate school in Los Angeles” period (relevant to the education theme). A second criticism of Conway’s model, formulated this time by Berntsen and Rubin (2012), relates to the excessive importance it attaches to the temporal dimension in autobiographical memories. As the examples reported in Fig. 3.1 show, the hierarchical inclusion relationship between the contents making up the model is linked, beyond their different abstraction level, to their different time extension: very broad in the case of lifetime periods, relatively brief in the case of general events

1 Notably,

an extended recent version of Conway’s original model also specifies the types of autobiographical memory knowledge structures involved in planning and imagining the future (see Conway et al., 2019).

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(one-off or repeated) and very brief indeed in the case of event-specific knowledge. For Berntsen and Rubin (2012), whilst time is an important dimension, it may not be the only variable influencing the psychological processes underlying autobiographical memory organisation. In this regard, the two authors focus their attention on a further two factors: space and social relationships. By “space”, Berntsen and Rubin mean environmental and physical contexts in which diverse instants, events and lifetime periods stored in our autobiographical memories are located: some examples of this might be a home, a workplace, a public venue, a landscape, a district, a town and a region of a given country. The expression “social relationships”, on the other hand, indicates the whole of people present in our autobiographical memories and the role these play in the scenes recalled: for example, my father showing affection to my mother, a friend telling me off for something I’ve done wrong, an unknown person behaving threateningly to a colleague of mine, my partner claiming my attention. For Berntsen and Rubin (2012), space and social relationships play no less important a role in influencing the process by which our autobiographical memories are organised and structured. In particular, they hypothesise that autobiographical memory is to be considered a flexible and dynamic knowledge system whose organisation varies continually in accordance with the role the three factors described—time, space, social relationships—play in a specific re-evocation context. In other words, the way an individual organises his or her autobiographical past is not always the same: there are contexts in which a spatial type organisation might be chosen and others in which a relationship or time-based organisation might be preferred. It is important to stress that this way of conceptualising the autobiographical memory organisation process leads to a radical revision of theoretical models like Conway’s (1996). For example, in Berntsen and Rubin’s (2012) theoretical perspective, a diagram like Fig. 3.1 can in no way represent a “universal” model of autobiographical memory organisation applicable, that is, to all individuals and the situations in which they remember their lives. This diagram rather expresses just one of the great many organisations that a specific individual’s autobiographical memory might adopt in a specific re-evocation context.

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3.2

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Life Stories

Conway’s model (1996; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000)—together with other contemporary models resting on similar assumptions (e.g. Barsalou, 1988; Brown, 2016)—is based on a structural conception of autobiographical memory. It likens lifetime periods, general events and event-specific knowledge to full-blown cognitive structures, that is mental schemas and representations which incorporate the knowledge individuals elaborate on their pasts. It is worth noting that whilst theories such as Conway’s have certainly made an important contribution to the analysis of the psychological processes by which individuals recollect individual portions of their autobiographical stories (from emotional sensations lasting just a few seconds to lifetime periods lasting years or even decades), these theories have not, however, paid sufficient attention to how people remember the overall fabric of the individual portions of their autobiographical pasts: their life stories. Unfortunately, the life story concept has come to psychologists working in autobiographical memory’s attention only in the last two decades. Susan Bluck and Tilmann Habermas are the psychologists who have made the most significant contribution to this field (see, in particular, Bluck & Habermas, 2000, 2001; Habermas, 2012; Habermas & Bluck, 2000). For these two researchers, it is the expression “life story” which best channels the adjective “autobiographical” in the expression “autobiographical memory”, which is so frequent in contemporary psychology literature (see Chapter 2, Sect. 2.4). Etymologically speaking, autobiography means “writing one’s life” and thus, in the widest sense, a story, tale, narrative or description of an individual’s experiences (the autobiography’s author) throughout his or her life. For Bluck and Habermas (2000), defining the life story concept adequately means first and foremost describing the cognitive and emotional processes with which people organise their autobiographies. In this respect, they stress that autobiographical memory is a representation and elaboration system which acts in a highly selective way. Whilst the number of experiences taking place over the course of an individual’s life is undoubtedly extremely large, only a small proportion of these has

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the potential to carve out a fixed space for itself within this person’s life story. For Bluck and Habermas, the individual’s autobiography—or life story—is thus absolutely not the whole range of the latter’s experience. A life story, they argue, is rather to be considered the whole of the mental representations relating to a select and, all things considered limited, group of autobiographical experiences. It is thus a synthesis of a person’s past, a reasoned synthesis, as we will shortly see. Readers will now be interested in finding out what criteria people use, consciously or unconsciously, in selecting the experiences to include in their personal autobiographical syntheses. For Bluck and Habermas (2000), an autobiographical experience’s chances of becoming part of an individual’s life story depend on two main factors which will be analysed here. The first is the personal relevance of the experience. The subjectively most relevant experiences—i.e. those to which individuals attribute intrinsic significant value—have greater chances of contributing to their life stories than other, less relevant experiences on the personal plane. This would seem to be fairly intuitive even if, as Bluck and Habermas (2000) have observed, the greater availability of an experience in the memory is frequently attributed to the subjective characteristics of the recollection (e.g. vividness, quality, sensory details, emotional intensity) rather than the salience of the experience for the individual remembering it. The second factor impacting on a personal event’s chances of becoming an integral part of an individual’s story is a matter of the contribution an event can make to the construction of an autobiographical story which, while not necessarily narrated to other people, is mentally well-organised all the same. In this respect, Bluck and Habermas (2000) suggested shifting to a life story coherence concept. This term refers to the whole of mental processes which enable individuals to connect up a multiplicity of frequently diverse personal experiences into a well-structured—or coherent—story. Bluck and Habermas (2000, 2001) categorise life story coherence into four distinct types whose main characteristics we will now examine in detail.

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Temporal coherence can be defined as an individual’s capacity to place life events in a time frame, attributing a clear and well-defined order and sequence to them. For example, the more an adult is capable of reconstructing and retracing his or her life experiences chronologically, the more coherent the resulting life story will be: beginning in childhood, continuing through adolescence and youth and concluding in adulthood. Cultural coherence, on the other hand, is bound up with the idea according to which the people living in a certain cultural context have a shared understanding of the significance to be accorded to autobiographical events within the culture they live in and make use of this in organising their life stories. Thus, for example, an Italian’s life story comprising high school diploma, a first job, marriage and retirement can be seen as culturally coherent as these are the events making up the biographies of a large number of people living in Italy. Naturally, it is important to bear in mind that not all autobiographical stories in a single cultural context comprise the same standardised events. Whilst many Italians are married, for example, some are not and thus marriage will not have a specific place in the autobiographies of these latter. As regards this specific example and in line with Bluck and Habermas (2000, 2001) arguments, it is, however, reasonable to assume that the unmarried will, just like the married, be able to construct a life story which is coherent with the cultural context they live in (Italian in this case). For example, they may accord significant space to not being married in representing the most significant stages in their life stories, reflecting and reasoning around the reasons they did not marry. In other words, the simple fact of remembering (or, in the case of another person’s story being told, narrating) a fact that never happened (in this case marriage) is a way of reiterating its cultural salience. A third type of coherence identified by Bluck and Habermas (2000, 2001) is thematic coherence. This can be defined as individuals’ capacity to represent diverse periods and events in their lives with reference to a single theme. As Bluck and Habermas have noted, this form of coherence frequently prompts people to attempt brief statements which effectively sum up the personal significance of the events and periods in their lives. For these two scholars, this synthesis is generally a matter of metaphors (“My life has been an obstacle course”), psychological truths (“I consider

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myself an honest person”) and life lessons (“I’ve learnt that if you want to achieve something in life you have to work hard”). Causal coherence, lastly, indicates individuals’ capacity to identify cause-effect relationships between the most significant events in their lives. For Bluck and Habermas (2000, 2001), this type of coherence is probably the most important in the construction of a coherent autobiographical story. It is on the strength of this, in fact, that people can experience the feelings of direction and self-continuity which are the characteristics of any autobiographical story.2 The following example, the story of an imaginary individual called Jason, can better clarify the causal coherence concept. Let us imagine that Jason graduated in medicine after devoting a grand total of eight years of his life to the achievement of this objective, but that he ultimately decided to open a restaurant and make this his main occupation. It is his current job. If Jason’s story was simply these two events (his degree in medicine and his restaurant occupation), without no further detail on his choices, it would certainly be incoherent both for Jason and anyone hearing his story. What relationship is there between medical studies and working professionally in the restaurant business? Undoubtedly none. Jason’s story might, however, gain significantly in coherence if Jason himself were to identify and express the motives behind his decision to open a restaurant and make this his profession. For example, in reasoning around his existential story, Jason might add the following: “I decided to go into the restaurant business after I started dating Kelly, who was already working in this sector as I wanted to share everything, absolutely everything, with her: both emotional and professional lives”. With this additional information on Jason’s life choices, the changes in his circumstances certainly seem easier to understand and his autobiographical story more coherent, both for Jason himself and anyone hearing or reading his story. Table 3.1 summarises Bluck and Habermas (2000, 2001) definitions of their four types of life story coherence. It should be stressed that the ability to depict and narrate one’s own coherent autobiographical story to other people—in time, cultural, thematic and causal terms—depends 2 For

more in-depth study of the self-continuity concept, see the third section of Chapter 4.

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Table 3.1 Types of coherence and their definitions according to the Bluck and Habermas model of life story Type of coherence

Definition

Temporal coherence

The individual is able to situate his or her personal experiences in time, thus constructing a chronologically ordered life story The individual is able to use internalised and socially shared cultural norms concerning what are appropriate personal experiences for inclusion in a life story The individual is able to identify a set of core themes which best describe the organisation and structure of his or her life story The individual is able to link his or her personal experiences in terms of causes or explanations

Cultural coherence

Thematic coherence

Causal coherence

only minimally on contextual type factors (when and where an autobiographical narration takes place, how the narrative is generated, who is with us at the time of the narration, etc.). For Bluck and Habermas (2000), the coherence of an autobiographical story is rather to be traced to an individual having a mental device which achieves full structure only at the end of adolescence and which these two scholars call the life story schema. In the same way as other schemas characterising the functioning of the human psyche (see Bartlett, 1932; Brewer & Nakamura, 1984; Rumelhart, 1980), the life story schema can be defined a mental representation—thoroughgoing, highly organised and generally stable— encompassing a large volume of information stored in individuals’ long-term autobiographical memories. There are many everyday life situations and contexts in which we activate and use our life story schema such as, for example, on a first date with a potential partner we want to tell our childhood to, when we are writing our CVs or when taking part in scientific research in which we have to sum up the most significant experiences in our teenage years in two pages. It is important to stress that when we access our life story schemas the information represented in them is temporarily transferred from our long-term autobiographical memory to the short-term (or, more precisely, “working”) autobiographical memory. Here this information may be partially reworked and

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adapted to suit the context in which we remember it and our objectives at the time (e.g. making an impression on someone or getting a job at an important firm or responding accurately to a researcher’s autobiographical memory survey questions). For Bluck and Habermas (2000), it is reasonable to assume that certain parts of the life story schema may be modified and adapted by repeated access to the schema itself and its reactivation in the working autobiographical memory. As these two scholars have observed, such changes are marginal, however, and do not affect the overall organisation of the schemas developed by individuals during their lives.

3.3

The Narrative Organisation of Autobiographical Memory

“We seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative” (Bruner, 1987, p. 12). In these words—taken from the article Life as Narrative—the great American psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915–2016), considered one of the principal exponents in the so-called Cultural Psychology movement (as well as one of Cognitivism’s founders), introduced a central theme in studies on the processes by which the autobiographical memory is organised and thus on the narrative organisation of personal memories. For Bruner, understanding how people remember their lives—“lived time”—involves first and foremost analysing the way they construct and organise their autobiographical story narratives. Drawing on disciplines such as linguistics and literary theory—and, in particular, insights from scholars of the calibre of William Labov (1927–), Vladimir Propp (1895– 1970), Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Tzvetan Todorov (1939– 2017)—Bruner (1986, 1987, 1991) developed a theoretical model whose objective is to describe the whole of the psychological and socio-cultural processes underlying the construction of a narrative text. On the basis of this model—which offers equally valuable insights into the psychological and socio-cultural processes underlying the understanding of a tale—narratives can feature the following ten properties (see Bruner, 1991):

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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narrative diachronicity, particularity, intentional state entailment, hermeneutic componibility, canonicity and breach, referentiality, genericness, normativeness, context sensitivity and negotiability, narrative accrual.

Table 3.2 contains a detailed description of each of the ten properties identified by Bruner, a description I would recommend to readers wanting to study this further. What I would like to underline here is that whilst Bruner’s model would seem to be especially useful in describing the construction and organisation of narrative texts of a literary type— namely real or imaginary stories written by professional writers—it would, on the other hand, appear less suitable to describing the construction and organisation of the autobiographical tales told by ordinary people. Whilst encompassing the specific properties identified by Bruner in certain cases, these are generally less structured and complex than literary work written by professional writers in many aspects: content, grammar, syntax and vocabulary terms. And it may be precisely for this reason that the contemporary theoretical models describing the organisation of ordinary people’s autobiographical narratives refer to far fewer characteristics than those identified by Bruner. For illustrative purposes, I will focus my attention here on two of these theoretical models. The first model was developed in the late 1990s by Baerger and McAdams (1999) and its roots are to be found in the personality psychology. The second model is more recent. It was developed a decade or so ago by Reese et al. (2011) and is anchored in theoretical approaches and empirical research enquiring into the development of cognitive and emotional processes across the lifespan. It is important to underline that, despite having been elaborated in diverse psychological domains, both Baerger and McAdams and Reese et al.’s models focus on narrative coherence in autobiographical texts, a concept which, the lack of a

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Table 3.2 Main features of narratives according to Bruner Feature

Brief description

Narrative diachronicity

The events included in a narrative follow a diachronic order A narrative includes references to particular happenings The characters of a narrative act on the basis of their intentional states (e.g. beliefs, desires, theories, values) There is a mutual relationship between the constituent parts of a narrative and the narrative as a whole Typically, a narrative is about a “precipitating event”, namely an event violating socially shared norms, rules and beliefs Events, places and people described in a narrative draw inspiration from events, places and people belonging to the real life. Nonetheless, there are also profound differences between the former and the latter Each narrative can be linked to a “narrative genre”, namely a conventional way of narrating human plights (e.g. tragedy, comedy, farce, satire) A narrative is normative in nature. This is because narratives are concerned with breach of conventional expectations A narrative is context dependent. This means that its content and organisation vary as a function of a range of contextual factors. They include: (1) the narrator’s intentions, (2) the listeners’ background knowledge, (3) the processes of meaning making that take place between the narrator and his or her listeners Personal narratives assemble into a superordinate symbolic system, which is social in nature. This system is variously called culture, history or tradition

Particularity Intentional state entailment

Hermeneutic componibility

Canonicity and breach

Referentiality

Genericness

Normativeness

Context sensitivity and negotiability

Narrative accrual

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shared theoretical and operational definition notwithstanding (see Adler et al., 2018), would seem to be of central importance to studying the organisation and structure of autobiographical memories. This concept is also entirely comparable with the concept which introduced this section: “narrative organisation of autobiographical memory”. Let us now examine the assumptions underlying the models cited in detail. Baerger and McAdams’s (1999) model was designed to describe the narrative coherence of autobiographical stories potentially spanning the whole of an individual’s life and which can thus take the form of texts of a certain breadth and complexity. According to the proponents of this model, the narrative coherence of an autobiographical story can vary in four main dimensions. The first dimension, called orientation, indicates the degree to which an autobiographical story contains references to the context in which the events in the narrative took place: for example, the dates and places in which the events happened, whether people other than the individual whose autobiography it is were present, a description of the role played by these and other, even more specific circumstances. This model hypothesises that the greater the presence in the text of contents of this sort, the more the autobiographical story will be coherent in narrative terms. By contrast, the fewer details of this sort are present, the more incoherent the narrative will be. The second dimension included in Baerger and McAdams’s model has been named structure and indicates the way in which the events narrated by the rememberer link up with each other. In particular, the model hypothesises that the more the events narrated follow a time sequence and a well-defined logical-causal order, the more the resulting autobiographical story will be narratively coherent. By contrast, events presented in a non-sequential and illogical way will generate a relatively or totally incoherent narrative. The third dimension, called affect, relates to the presence in the reference text of emotions, feelings and mood states felt by the narrator and the other people playing some role in the story. In the same way as the previous dimensions, the model assumes that the more the narrative text contains affective assessments the more coherent it will be and, vice versa, the fewer such assessments are present the lower the autobiographical story’s narrative coherence will be. The fourth and last

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dimension is integration. By this expression Baerger and McAdams indicate the degree to which the various parts of an autobiographical story join up into an integrated story, namely a narrative bearing a meaningpacked message intelligible to the people it is directed at (the so-called narratees). Specifically, Baerger and McAdams hypothesise that the more a story is capable of resolving the ambiguities, discrepancies and contradictions present within it the higher its narrative coherence level and, vice versa, the more ambiguities, discrepancies and contradictions there are the lower its narrative coherence level will be. Baerger and McAdams have also underlined that stories with a high integration level are those from which information on the identity and personality characteristics of the rememberer will be easier to bring out. Moving onto Reese et al.’s (2011) narrative coherence model, this differs from Baerger and McAdams’s model in taking as its object of analysis tales referring to individual autobiographical episodes rather than the rememberer’s entire life story. However—in an entirely similar way to Baerger and McAdams—Reese et al. define narrative coherence as a multi-faceted concept which can be subdivided into certain dimensions, specifically, three. The first is what they call context and indicates the degree to which the narrative supplies information which enables the space and time of the episode narrated to be localised. The second, called chronology, on the other hand, indicates the degree to which the facts narrated are presented, following a time frame which is understandable to those listening to or reading the narrative. Lastly, the third dimension, called theme, relates to the convergence between the various parts of the tale on a single theme and the presence in its text of causal connections which link up these parts. It will be clear that these three dimensions are very similar to those included in Baerger and McAdams’s model: whilst the context dimension refers exclusively to the spatial and time dimensions mentioned in the autobiographical tale, it overlaps with the dimension Baerger and McAdams call orientation; the chronology dimension, on the other hand, has clear similarities with the structure dimension and comparable similarities can also be detected between the theme and integration dimensions. Lastly, there is also an important similarity between the two approaches considered here as regards the fact that Reese et al. interpret the three dimensions included in their model

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as continua: in this respect they hypothesise that the more a narrative is centred on a precise theme and encompasses specific references to the event’s context and chronological evolution, the higher its narrative coherence level will be. By contrast, a narrative in which these characteristics are present to a limited degree will be associated with low narrative coherence levels. Both Baerger and McAdams (1999) and Reese et al. (2011) used their theoretical models to construct textual coding systems by which to empirically assess the coherence of the autobiographical narratives of ordinary people in both oral (e.g. an interview) and written (e.g. an openended questionnaire) forms. Both Baerger and McAdams and Reese et al.’s coding systems require autobiographical text assessment to take place by according scores to each of the narrative coherence dimensions encompassed by their respective theoretical models (orientation, structure, affect and integration in Baerger and McAdams; context, chronology and theme in Reese et al.). Generally, at least two researchers are tasked with according these scores and these must follow the following procedure: in a first phase, they assess the narrative individually, naturally using the same rating scale, and assigning scores which they consider best suited to the individual narrative coherence dimensions considered; in a second phase, the researchers compare the scores assigned, identifying discordant ones and launching a debate designed to understand the reasons behind the differences in their subjective assessments; lastly, they formulate a shared assessment agreeing a score which best represents the narrative coherence aspect they previously disagreed over. The coding systems developed by Baerger and McAdams (1999) and Reese et al. (2011) have been used to analyse the coherence of autobiographical narratives provided by different age groups and relating to personal experiences which differ considerably in terms of their emotional valence, in the amount of time which has passed since the original experience took place and the relevance it had to the individual’s life story (on this, see empirical studies by Adler et al., 2007, 2018; Fivush et al., 2012; Grysman, 2018; Mitchell et al., 2020; Reese et al., 2017; Vanderveren et al., 2019; Waters et al., 2013; Waters & Fivush, 2015; Weststrate et al., 2018).

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In recent research (Sotgiu, 2019), I used Reese et al.’s (2011) coding system to assess the coherence of 186 narratives of happy autobiographical experiences. Specifically, the research took into considerations narratives of eudaimonic happy events, a specific type of positive events which people experience when they pursue objectives and devote themselves to activities which offer them the chance to express and realise their potential and talents (see Sotgiu, 2013, 2016). This Italian study’s sample was made up of 88 men and 98 women aged between 18 and 45. Participants were given the following instructions: Try to recall a happy event in your life that was an important and meaningful experience for you. It could be a situation where you had the feeling to express your potentials and your skills, or an event in which you accomplished something you strongly believed in, or an episode where you had the feeling of being truly yourself. Please, describe in your own words this event as you remember it now. (Sotgiu, 2019, p. 1464)

Analysing the content of the narratives supplied in response to these instructions demonstrated that the memories reported by participants could be subdivided into a large number of categories. Of these, those reported with the greatest frequency were the following: school achievements, work experiences, childbirth, experiences of autonomy, sporting achievements, romantic experiences and marriage. Box 3.1 shows the complete text of two narratives which have been chosen specially to demonstrate how the narrative coherence of autobiographical memories can vary significantly. Box 3.1: Examples of happy autobiographical memory narratives High coherence “When thinking of a happy event (leaving aside my diploma, degrees and so on), I remember a specific day. I was 6–7 years old. It was a summer day, like so many others. I was in the courtyard with my friends. My mom was seated together with my friends’ mothers and they were

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keeping an eye on us. Then, my dad came home from work. He was holding a pack of basketball stickers as a gift for me. I finished playing, took a shower, and then I started attaching the stickers. My mom was making pizza in the kitchen. My dad was helping her. We started eating pizza and then put the TV on the terrace. Three chairs. The national soccer team was playing in the World Cup. I sat between my mom and my dad. I remember this event as an extremely significant one for me. Normality is a gift. It is a family ritual of a lost time that, perhaps, will return, but in a new family context. It is the normal that makes you cared for and loved. It is the normal that becomes special—special perhaps, or certainly, because it cannot come back. However, still as hopeful as a child, I always think about that day if I want to remember happiness. Maybe it was a Wednesday, an anonymous midsummer Wednesday”. Low coherence “The happy event that I want to tell is a job event that made me feel important. I managed to do one thing in my job that most people can’t do. There were many other ways to do the same thing, but they were time-consuming and potentially subject to errors. I felt fulfillment”.

The first narrative was provided by a 31-year-old man and describes a childhood memory whose central characters are himself and both his parents (and thus categorised under family events). As we can see from a reading of the text, the narrative shows a high level of coherence in relation to each of the three dimensions evaluated by Reese et al.’s (2011) coding system: the individual concerned reports certain details which enable its context to be identified fairly precisely (“I was 6–7 years old”, “It was a summer day”, “I was in the courtyard with my friends”, “The national soccer team was playing in the World Cup”). Additionally, the various facts making up the narrative are in chronological order (“I finished playing, took a shower, and then I started attacking the stickers”, “We started eating pizza and then put the TV on the terrace”). Causal links between the various parts of the narrative are also detectable and lastly, in the final part of the narrative—what linguists call the coda of the narrative—there are personal considerations which cast additional

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light on the meaning of the event narrated for the person remembering it (“Still as hopeful as a child, I always think about that day if I want to remember happiness”) and this type of personal considerations—once again according to Reese et al.’s coding system—contributes to increasing the thematic coherence of an autobiographical narrative significantly. The second narrative shown in Box 3.1 is a 23-year-old woman’s and describes an autobiographical memory relating to a work-related experience. An analysis of this text, once again using Reese et al.’s system (2011), leads to very different conclusions from that achieved in the first of Box 3.1’s narratives. First of all, the narrator supplies no information whatsoever (either generic or specific) relating to when and where the episode originally took place. Moreover, as the narrative comprises an extremely limited number of sentences, it is difficult to trace a sequence of events over time or causal links between the various elements in the narrative. Overall, the text’s narrative coherence level is very low in relation to each of the three dimensions in Reese et al.’s model: context, chronology and theme.

3.4

The Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Autobiographical Narrative

The theme at the heart of the previous section—the narrative organisation of autobiographical memory—brings to the fore a delicate theoretical issue, the relationship between autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative. Italian psychologist Andrea Smorti, together with some of his research team, recently took on this issue in a series of interesting contributions which are both theoretical (Smorti, 2011, 2020; Smorti & Fioretti, 2016) and empirical (Elmi et al., 2019)— and whose main objective was responding to the following question: do the autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative concepts relate to the same or two different psychological processes? Smorti’s answer to this question can be summed up as follows: the autobiographical

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memory concept and the autobiographical narrative concept refer to different psychological processes but the link between the two is a very strong one. Let us now look in detail at the arguments shoring up this answer, an answer which is clearly much more complex than this summary makes it appear. For Smorti (2011, 2020), the main difference between autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative relates to what we might call their “physical” location. Autobiographical memory is an internal process comprising thoughts, mental representations, subjective assessments, interpretations and judgements which individuals formulate around their pasts. Autobiographical narrative, on the other hand, is an external process comprising the words, sentences and speech which individuals make use of to describe (in spoken or written words) the events in their pasts. According to Smorti, whilst these have different “locations”, the two are to be conceived of as open systems in constant dialogue with each other. This dialogue can be expressed as a recursive process taking place in two phases: A first phase is when memory is narrated. The memory is then externalized in the narrative. In a second phase, after the memory has been narrated, it becomes an object of interiorization and returns to being a memory. But when you have to recall this memory, it will no longer be the same, because it has gone through the first phase in which it was told and the second in which it was internalized. Moreover, as this two-step process can be repeated many times (in fact we can go back and tell that memory again), the memory ends up containing not only the encoding of the original event but all the operations of rehearsal mnestic (every time we remember that event) and narrative (every time we tell the memory of that event within a given situation). (Smorti, 2020, p. 77)

The schema displayed in Fig. 3.2 shows the autobiographical memory externalisation and internalisation processes described in this excerpt. In it these processes are depicted as elements in a complex sequence of events—both internal and external—which can be repeated many times. In line with the arguments of various contemporary memory scholars (Brockmeier, 2015; Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012; Pasupathi, 2001; Skowronski & Walker, 2004), it is also important to underline that the interaction processes underway between autobiographical narrations and

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Fig. 3.2 The alternate encapsulation of autobiographical memories and autobiographical narratives according to the Smorti’s model (Reprinted with permission from “Why narrating changes memory: a contribution to an integrative model of memory and narrative processes”, by A. Smorti and C. Fioretti, 2016, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50, pp. 296–319. Copyright 2016 by Springer Nature)

memories occur within well-defined relationship contexts which have, in turn, the ability to influence the way individuals assess, interpret and reconstruct their pasts. Returning once again to Smorti’s (2020) words: With the translation of the narration into memory, the narrator becomes able to look at his memories from different points of view, precisely because they have been told to a narratee, who, even just by listening to him, induces him to consider his memories with new points of view that have emerged in that specific relational situation. (p. 77)

We can further clarify Smorti’s words with an example. Let us imagine wanting to recount an event from our lives—perhaps a recent work trip to Paris—to two different people, a partner and a colleague (each met at different times and places). It is not difficult to imagine that this dialogue would be taking place in two totally different conversational contexts. If I have an especially jealous partner, for example, my narrative might be interrupted constantly by his or her questions designed to find out how I spent my free time, who was with me at these times and, above all, what gender they were. On the other hand, if my colleague had just returned from a similar trip to Paris—and thus for work too—then my narrative might be met with boredom or indifference, with the result that I may

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not receive any questions at all designed to find out more about my trip to the stylish French capital. Coherently with the theoretical schema shown in Fig. 3.2, it is reasonable to hypothesise that both the verbal interaction contexts described above might have a significant impact on the organisation of my personal memories of the trip to Paris. The constant signs of jealousy shown by my partner might make certain aspects of the trip salient: my leisure time in which I had fun with other, potentially attractive, people. As far as the narrative dialogue with my colleague is concerned, the disinterest and limited responsiveness of the latter might lead me to believe that the trip to Paris was, at the end of the day, just an everyday event and thus not worthy of a special place in my autobiographical story. To sum up, whether because of my partner’s jealousy or my colleague’s lack of interest, my personal memories of the trip to Paris might undergo significant changes as a result of their very different reactions. And that’s not all. The transformations in my autobiographical memories might be even more evident if conversations on my past simultaneously involved multiple listeners rather than one (for more on this, see Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012). Further insights into the relationship between the autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative concepts come from the clinical neuropsychology field and a classic by famous Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria (1902–1977) in particular: The Man With a Shattered World. The History of a Brain Wound . In this book, Luria (1971/1987) analyses the case of Lev Zasetsky, a young Russian soldier who was injured during World War II by a bullet which penetrated the left side of his skull, causing severe damage to the left occipito-parietal regions of his brain. Luria himself worked with this patient for a grand total of 26 years, a very rare observation and rehabilitation period indeed in the neuropsychology literature on individual cases.3 When Luria met Zasetsky for the first time, in May 1943, it was just three months after the shooting and the now former soldier’s intellectual 3 And

not only in neuropsychology, as not even Freud followed patients for such a lengthy time frame (see Sacks, 1987).

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functioning was very worrying: he could not read nor write, do even simple arithmetic or distinguish his left from his right, all things he was able to do before being wounded. In the course of this first meeting, Luria invited Zasetsky to talk about his arrival at the front (orally obviously). The following excerpt from Luria’s book contains a transcription of Zasetsky’s autobiographical narrative. By then … we were … were in a bad way. Had to retreat … would lose everything. So I decided that, that … if that’s the way things were … I was told to … how many? Five. … But then I was out of the hospital and, and … then … the attack. I clearly remember it … for then, then …then I was wounded. … That’s all. (Luria, 1971/1987, p. 19)

As can be seen here, Zasetsky was capable of narrating various events related to his wounding: his arrival at the front, his training, the enemy’s attack. However, his subjective perception of these memories (“I clearly remember it”) is entirely incompatible with both the organisation of his self-narrative, which is excessively fragmented, and its contents, which are lacking in detail and thus uninformative. Why was Zasetsky not able to generate an organised, coherent, detailed and intelligible autobiographical narrative? It took some time to understand why. In the months following on from his first meeting with Luria, Zasetsky underwent lengthy rehabilitation thanks to which he managed to reacquire the capacity to read and write over about one year. Naturally it was a slow, partial and very difficult recovery. Both writing and reading caused Zasetsky a great deal of stress: cognitive, emotional and physical. Despite this, Luria recounts that, shortly before the end of World War II, Zasetsky decided to take on a mammoth task which was to keep this former soldier occupied for the subsequent 25 years of his life: writing the story of his condition. He worked industriously at what we might call his narrative task which produced over 3000 pages of text. This is the material Luria used to describe Zasetsky’s intellectual functioning and emotional life after his terrible war injury. It was precisely on the strength of his analysis of this material that Luria came to the conclusion that his patient’s autobiographical memory had not been lost. Zasetsky was capable of clearly and

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precisely recollecting a great many of his life’s events and periods both prior to his head injury (such as episodes from his childhood and his elementary school years) and subsequent to it (e.g. his long convalescence in various hospitals and care homes). Despite this, Zasetsky showed great difficulties in organising his life memories into a structured, coherent, clear and intelligible narrative. The next excerpt, also taken from The Man With a Shattered World. The History of a Brain Wound, comes from Zasetsky’s autobiographical story, large portions of which were reproduced in Luria’s work (1971/1987). This excerpt is especially significant in that Zasetsky, in addition to describing the methodology he followed in composing the story of his illness, also explains in due detail the difficulties he encountered as he wrote, the nature of his memory problems and the impact this had on his emotional well-being. I set to work writing. I decided to devote parts of the journal to the periods I spent in different hospitals. At first these were the only facts I had. I tried to remember whatever I could with that battered memory of mine and write it as a true story, just as a writer would. But when I started, I realized I’d never be able to do that since I didn’t have enough of a vocabulary or mind left to write well. I’d get a faint idea of how to describe the beginning of the attack I was in but couldn’t remember the words I needed to do it. I’d try to dig these up from my mind but I’d spend ages hunting for the right words. I had to remember and turn up words that were at least fairly similar or close enough to what I wanted to say. But after I’d put together these second choices, I still wasn’t able to start writing until I figured out how to compose a sentence. I’d go over each sentence again and again in my mind until it seemed like a sentence I’d heard or read in an ordinary book. But it was so hard to write. I’d get an idea of how to describe the moment I was wounded and the period right afterwards, when my illness began. At last I’d turned up a good idea. So I began to hunt for words to describe it and finally I thought up two. But by the time I got to the third word, I was stuck. I’d rack my brain trying to remember. Hold on, I’d think, I’ve got it. But before I could manage to write it down, it was gone, along with the other two words I’d had such a hard time remembering. I’d try to dig up another idea and find suitable words for it, and I’d write these down on various scraps of paper before including them in my writing—I’d try to clamp the words to the idea as much as I

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could. But what a torture it was. I’d always forget what I wanted to write, what I had just been thinking of the minute before. Minutes would pass and I wouldn’t be able to remember how far I’d gotten. (pp. 78–80)

As emerges from this excerpt, Zasetsky’s mnestic problems were not a matter of accessing the contents of his autobiographical past.4 What was seriously compromised was his capacity to externalise his memories. Zasetsky was not capable of translating the mnestic images from his past into an organised narrative text (written or spoken). This was the real reason for his suffering and frustration: he could not communicate his personal memories, his life story, to others. Why did Zasetsky’s autobiographical memory remain intact while his ability to construct a coherent autobiographical narrative was so seriously compromised? Unfortunately, Luria did not answer this question. All the same, it is possible that we might be able to explain the damage to Zasetsky’s narrative abilities on the basis of our current theoretical and empirical knowledge of human memory. It would seem to me reasonable to hypothesise that the “narrative” problems reported by Zasetsky might have been attributable to a malfunctioning of his working memory and, that is, to that system whose task it is to actively process the information available in the short-term memory: images, concepts, words, sentences (Baddeley, 1986, 2012). Recently, Coon and Mitterer (2016) paralleled the working memory to a “mental scratchpad”, an ideal metaphor for its role: constructing temporary images of objects and people, comprising written and spoken texts, reasoning and resolving problems, making calculations, deciding, learning. Returning to Zasetsky’s narrative deficit, we might thus hypothesise that his mental scratchpad was partially or entirely defective and thus that he struggled to retain and organise the thoughts which would have enabled him to shape the events of his autobiographical past into a coherent narrative in the here and now. In addition to the considerations made, the hypothesis according to which Zasetsky suffered from a working memory deficit may be 4 In

a subsequent section of the book, Luria (1971/1987) commented thus on the phenomenological qualities of Zasetsky’s autobiographical memories: “Images of his past emerged clearly and in great detail, which is why he managed to write this journal” (p. 97).

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supported by an analysis of the neurological damage he suffered. As we have seen, Zasetsky suffered damage to his left occipito-parietal cortex, an area which contemporary neuropsychology research has shown to play a significant part in working memory tasks (see Baddeley et al., 2009). On the other hand, the neurological damage suffered by Zasetsky left intact those cerebral regions and structures which shore up the longterm autobiographical memory function such as: the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus complex, the amygdala and the thalamus nuclei (St. Jacques, 2012; Suardi et al., 2016; Svoboda et al., 2006). This observation further shores up our hypothesis on Zasetsky’s memory deficit: his problems related to the working memory system. In conclusion, the interpretation of the Zasetsky case offered here would appear to be entirely in line with Smorti’s (2011, 2020) hypothesis on the need to distinguish between the autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative concepts. As compared to Smorti’s analysis, my interpretation encompasses additional hypotheses with which to describe and explain the close bond between these two concepts and processes (a bond also cited by Smorti). These hypotheses examine the functions performed by the working memory and the possible involvement of this memory system in the process consisting in the transformation of autobiographical memories into autobiographical narratives.

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4 The Functions of Autobiographical Memory

What is the purpose of autobiographical memory? What problems, obstacles and difficulties does it allow us to overcome? What opportunities does it enable us to grasp? Why can we remember certain specific episodes of our personal autobiographies in the finest detail while we cannot access others? What functions do memories of our most intense emotional experiences serve? What functions do memories of personal events with no special emotional intensity serve? What use do we make of all these memories in our everyday lives? This chapter revolves around these questions. In Chapter 2 on the historic framework around the psychology of autobiographical memory, we met at least two of the great writers to have taken on the issues referred to above: Freud and Neisser. In his writings on childhood memory, Freud developed an elegant and sophisticated theory around the psychological motives behind people reconstructing and reworking the contents of their autobiographical memories of their earliest years of life, frequently in a radical way. As I have already noted (see Chapter 2, Sect. 2.1.3), the father of Psychoanalysis also formulated interesting hypotheses on the subject of the functions of childhood amnesia, namely that specific phenomenon by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2_4

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which adults cannot bring to mind the vast majority of the personal episodes which happened in the first years of their lives. In particular, Freud developed and defended a hypothesis according to which forgetting one’s earliest childhood is psychologically motivated and depends on the traumatic or, at least powerfully conflictual, contents of individuals’ experiences in this first, complex phase of their lives. Moving on to Neisser, whilst this latter did not perform empirical research focusing specifically on analysing the functions of autobiographical memory, during the course of his academic career, like Freud, the author of Cognition and Reality believed this issue to be crucial to understand human memory. As he argued in 1978—during his famous opening address to the Cardiff conference on practical aspects of memory—all researchers then identifying with the ecological approach to the study of human cognition would have to take a functional approach to autobiographical memory.1 Fully according with the gauntlet thrown down by Neisser, in the 1980s and 1990s other eminent human memory scholars argued forcefully in favour of pursuing a systematic analysis of the functions and uses of autobiographical memory (see, e.g., Baddeley, 1988; Barclay, 1994; Bruce, 1985; Fivush, 1988; Pillemer, 1992; Robinson & Swanson, 1990). It was, however, not until the noughties that a research approach designed to fulfil this specific end effectively emerged.2 This chapter is split up into four sections each of which examines the characteristics of a specific category of functions of autobiographical memory. These can be identified as follows: deciding and acting (Sect. 4.1), sharing (Sect. 4.2), reflecting about oneself (Sect. 4.3) and forgetting (Sect. 4.4). I believe it to be important to specify that the first three function categories overlap semantically with those included in other conceptual taxonomies which are widely used in contemporary 1These

were Neisser’s words (1978) in his attempt to stimulate research and debate into the functions of autobiographical memory: “What we want to know, I think, is how people use their own past experiences in meeting the present and the future” (p. 13). 2 Once again, a symbolic date giving a more precise timeline for this specialist field of study can easily be identified. It is 2003, namely the year Susan Bluck (an American psychologist we came across in the second section of Chapter 3 on the life story concept) edited Autobiographical Memory: Exploring its Functions in Everyday Life as a special issue of the Memory journal (Bluck, 2003a).

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autobiographical memory literature (see Bluck, 2003b; Pillemer, 1992). On the other hand, the fourth function—i.e. forgetting—refers to a vast range of memory phenomena (inaccurate and distorted recollections) which have not always been paid sufficient attention in the functional approach to autobiographical memory. Before proceeding to an analytical description of the functions cited above, I would like to specify a further issue. Grouping the functions of autobiographical memory into four conceptual categories is an entirely arbitrary semantic and theoretical operation. The functions examined in the next sections do not, in fact, cover the wide range of potential functions performed by autobiographical memory during the course of the lives of ordinary people. In actual fact, in accordance with the arguments of various authors (Beike et al., 2020; Pillemer, 2009; Webster, 2003), we might adopt more articulated and larger classifications of autobiographical memory functions, including five, six, seven, eight or even more categories. That said, a four-category taxonomy would seem to be sufficient for the purposes of this chapter.

4.1

Deciding and Acting

A key function of autobiographical memory is supplying individuals with information—some of which is valuable, some less so, as I will shortly explain—that may be useful to them in managing problems, taking up opportunities and, more generically, coping with the wide range of events, situations and experiences which present themselves during our lives, both present and future. Autobiographical memory—as many contemporary psychologists have argued (Bluck, 2003b; Pillemer, 2003; Pillemer & Kuwabara, 2012)—performs, first and foremost, a directive function: i.e. it guides and orients the decisions and behaviours of rememberers. There are many potential examples of the way in which our autobiographical memories can impact significantly on what we think and do in the present and future. For the sake of convenience, I will refer here to one of my own personal experiences which is not especially unique and

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special and readers may therefore have had similar experiences, variations notwithstanding. The episode concerned dates to one Saturday afternoon many years ago. I was in Turin (in Northern Italy) in the company of a friend and was driving my car when, at a certain point, I realised that I had entered a residents-only area of the city without the permit required. I remember that I broke the traffic law for a very brief section of road, around 50 metres or so. But, as we all know, this is entirely irrelevant to those— the local police in this case—whose task it is to ensure that the traffic laws are obeyed. My transit did not, in fact, escape the attention of the security cameras and, a few weeks later, a fine arrived at my home. I still today, many years later, have very vivid memories of the section of road which cost me that fine. So vivid that, when it so happens that I end up in that same part of the city I always follow alternative road routes in which there are no traffic constraints. And, luckily, I have never incurred other fines, in that part of the city, at least. This example clearly illustrates that the information stored in my autobiographical memory influences my decisions and guides my actions, enabling me to avoid potentially problematical situations (such as the unpleasant experience of getting a fine). Naturally this is dependent on the memories linked to the fine being, thus far, sufficiently accurate and detailed: I can, in fact, remember distinctly where the street in question was and the junction at which the security camera controlling this residents-only area is located. It is, however, important to bear in mind that if my autobiographical memories were imprecise and inaccurate (such as in the event that I mixed up the street which cost me the fine with a different, free access road), my autobiographical memory would continue all the same to perform its directive functions, but the outcome for me in this event would be negative: guided by my incorrect autobiographical memories I would, in fact, be extremely likely to end up on that same section of residents-only road and incur a second annoying fine. For the purposes of explaining the directive power of the autobiographical memory, some contemporary psychologists have developed theoretical models which refer explicitly to the ideas and concepts of evolutionary psychology, i.e. that field of enquiry—which Buss (2020)

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called “revolutionary”—which attempts to describe, understand and interpret the functions and characteristics of human mind and behaviour, formulating hypotheses on the way these latter made their appearance and developed during the course of human evolutionary history. Authors such as Christianson and Engelberg (1999), Donald (2012) and Berntsen (2012) have hypothesised that the capacity to remember events from one’s past evolved phylogenetically to help our progenitors cope with certain problems characteristic of their ancestral world: sourcing food, protecting themselves from predators, finding a mate, coping with natural calamities and adverse weather conditions. Following this line of reasoning, autobiographical memory can be conceptualised as a neural and psychological device which progressively developed over hundreds of thousands of years to guide and orient the decisions and behaviours of our ancestors in their harsh struggle for survival. It was thus a product of natural selection: hominids equipped with a neurocognitive system able to encode, retain and retrieve information on their personal pasts would, that is, have had a greater chance of adapting to their environments and passing on their genes than those without such a system. The evolutionary hypotheses on the directive functions of autobiographical memory are certainly attractive and evocative, however difficult it would be to find empirical proof of such hypotheses because research methodologies capable of understanding what environmental conditions might have led to the appearance of the human memory and how this has changed over our species’ ultra-long history are no simple matter (for further consideration of this issue see Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009; Richardson, 2007). As frequently occurs in science, researchers are not easily discouraged by the methodological challenges they encounter and frequently venture into precisely those fields of enquiry which present the greatest complexities and difficulties. In all likelihood, this is what happened to me twenty years ago now when I was given the chance to subject some of the evolutionary hypotheses on autobiographical memory to empirical enquiry in the context of my doctoral thesis research, whose objectives included enquiring into how people remember stressful and traumatic personal experiences linked to hydro-geological calamities (such as floods and

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landslides), a type of catastrophic event which our ancestors were also very familiar with. The research concerned (see Sotgiu, 2004; Sotgiu & Galati, 2007a) involved 145 adults residents in Pollein, a small community located in North-Western Italy which experienced a disastrous flood in 15th October 2000 causing the death of seven people and huge damage to the local environment.3 The study took place three years after this hydro-geological disaster and was carried out by administering a questionnaire containing a range of questions on the psychological responses of victims taking part in the research, from short to long term. Of these questions, one in particular invited participants to formulate a brief account of their personal experiences of the disaster and put it down in writing. The responses given to this question were content analysed. By means of this procedure, I identified 14 categories of memory contents which recurred in these autobiographical accounts and summed up the main characteristics of participants’ traumatic experiences. More in detail, three categories out of 14 related to participants’ actions and behaviours prior to the flood, during what is defined the preparation phase of a disaster (Drabek, 1986; Sotgiu & Galati, 2007b). Eight categories referred to participants’ psychological responses to the emergency phase. Finally, the last three categories encompassed other information about participants’ experiences that was unrelated to a specific flood time phase. This information comprised, in particular, participants’ personal assessments of the damage caused them by the flood, their non-autobiographical memories of the disaster and general comments on their traumatic experiences. For the purposes of obtaining more precise information on the importance of the various memory contents in research participants’ autobiographical accounts, I then calculated the percentage of participants who had cited each individual memory content category and the wider category group these belonged to. The results showed that 84.1% of the sample cited at least one category linked to the disaster emergency 3 From

13th to 16th October 2000 other towns in North-Western Italy in the Aosta Valley and Piedmont were hit by floods, landslides and landslips which caused serious damage to housing and public infrastructure and, in some cases, as in Pollein, loss of human life (for further details, see Ratto et al., 2003; Sotgiu, 2004).

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phase whilst only 31% referred to the preparation phase in their autobiographical accounts and lastly the third group of categories was cited by only 22.1% of participants. As far as the occurrence frequency of the individual categories is concerned, those mentioned by the majority of participants related to the most critical disaster phases: 57.9% of participants described their immediate perception of the flood’s impact on the territory (i.e. seeing the wave of mud and debris caused by the flooding of the river which cuts through Pollein); 55.7% referred to how they detected impending danger; lastly 50.3% described their personal circumstances when the flood hit (i.e. time, location, people present, what they were doing). A further category cited with great frequency (reported by 40.6% of the sample) related to participants’ immediate behavioural reactions during the emergency whilst more purely psychological responses (both cognitive and emotional) were mentioned by a markedly small number of participants (fewer than 20%). An evolutionary interpretation of this data is possible. In particular, the presence in research participants’ autobiographical accounts of a large number of details referring to the threat to survival might be explained by the fact that this type of mnestic information performs valuable guiding and orientation functions as regards participant behaviours, that defined “directive function” above. For the purposes of even greater clarity, in the event that one of the research participants had had to cope with a new hydro-geological calamity three years after the year 2000 disaster, he or she would have been able to make use of these memories to identify the risk markers in the new emergency situation easily and react to it with adaptive behaviours capable of increasing his or her chances of survival. And this individual would have been able to do this solely because his or her memories of the dangers encountered during the year 2000 disaster—as my research demonstrated—were available to a greater extent in his or her autobiographical memories than other aspects of his or her victim experience. In conclusion, the theoretical and empirical contributions discussed in this section underline an important fact: autobiographical memory is not a purely past-related psychological activity but also impacts on an individual’s future. In order to interact optimally with their physical and social environments, people use the contents of their autobiographical

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Fig. 4.1 Core brain regions involved in autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking (Reprinted with permission from “Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain”, by D. L. Schacter, D. R. Addis and R. L. Buckner, 2007, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, pp. 657–661. Copyright 2007 by Springer Nature)

memories to project themselves forward in time and to plan out and select the behaviours best suited to use in future experiential scenarios imaginable in their minds. Further evidence of this hypothesis comes from the neuroscientific literature. A vast volume of studies—most of which have used the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique—have, in fact, shown that the brain regions activated during autobiographical event retrieval are the same as those activated in tasks requiring the use of so-called episodic future thinking , namely the psychological activity consisting in mentally simulating personal events which may occur in the near or less near future. As can be seen in Fig. 4.1, these regions include the medial prefrontal cortex, the lateral parietal cortex, the medial parietal cortex (in particular the precuneus and retrosplenial cortex areas), the lateral temporal cortex and the medial temporal lobe (see Schacter et al., 2007).4

4 For

more on the neuroscientific research which has examined the relationship between autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking, see Spreng et al. (2009) interesting meta-analysis and D’Argembeau’s (2012, 2020) literature reviews.

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Sharing

In addition to channelling individuals’ thoughts and behaviours, autobiographical memory also performs ultra-valuable functions of a communicative and social type, functions which—it should be clarified—are closely bound up with both the directive functions we examined in the previous section and the functions we will examine in the two subsequent sections (see Beike et al., 2020). One of the key reasons why people remember their autobiographical pasts is in order to share it with the people they interact with during their everyday lives. These are the so-called targets or “partners” of the social sharing of autobiographical memories and may be parents, partners, children, siblings, friends, colleagues and even strangers. It is important to underline that sharing an autobiographical memory can take place both in the presence of a target of the sharing process (such as during a conversation at a café with a friend) or in their absence (e.g. via a letter, email or telephone message to the same person). In both cases the communicative behaviour of the individual who initiated the sharing process indicates the latter’s desire to transmit information on his or her personal past to another, carefully chosen, individual. A great many contemporary studies have shown that whatever the chosen communication channel (direct or indirect), sharing the autobiographical past is a pervasive phenomenon. In this respect, Bohanek et al. (2009) asked a sample of 37 American families to record the conversations taking place in their homes at dinner time, namely a moment in everyday family life which is characteristically convivial. An analysis of the conversations taking place in this specific interpersonal and communicative context highlights a very important fact for scholars investigating the functions of the autobiographical memory: on average the various members of the families examined mentioned an event from their autobiographical pasts every five minutes of conversation. Furthermore, whatever the role played within the family unit (parent or child), the memories shared by the individual concerned stimulated the interest and participation of all, or almost all, the family present on that occasion.

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In a further recent study, Beike et al. (2016, study 1) asked 205 US citizens to turn their minds to all the conversations they had taken part in over the last 24 hours. For each conversation identified, they had to indicate whether they themselves or those they conversed with had spoken of specific autobiographical memories (regarding an event with a precise time framework and lasting less than a day). The results of this study highlighted that 75% of the 433 conversations reported by the whole sample related to at least one specific autobiographical memory. Further indications on the frequency with which we share memories of our autobiographical pasts are to be found in the great many investigations carried out over three decades by Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé (for reviews see Rimé, 2005, 2009, 2017; Rimé et al., 1998, 2020). On the basis of a vast volume of data gathered using diverse research methods, Rimé (2009) has estimated that 90–95% of the emotional episodes which take place in our everyday lives trigger sharing behaviours of the emotions felt during these episodes (together with other factual details associated with these latter). It was found that our tendency to speak very frequently of our emotions does not vary significantly by gender, education or country and cultural context of origin. Neither does the rate of social sharing of emotion varies significantly in accordance with the hedonic valence of the emotional experiences concerned: memories of positive emotional events (those in which individuals feel joy, contentment or pride, for example) and memories of negative emotional events (such as those in which individuals feel sadness, fear or anger, for example) are both shared extremely frequently and in a substantially similar way.5 However, research results showed that there is an important factor able to significantly affect our tendency to socially share our emotional experiences. This is the intensity of the emotions experienced by the rememberer in response to the original event: the greater the intensity of these emotions, the greater the likelihood that such memories will be shared with other people. In addition to the data discussed above, Rimé et al.’s empirical research, together with that of other researchers who have continued with 5 However,

it has also been demonstrated that there are specific emotional experiences (those in which people felt shame or guilt) which are less likely to be shared as compared to others (Finkenauer & Rimé, 1998).

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his studies in recent years (e.g. Christophe & Rimé, 1997; Christophe et al., 2008; Curci & Bellelli, 2004; Harber & Cohen, 2005), has brought out a further interesting aspect of the process of social sharing of emotion. This is the phenomenon which Christophe and Rimé (1997) called secondary social sharing . According to these two scholars, since telling an emotional experience takes the form of an emotional event of a certain intensity for listeners, it is extremely likely that the latter will pass on the emotional information learnt to others (who may also not be in direct contact with the person who began the “primary” social sharing of emotion process). And this propagation of the contents of emotional autobiographical memories may not stop here. The targets of this secondary social sharing process may, in fact, decide to share the emotional novelties they learnt with other people they talk to, thus triggering a further sharing process defined by Rimé (2005) tertiary social sharing. This might be followed by new sharing behaviours capable of generating an ever denser and more extensive network of communication and interpersonal exchanges. Figure 4.2 sets out the social propagation of the contents of emotional autobiographical memories in schematic form. As Rimé (2009, 2020) has underlined, the information relating to emotional experiences spreads very rapidly via a network of individuals (real and, increasingly frequently, virtual) making up society. Furthermore, the propagation of this information has a psychological impact on both the person who first decides to share emotional experiences and on the various people these come into contact with (directly or indirectly). More specifically, this Belgian psychologist has hypothesised that the various forms of social sharing examined above (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.) foster the formation of shared social representations of the meaning of emotional events occurring in a given interpersonal and societal context. These representations in turn foster the development and consolidation of the social bonds uniting individuals belonging to the same community. Whilst they provide some extremely interesting indications, Rimé and colleagues’ theoretical and empirical contributions describe the social functions of autobiographical memory in reference to a highly specific, however significant, category of autobiographical memories: that relating

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Fig. 4.2 The social propagation of emotional information embedded in autobiographical memory (Reprinted with permission from “Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review”, by B. Rimé, 2009, Emotion Review, 1(1), pp. 60–85. Copyright 2009 by SAGE Publications)

to experiences in which individuals experienced some emotion (positive or negative). A wider ranging theory designed to describe the social functions of all categories of autobiographical memories (both emotional and otherwise) is that of Alea and Bluck (2003). For these two psychologists there are three main reasons behind individuals’ decisions to share information on their autobiographical pasts with other people. The first relates to the desire to transmit teachings, advice or, more generically, information to others. As Alea and Bluck noted (2003), this desire is more likely to show itself when there is a significant age gap between the individuals deciding to share personal memories and those listening to them (think, for example, of the contents

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which frequently characterise grandparent-grandchild, parent-child and teacher-pupil conversations). The second reason potentially prompting individuals to speak of their autobiographical pasts with others relates to the formers’ desire to build a more intimate and emotionally close relationship with the recipient of this mnestic communication (e.g. this is what often happens between two people who have just made friends, or a couple). Lastly, once again according to Alea and Bluck’s (2003) theoretical framework, autobiographical past sharing behaviours can be bound up with a twofold need on the part of the rememberer (and narrator): prompting an empathic response in listeners (something which might, for example, occur in the event that individuals speak of painful or stressful experiences) or, alternatively, they may be inspired by a desire to demonstrate empathy to a conversational partner (this may, for example, occur in the event that it is the listener who has spoken of painful or stressful personal experiences). In addition to having developed a taxonomy of the principal social functions of autobiographical memory, Alea and Bluck (2003) also hypothesised that the characteristics of the autobiographical past social sharing process can vary significantly on the basis of a wide range of factors of various sorts such as: the characteristics of the person sharing autobiographical memories (age, gender, personality); the listener’s characteristics (age, gender, personality, familiarity with, and similarity to, the sharer); the characteristics of the interpersonal relationship binding together the sharing partners (valence and length of the relationship); level of responsiveness during the interactive memory-sharing process; the phenomenological characteristics of the sharer’s autobiographical memories (level of detail and amount of emotion in personal memories). Future studies will need to clarify how the various factors cited here interact in real-life situations and how these potentially influence the behaviours, choices and feelings of those involved in various capacities in the process of social sharing of autobiographical past. In concluding this paragraph, it seems to me to be important to underline that the social functions of autobiographical memory, like the directive functions, may also have played an important part in human

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evolution and thus have a very long phylogenetic history behind them.6 This has been espoused, in particular, by Bruner (1994, p. 52) who— in an interesting essay entitled The “Remembered” Self —hypothesised that the human ability to share the mental representations of the autobiographical past socially may have developed in conjunction with the emergence of language and thus around 70,000 years ago (Harari, 2012), and perhaps even earlier (Corballis, 2011).

4.3

Reflecting About Oneself

A third function of autobiographical memory has to do with the psychological processes as a whole underlying the self-reflection activities which enable individuals to achieve a better knowledge and understanding of their own selves and identities. As various contemporary studies have highlighted (Bluck, 2003b; Pillemer, 1992; Wilson & Ross, 2003), when people’s thoughts turn to the periods, episodes and instants which make up the warp and weave of their autobiographies, it is not only in order to find reference models for their own decisions and actions or to share their autobiographical stories with others. People also mentally explore their pasts in an attempt to understand themselves, to reflect and reason on their identities and life stories, to seek out and find deeper meaning in their various life experiences—sometimes extraordinary, sometimes ordinary. It is important to note that since the events making up people’s autobiographies refer to the whole of their lives, they can relate to a wide variety of episodes, facts and situations. Autobiographical experiences are not, however, equally accessible in mnestic terms. Some are relatively easy to remember, others less so. Still others are no longer accessible in the rememberer’s autobiographical memory and thus end up being forgotten, sometimes forever.

6 Certainly

less long than the phylogenetic history of the directive functions, however.

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Contemporary research has shown that adults tend to organise their life stories around a small number of autobiographical episodes which they remember especially vividly and occupy a central place in their autobiographical accounts. These episodes include (see McAdams, 2008): – high points, i.e. events bound up with very intense positive feelings; – low points, i.e. events bound up with very intense negative feelings; – turning points, i.e. events leading to significant changes, either positive and negative, in individuals’ lives; – other emotionally charged events which have a certain significance in individuals’ autobiographical stories but do not fall under the previous categories. Of the autobiographical events categories cited above, it is the turning points which would seem to have the greatest potential for triggering selfreflection and self-knowledge processes (McLean et al., 2017). A range of research has supplied empirical evidence in support of this affirmation. Let us take a brief look at these. In a study conducted in United States, Grysman and Hudson (2010) asked a sample of 56 college students and 46 high school students to write about three autobiographical episodes: a high point, a low point and a turning point. From an analysis of the texts in this study, it emerged that autobiographical narratives around turning points comprised a greater number of references to lessons and insights related to the self than the other categories. Other studies using the same research methodology (see McAdams et al., 1997, 2001) have highlighted that turning points frequently coincide with redemption stories, namely with personal accounts in which individuals accord positive value to experiences and situations which were originally a source of malaise, frustration, suffering and pain. It has also been demonstrated that people who have had redemption experiences use extremely elaborate autobiographical reasoning forms: that is, accounts by such individuals contain a significant number of statements in which the story’s protagonist, the self-narrator, expresses a desire to reflect on his or her experiences and seek personal meaning in these from

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which to extract important personal lessons (McLean & Pratt, 2006).7 More generally, the authors of research of this sort have underlined that redemption stories—and the autobiographical memories which form their narrative warp and weave—constitute simultaneously cognitive and narrative devices which enable rememberers to achieve a deeper understanding and knowledge of their identities and personal stories (for more on this subject, see McAdams, 2006; McAdams & Bowman, 2001). Box 4.1 shows two examples of turning point narratives, both taken from previous research into samples of North American young adults (McAdams et al., 2006; McLean & Pratt, 2006). Readers will note that the redemption theme is clearly visible in both the first and the second narrative. The author of the first text describes the great feeling of liberation she felt at the end of a very problematical romantic relationship. Similarly, the author of the second text explains how a period of study abroad which was extremely challenging and difficult for her turned out to be a source of positive feelings of autonomy, independence and personal growth. Box 4.1: Examples of turning point narratives “I went abroad this summer to ‘study abroad.’ Really, I went abroad to chase after my Italian boy, Tony. My first love. I was driven with the desire to see him again, to know if we could still be perfect for each other. Well, I found him and spent a week with him, all the while realising that he wasn’t the pedestal of wonder I had built him up to be in my head. I told him this in the nicest way possible, by writing him a very nice note and leaving it on his night table the morning after I left. I had spent the last year thinking no boy was as great as him. I had lost a lot of self-confidence on the way. Now, walking out of his front door, I knew I could make it on my own. I had made him laugh, I had found my confidence. I knew that there were more, better boys to come. I finally was able to get over my first love, and to move on. A huge weight was

7The autobiographical reasoning concept, originally proposed by Bluck and Habermas (2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000), is now extremely popular in contemporary literature on autobiographical memory and narration (see Banks & Salmon, 2013; Bohn, 2011; Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011; McLean et al., 2017; Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006).

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lifted off my shoulders as I stood on his doorstep, at an apartment on a street in Milan. I was free!” [Narrative cited in McAdams et al., 2006, p. 1391] “At the end of this summer, I left Canada for Scotland in order to pursue teaching education. This is something that I had planned on for a long time and was very sure about. I had been away from home before, but never as far away as another country. Although I only half completed the length of my time here, I have learned a great deal about myself that I didn’t really see before. I have certainly proved that I am very independent. I had previously doubted this about myself. It felt rather fulfilling to feel such independence. I had the occasional doubt prior to coming here that it would be difficult, but little doubt exists in my mind now.” [Narrative cited in McLean & Pratt, 2006, p. 719]

An important construct in any attempt to clarify the self-reflective functions of autobiographical memory is self -continuity. This expression refers to the idea by which people subject their autobiographical pasts to a resignifying process with the objective of identifying a specific developmental trajectory in their identities and personal stories. “What was I in the past?”, “What am I today?”, “What will I be in the future?” Individuals reflecting on their autobiographical pasts and seeking a sense of self-continuity ask themselves questions like these.8 In accordance with the theoretical arguments proposed by a range of scholars (Bluck & Habermas, 2000; McAdams, 2008; Troll & Skaff, 1997), finding a satisfactory answer to these questions involves rememberers taking on the challenging task of connecting up and bringing together portions of their autobiographies into a more extensive life story, an internally coherent and easily understood one both for the individual concerned and for those coming into contact with this narrative. Recently, Bluck and Liao (2013) have developed a theoretical model which distinguishes between two levels of self-continuity. The first level, 8 It

is reasonable to hypothesise that these questions are of particular importance for those whose life stories comprise turning points, namely life events bound up with profound changes in an individual’s way of thinking, feeling and acting.

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called chronological self -continuity, indicates an individual’s ability to place certain life events in chronological order from the furthest ago to the most recent. As we saw in Chapter 3 (see, in particular, Sect. 3.2), this ability is the same as that which underlies the construction of chronologically coherent autobiographical stories (Bluck & Habermas, 2000, 2001). For Bluck and Liao (2013), the sense of chronological self-continuity emerges at a relatively early stage of psychological development (around 5 years of age, to be precise) and performs an important role in the survival of both children and adults. In fact, it is on the strength of this that individuals succeed in adapting to the frequent changes which take place in their living environments. The second self-continuity level identified by Bluck and Liao (2013), on the other hand, is called retrospective self -continuity and refers to individuals’ ability to associate personal judgements and meanings with the events making up the warp and weave of their personal autobiographies. In contrast to chronological self-continuity, this ability only emerges during adolescence, namely in that life cycle phase in which symbolic and abstract thought forms reach full development. It is also useful to highlight that the functions performed by a sense of retrospective selfcontinuity are not only a matter of individual survival but also of this latter’s psychological well-being. As Bluck and Liao have highlighted, resignifying the autobiographical past can, in fact, help rememberers to regulate their emotional experiences associated with significant life events and turning points optimally, thus activating a psychological growth process. The self-continuity concept is also of central importance to an understanding of pathological as well as normal psychological functioning. Typically, people suffering from depression, personality disorders and other forms of psychological malaise—who may seek the help of a psychotherapist for this reason—have a fragmented or, in the most serious cases, disintegrated sense of self-continuity. In taking a decision to undergo clinical treatment such people are thus expressing a need to mend the many fractures cutting through their personal stories, fractures which may underlie their current psychological suffering. For various scholars (Gonçalves & Machado, 1999; Habermas, 2019; Starace, 2004; White & Epston, 1990), it is psychotherapeutic approaches based

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on an analysis of autobiographical narratives—psychoanalysis first and foremost but not solely—which have the greatest chance of restoring patients’ sense of self-continuity (both chronological and retrospective in accordance with Bluck and Liao’s distinction). The healing power of autobiographical narratives is traceable to the specific meaning making processes which are activated when individuals formulate their life stories. As Habermas (2019) has recently underlined: Narrating an experience forces narrators to explicate memories and mold them into a narrative form. This compels narrators to make sense out of an experience. The event needs to be reconstructed temporally, causally, and above all, motivationally. The emotional event needs to be situated in a context and related to subsequent events in a plausible way. If the requirements of narrative form are fulfilled, the emotion needs to be named and explained by relating it to an eliciting situation and to subsequent reactions and renewed emotional evaluations. By contextualizing an initially vague affect, the quality of the affect becomes clearer and can be named as an emotion. In addition, the emotion can be explained and, therefore, also justified or criticized by interpreting the nature of the eliciting situation. Thus, narrating an experience can help understand events and the continued emotional impact on the individual. (p. 205)

The idea according to which the narrative building process helps people to understand the sense of and elaborate their emotional experiences is not only widely shared by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists using autobiographical narratives as their elective intervention tool in clinical work. From the 1980s onwards, American psychologist James Pennebaker’s expressive writing research supplied extremely convincing empirical evidence in support of this idea (for reviews, see Pennebaker, 1997; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016). The basic experimental paradigm excogitated by the latter involves the random assignment of research participants on two conditions. Those assigned to the experimental group are asked to write about significant emotional experiences that affected their life. Those assigned to the control group are asked to write about emotionally neutral or trivial topics (e.g. how they used their time). This experimental procedure—or

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some of its many variants—has been used with the general population (from children to the elderly) and by individuals suffering from mental and physical pathologies such as, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV and myocardial infarction.9 Overall, Pennebaker’s studies—and those done by the many other researchers who have made use of his experimental paradigm over the last 30 years—have demonstrated that, as compared to people writing about neutral topics, those undertaking expressive writing experienced a series of positive long-term effects on their health, both mental and physical: significant improvements in mood, fewer physician visits for illness and enhanced immune function. Lively scientific debate is still raging around the specific reasons for these changes in the health of those taking part in expressive writing sessions (as against those assigned to the control groups). What is interesting to underline here is the results obtained by Pennebaker from an analysis of the narrative texts developed by participants in his research. He found that, relative to the control groups, those assigned to the experimental groups showed an increased use of cognitive words over the course of their expressive writing sessions. Interestingly, this kind of words included both causal words (e.g. “effect”, “reason”, “because”) and insight words (e.g. “understand”, “realise”, “know”). On the basis of these findings, it is reasonable to assume that the use of forms of autobiographical reasoning is positively correlated to individual physical and mental well-being. That is, self-reflective thinking seems to be an adaptive response when individuals remember and recount their emotional experiences.

4.4

Forgetting

The fourth and last function dealt with in this chapter is linked to the selective and reconstructive nature of the psychological processes at work in remembering autobiographical events.

9The first study to use the research methodology described here was published in 1986 (in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology) and examined a group of 46 healthy undergraduates (see Pennebaker & Beall, 1986).

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As I have already underlined elsewhere in this book (see Chapter 2, Sect. 2.4) the quantity and type of information which individuals are capable of recovering from their long-term autobiographical memories does not coincide with the quantity and type of information they originally came into contact with in their lives. In a similar way to other mnestic content categories, the experiences making up a person’s autobiography are subject to forms of forgetting which can make them partially or totally inaccessible. Moreover, even when rememberers demonstrate an ability to access large portions of their personal pasts easily, it is impossible for them recall the information acquired entirely accurately. Their autobiographical memories will rather take the form of modified—imprecise, distorted and sometimes even false—representations of the events experienced in the first place. They will resemble the original experience but will not be a mirror image of it (apart from in very rare conditions, frequently pathological in nature).10 On the basis of the above, it would seem clear that, functionally speaking, it is fundamentally important to understand why the autobiographical memory works in this selective and reconstructive way. There is a multiplicity of issues for scholars to deal with here and these can be translated into a series of questions—both theoretical and empirical—which I will set out here: – What autobiographical information is most easily forgotten (i.e. does not survive the selection operations enacted by the autobiographical memory)? Why is it precisely this and not other information which is forgotten? – What autobiographical information is most easily remembered (i.e. survives the selection operations enacted by the autobiographical memory)? Why is it specifically this and not other information

10The

contemporary neuropsychology literature contains a handful of cases of people with a hyperdeveloped autobiographical memory, i.e. people capable of recollecting the lion’s share of their life events in the finest detail whatever its relevance or emotional valence (Ally et al., 2013; LePort et al., 2012; Parker et al., 2006). This condition—called hyperthymestic syndrome or highly superior autobiographical memory—is associated with forms of psychological malaise of a certain gravity and some scholars (Ally et al., 2013) have argued that it may be the result of a hyperactive amygdala.

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which is most available for recollection? What accuracy level is this information remembered at? In Chapter 2 (see Sect. 2.1.3), we saw that Freud attempted to find answers to these questions (or at least most of them). With his screen memories and childhood amnesia theories, the father of Psychoanalysis hypothesised the existence of psychological mechanisms of repression by means of which memories of a conflictual nature, i.e. those capable of threatening the integrity of the Ego, are kept away from the consciousness and replaced with other autobiographical memories which do not undermine the individual’s psychological equilibrium. In more recent times, other psychologists have taken up the challenge involved in enquiring into the autobiographical memory’s selection and reconstruction mechanisms. These scholars have concentrated, in particular, on two opposing mnestic distortion mechanisms: positivity bias and negativity bias. Let us look more closely at these. The expression “positivity bias” describes a tendency to recollect the positive events making up our autobiographies more easily, at the expense of negative ones, clearly. The first empirical evidence in support of this bias came from an investigation carried out in the 1940s by American psychologist Samuel Waldfogel (1948) who asked a sample of 124 university students to write down as many autobiographical memories as possible relating to the birth to eight years of age period. The results showed that 50% of the memories reported related to experiences judged by participants to be pleasant, 30% to experiences judged unpleasant, with the remaining 20% being emotionally neutral. Other data in support of positivity bias comes from studies in which the degree of accuracy of the autobiographical memories reported by participants could be directly evaluated (something which was impossible in Waldfogel’s research into early childhood memories). For example, Bahrick and his colleagues asked individuals of various ages to recollect their high school (Bahrick et al., 1996) and university (Bahrick et al., 2008) grades. These were then compared with the actual grades achieved by participants which were sourced from the archives of the schools and universities attended by the latter. As a whole, the results showed that over 70% of actual grades were remembered accurately. Shifting

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attention to the inaccurate memories, however, the authors found an interesting fact: participants tended to remember their lower marks as higher than they actually had been rather than the opposite. Thus, the school pasts of participants who had remembered their school grades inaccurately were generally remembered as more positive than they really had been (meaning that if we were marked C at a Biology exam we would be more likely to remember it as a B or even an A than a D). A further mnestic distortion phenomenon which can be encompassed within this positivity bias category, and one which has received a great deal of attention in recent years in the autobiographical memory field, is fading affect bias. This expression was coined in 2003 by Richard Walker, John Skowronski and Charles Thompson to describe the differential effects which events with a positive hedonic valence and events with a negative hedonic valence have on the recollection of the emotions experienced during the events themselves. More specifically, this phenomenon can be described in these terms: the emotional intensity of negative events fades more rapidly than the emotional intensity of positive events; or rather, in other words, the emotional intensity of positive events persists in the autobiographical memory much longer than the emotional intensity of negative events does. One of the first empirical investigation to have analysed fading affect bias in a systematic way was that of Walker et al. (1997). This investigation encompassed three distinct studies each of which used a very similar research methodology, however. Let us first describe the experimental procedures used by Walker et al. in all the three studies cited in detail and subsequently the main results which these procedures enabled them to achieve. In the first study, 43 undergraduates were asked to keep a diary for a 3.5-month period with participants tasked with recording one event per day. For each event recorded they were to supply a brief description of what had happened and evaluate the pleasantness of the event on a 7-point scale ranging from very unpleasant (−3) to very pleasant (+3), with a rating of 0 indicating a neutral judgement. Three and a half months later Walker and his colleagues contacted participants once again and invited them to a new phase in the research in which they were asked to judge—once again using the 7-point scale described above—the

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pleasantness of each event recorded in the first research phase a second time. Walker et al.’s second study involved just 6 undergraduates. Like in the first study, these students were required to record one event per day, describing these events briefly and assessing their degree of pleasantness (on the usual 7-point scale). In contrast to the procedure used in the first study, the diary time frame was two years (instead of 3.5 months) this time. Moreover, the second phase in the research—in which participants were tasked with reassessing the pleasantness of the events reported in the diary—was a year after the first phase (rather than 3.5 months). The third study by Walker et al. involved just one participant. This individual, once again from the university population, noted down one event per day for nine months and was recontacted to formulate a second judgement on the pleasantness of the events selected after a grand total of four and a half years.

Fig. 4.3 Summary of findings from the Walker et al.’s (1997) studies on the fading affect bias (Reprinted with permission from “Life is pleasant—And memory helps to keep it that way!”, by W. R. Walker, J. J. Skowronski and C. P. Thompson, 2003, Review of General Psychology, 7(2), pp. 203–210. Copyright 2003 by SAGE Publications)

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The graph shown in Fig. 4.3 shows average participant pleasantness rating variations in the three studies in accordance with the hedonic valence of the events initially recorded in their diaries and the length of time which had passed since they occurred (3.5 months in the first study, 1 year in the second and 4.5 years in the third). As the graph makes clear, a reduction in the emotional intensity level associated with the events reported in the diary is visible for all three studies. In accordance with the definition of fading affect bias supplied above, this drop was greater for events with a negative hedonic valence than those with a positive hedonic valence. Furthermore, the more time had passed between the first and second research phases the greater this drop was. Since 1997 (the year Walker et al.’s research was published) similar results have been achieved by a great many studies carried out on individuals of various ages and using a range of autobiographical memory assessment methodologies (for an up-to-date overview, see Sedikides & Skowronski, 2020; Skowronski et al., 2014). Whilst there is a great deal of evidence supporting the positivity bias, contemporary literature on autobiographical memory also comprises a number of studies showing that in certain specific situations people show a tendency to recollect negative aspects of their autobiographies with a certain ease, at the expense of positive ones, in this case. This mnestic distortion mechanism—called negativity bias, as above (see Skowronski, 2011)—was, for example, observed in research by Wilson and Ross (2001; study 1) on people’s appraisals of their past and current selves. The authors of this study invited a group of 26 university students to supply descriptions of themselves in two distinct phases of their lives: the present (in which participants’ average age was 20) and when they were 16 years of age. All these descriptions were audio recorded. At a second phase of the research, participants were asked to listen to their self-descriptions and assess their hedonic content (positive, negative or neutral). Overall, the results showed that participants’ descriptions of their past selves comprised a higher number of statements with a negative hedonic content than participants’ descriptions of their current selves did. By contrast, these latter comprised a higher number of statements with a positive hedonic content than participants’ descriptions of their past selves did.

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In a further study, Dewhurst and Marlborough (2003) asked a group of 29 university students to fill in a questionnaire 48 hours before they sat their first exam of the academic year. Participants were to judge the intensity with which they had experienced 16 anxiety symptoms associated with having to sit an exam shortly (e.g. “unable to relax”, “hands trembling”, “fear of getting a bad result”). Once they had sat the exam and had their results, these same participants were invited to fill in a second questionnaire in which they had to remember the intensity of the anxiety symptoms experienced prior to the exam (this second questionnaire was filled in within 48 hours of their grades being given them). The results of the research showed that participants who had obtained higher grades than they expected overestimated their pre-exam anxiety levels. For Dewhurst and Marlborough, this memory bias served to reinforce the feelings of pride experienced by participants in relation to a positive result, however unexpected, which they had achieved in a significantly challenging past situation for them in emotional terms. It may now be useful to return to the two main questions with which this section began and attempt to answer these in the light of the research results discussed thus far. The first question related to identifying the autobiographical information most likely to be forgotten and explaining why it is precisely this and not other information which most tends to be forgotten. In line with what Skowronski (2011) highlighted, it seems reasonable to assume that people tend to forget information from their autobiographies which has the potential to damage their self-image (the current one, naturally). Examples of this might be having been rude to one’s partner, cheated a friend, been humiliated at work, got a bad mark at university. As we prefer to see ourselves as good, kind, honest, intelligent, capable, selfconfident people satisfied with our lives, all those facts which tend to demonstrate the opposite—i.e. that we are bad, rude, dishonest, unintelligent, incompetent, insecure and unhappy—are more likely to be kept at bay by our minds. As far as the second question is concerned, this related to identifying the autobiographical information most likely to be remembered and explaining why it is precisely this and not other information which most tends to be remembered. Once again, in line with Skowronski’s

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(2011) theoretical arguments, the most likely explanation of the available research results on this theme is that people tend most to remember autobiographical information which contributes to protecting or improving their self-image, whatever its hedonic content. In accordance with this reasoning, we might be more likely to remember getting good grades at university or that specific episode in which we were especially polite, kind and generous to our partners. But that’s not the full story. For the purposes of improving our self-image, our current self, we may see ourselves as having experienced more negative emotional experiences in the past than was actually the case (as is suggested by the results of Dewhurst and Marlborough’s 2003 study), or we may convince ourselves of the fact that, at a certain period of our lives, we were worse people than we see ourselves as being today (as the results of Wilson and Ross’s 2001 study 1 show). In conclusion, the research discussed in this section underlines powerfully that the psychological processes at work in the selection and reconstruction of the information making up our autobiographical pasts is closely bound up with psychological processes presiding over the construction of the image we have of ourselves. As we have seen thus far, this strong bond between autobiographical memory and self explains the mnestic distortion phenomena, opposing but serving the same functional reasons: positivity bias, in which positive autobiographical memories take on greater salience than negative autobiographical memories, and negativity bias, in which the exact opposite occurs.

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5 Conclusions: What Is Autobiographical Memory?

Although this is the final chapter of this book, it would seem to me to be important to take a step backwards and start afresh from the key question which has inspired many of the psychologists who have studied autobiographical memory from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, over a time frame spanning over 140 years. However straightforward its formulation may seem, the question I would like to start afresh from is this: “What is autobiographical memory”? In Chapters 2–4 I reviewed the main theories and research which have attempted to answer this question, sometimes explicitly, sometimes only implicitly. Let us retrace our steps here now. Chapter 2 introduced three pioneering contributions to the study of the psychological processes involved in autobiographical memory: (1) Galton’s psychometric enquiries into mental associations and visual imagery; (2) the Henris’ survey on earliest childhood memories; (3) Freud’s theoretical speculations and clinical observations on the screen memories and childhood amnesia phenomena. It is important to underline that each of these contributions has enabled specific aspects of the functioning of the autobiographical memory to be explored. Galton © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2_5

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focused attention on the phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical memories and the variation in these both within and between individuals. The Henris, on the other hand, gathered valuable data on the temporal location of autobiographical memories relating to infancy. Lastly, Freud examined both the symbolic meanings and phenomenological characteristics of his patients’ autobiographical memories, formulating interesting hypotheses on the psychological mechanisms of repression and reconstruction of the autobiographical past. Once again in Chapter 2, I also set out a list of twelve statements describing the way in which contemporary psychologists, or at least the majority of these, defined the autobiographical memory concept. In this respect, we have seen that autobiographical memory is viewed as a complex multi-faceted system whose primary task involves encoding, storing and retrieving the various experiences relating to rememberers’ lives. We have likewise seen that the autobiographical memory is also shored up by episodic and semantic memory; that it works selectively and reconstructively; that access to its contents can be both voluntary and involuntary; and that it is an essential component of the psychological process whole enabling individuals to travel mentally across time, both backwards and forwards. Chapter 3 examined the autobiographical memory’s cognitive architecture, showing that this architecture has been conceptualised by various authors as a broad network of autobiographical contents whose degree of abstraction/specificity varies very widely, ranging from generic contents (life themes and lifetime periods) to extremely concrete contents (individual events and specific details relating to the latter). We also saw that rememberers are capable of constituting their autobiographical memories into mental schemas capable of illustrating their life stories as a whole. Lastly, we saw that these mental schemas can take the form of (oral or written) autobiographical narratives whose volume of detail and complexity, coherence and organisation vary widely. Chapter 4, on the other hand, took on a subject which, however crucial to understanding what autobiographical memory is, has only recently come to the forefront of psychologists’ attention: the functions of autobiographical memory. Specifically, we saw that individuals remember their personal pasts because these are a source of valuable

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information with which to tackle problems and grasp the opportunities which may arise in their lives, both present and future. We also saw that, in addition to directing rememberers’ decisions and behaviours, both current and future, the autobiographical memory performs three further functions: fostering communication and social contact between people; raising awareness of our own selves and identities; helping people retain a positive image of themselves. I hope that these chapters have enabled readers to gain a somewhat complex idea of the theoretical and empirical progress made—over 140 years of scientific psychology’s history—in defining the autobiographical memory concept. All the same I believe that autobiographical memory psychologists cannot be content simply with drawing up good literature reviews. They must also be capable of taking on the difficult task of translating scientific theories and research on autobiographical memory into a form which is understandable for the widest range of people possible. These latter include: all those researchers working in the psychological sciences field whose specialist training is elsewhere (in various degrees of distance from autobiographical memory); experts from non-psychological sciences and disciplinary areas of knowledge and culture (such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, linguistics, literature and literary criticism, history, art, religion and IT); professionals who interact with the autobiographical memories of their users and clients in various ways (such as psychologists, psychotherapists, doctors, nurses, teachers, educators, lawyers, magistrates and marketing experts); and, last but not least, ordinary people with a legitimate desire to understand how the human memory works. The objective of this chapter is thus to formulate a, in some ways more narrative, description of the autobiographical memory concept which, whilst solidly grounded in the knowledge acquired to date in the scientific context, can be taken on board, understood and used without specific difficulties by all the types of people mentioned above. I will make use of two metaphors to this end. The first metaphor compares the autobiographical memory to an archive, whilst the second compares

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it to a book. Let us now look in detail at the implications of these two different metaphorical conceptions of the autobiographical memory.1 As we all know, an archive (either physical or digital) is a collection of documents, and more generally of information, relating to a specific field of human knowledge. Whatever the type of information contained in it (e.g. historical documents, social and demographical data, scientific results), the main characteristic of an archive is its organisation. We will make use of an example to clarify this concept. Let us imagine that we need to consult Freud’s work and visit the human sciences library of our university for this purpose—a full blown archive and, in this case, a store of documents such as books, periodicals, encyclopedias and dictionaries. With this specific objective in mind, i.e. consulting Freud’s work, we would proceed as follows. First and foremost, we would locate the library section in which psychology texts are stored. Next, we would need to find the specific sub-section containing texts on the more circumscribed field of Psychoanalysis. We would thus finally get to the much sought-after Freud’s work. And if, rather than Freud’s work in general, we were interested in consulting a specific work by the father of Psychoanalysis—let’s say The Psychopathology of Everyday Life—then we would need to seek out this specific volume on the basis of the Freud’s work classification criteria used by the catalogue of the library we are consulting. In addition to casting light on how a very common type of archive—a library—is used, the example given would appear to be especially suitable to describing the functioning of the human autobiographical memory. The mental processes used by ordinary people in conjuring up a personal experience are not, in fact, very different from the working processes which would be used by this same person in the event that he or she was looking for a text by Freud from the many shelves making up a university

1 It

is important to stress, at this point, that the use of metaphors to describe the functioning of the autobiographical memory (not solely these two metaphors but many more) is by now consolidated psychology research tradition (Brockmeier, 2015; Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996; Roediger, 1980). All the same, the idea of making recourse to metaphorical conceptions of memory has roots in philosophy and literature and thus in fields of knowledge whose history is much longer and more complex than that of the psychological sciences (see Assmann, 1999/2011; Draaisma, 1995/2000).

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human sciences library. In this case, too, an example from everyday life may help to clarify the concept. Let us imagine that we are asked to remember the day of our eighteenth birthday. Accessing this autobiographical memory would require returning in our minds to a very specific period of our lives, our high school years. It is reasonable to assume that our memories of this period incorporate information on a variety of spheres and experiences relating to our autobiographical story: our first romances, the friends we had in that period, the house we lived in, our father’s work, our mother’s work, our hobbies, our school results and those of our siblings and much more. There is no doubt that all this information is bound up with our eighteenth birthday. Moreover if, in response to an explicit request to recall our eighteenth birthdays, our memories of what we did on that specific day sprang immediately to mind it would not be difficult for us to access all the other information cited above relating to the more general period of our eighteenth birthday (i.e. our high school years). The location of all this information within our autobiographical stories is, in fact, wellknown, in the same way as we know that The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a work by Freud which can be accessed from a shelf at our university’s human sciences library. And not just any old shelf but the shelf on which other Psychoanalysis texts are to be found which are, in turn, part of the broader library section encompassing volumes relating to psychology as a whole. It is thus very clear that, just as the books in a library have an easily identifiable place, our autobiographical memories are also well-organised in our minds and can be located easily. We can begin to recall a specific event (returning to the previous example, our eighteenth birthday) and then, from the starting point of that memory, recall a second memory linked to it (that year’s summer holidays) and then a third memory, once again linked to the latter (a winter romance with a girl met during the summer holiday), and so on in a virtually infinite memory retrieval process. And one after another the memories recalled will enable us to reconstruct—in a gradual and not always straightforward way—first the main periods of our lives and later our whole autobiographical stories. Naturally, we might not be able to remember everything, absolutely everything, which has happened to us in our lives. But what library

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owns all the books cited in its catalogue? What records office contains the data of absolutely all the people living in a specific town? Thus, just as happens in any archive, including libraries and records offices, the human autobiographical memory is also unfortunately incomplete. It may contain an amazing amount of information, just like an archive, but its capabilities are not infinite. Let us now move on to our second metaphor, the book metaphor. There are at least two reasons why this can be seen as especially wellsuited to describing the autobiographical memory concept. The first is to do with the narrative organisation of the information contained in a book. This characteristic affects all the book categories people come up against in their everyday lives: novels, academic theses, school textbooks, history books, religious works, etc. Whether they deal with the adventures of the hero of a noir novel or the history of the United States, books are always built around a narrative: of real or imagined facts, theories or even simply notions, concepts and definitions. Ultimately, even the book you are reading now has offered a narrative: that one regarding the history and recent developments in a well-defined field of contemporary psychology, namely the psychology of autobiographical memory. Precisely as happens with books, people’s autobiographical memories take the form of narratives (in this case real facts which have actually occurred or rather which we have reason to believe have happened in people’s lives). It is important to note that autobiographical memory narratives are linguistic and cognitive products which vary hugely, both between and within individuals. These can change substantially in accordance with the characteristics of the person developing his or her narrative text and also with the specific recollection context in which a single person builds his or her narrative. Narratives can, in fact, be rich or poor in details, organised or disorganised, easy to understand or impenetrable, draw us in emotionally or be didactic. And as we all know, this same variety of narrative styles is also to be found in the books we customarily read. A second fundamental reason to consider the book metaphor especially well-suited to describing the autobiographical memory is the social nature of the book as an object. In addition to being products made by

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individuals—writers—books are also social products. Those who know the world of writers well know that writing a book (whether it is an autobiography, a novel, a philosophy essay or a scientific treatise is of no importance here either) is always motivated by the same thing: a desire to share its contents with other people or rather with as many people as possible. It is also well known that writers always get friends and colleagues to read their books, even before they are finished. Once a book has finally been finished, moreover, the social sharing of its contents will certainly continue, with its publication and sale. And if the book is not simply published in the language it was originally written in but also translated into other languages, its potential readership will be further extended, to the joy of the writer and those who have fostered its social sharing (the publishing house, generally, but not exclusively). Just like books, autobiographical memories—above all those relating to events triggering powerful emotions—can also be considered social products and thus psychological representations subject to extremely intense interpersonal exchange. As I noted in Chapter 4, the social sharing of emotional autobiographical memories—i.e. activities consisting in recounting emotional events from one’s life to others—is extremely frequent in ordinary people’s everyday lives. This is true of all age groups: from the preschool years (4–5 years of age) right through to old age (Fivush et al., 2011; Rimé, 2005, 2009). It should also be remembered that social sharing of the autobiographical past is a social and communicative act which enables rememberers to make contact with a very large number of other people: not solely those closest to them (e.g. partners, family members, friends) but also people on the margins of their social world (such as colleagues, acquaintances and even strangers). With a certain audacity, Rimé (2005) hypothesised that the social sharing of emotional autobiographical memories can enhance people’s chances of survival significantly, thus allowing these latter to live long and, as far as possible, healthy lives. Whilst there is no direct empirical proof of such hypotheses, an anything but negligible volume of studies has documented that people with poor social lives have a much higher mortality risk than those who are well integrated into society (see in this

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respect the meta-analyses by Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010, 2015).2 In other words, being able to spend time with other people—and presumably pass some of our time reminiscing about our personal pasts and, even more specifically, those events which have triggered emotions of a certain intensity whether positive or negative—may enable us to overcome the challenges, difficulties and problems associated with the various ages.3 Curiously, some recent studies (Agahi et al., 2011; Bavishi et al., 2016; Jacobs et al., 2008) have shown that reading books regularly is associated with a significant reduction in mortality risk. This is potentially an additional valid motive to parallel the autobiographical memory with a book: both perform positive functions for individual survival, health and well-being. At this point, readers may rightly be asking themselves which of the two metaphors presented—the archive or the book—is best suited to describing the autobiographical memory concept. Responding to this question is anything but straightforward. Both metaphors convey the theories and research examining the psychological processes involved in encoding, retaining and retrieving the events making up the autobiographical past very well. The archive metaphor would appear to harmonise especially well with theoretical models describing the autobiographical memory as a network of knowledge and information organised hierarchically (see Chapter 3, Sect. 3.1). The book metaphor, on the other hand, accords better with those theories and empirical studies which have studied topics such as life stories (see Chapter 3, Sect. 3.2), the narrative organisation of autobiographical accounts (see Chapter 3, Sect. 3.3) and the social functions of autobiographical memory (see Chapter 4, Sect. 4.2). Whilst both the metaphors examined here have certainly helped us bring out certain distinctive aspects of the functioning of the autobiographical memory it is, in my opinion, the book metaphor which is best

2I

am grateful to Bernard Rimé for bringing these studies to my attention. my opinion researchers interested in the social and clinical applications of research into autobiographical memory should take serious account of Rimé’s (2005) hypothesis. If future studies succeed in confirming it at the empirical level, these scholars might, in fact, be able to plan psychological interventions capable of fostering autobiographical memory’s social use.

3 In

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suited to describing the autobiographical memory concept. There are, I believe, at least two reasons for this. The first has to do with the fact that, as compared to the archive metaphor, the book metaphor stresses the active role played by rememberers in the recollection of their autobiographical pasts to a greater extent. As I have outlined on various occasions in the various chapters of this book, autobiographical memory is a mental activity of a reconstructive type in which not only do people potentially record and conserve significant episodes in their lives over time but they also potentially rethink, reappraise and reinterpret—reconstruct—their autobiographical pasts and thus resignify the experiences which have, in some way, left a mark on their life stories or, at least, certain specific periods in them. Those lucky enough to have written a book, especially an autobiography, well know the extent of the freedom writers enjoy: they can decide to omit important information from their narrative; set out a series of events in a non-sequential order which actually happened in a sequence; present their own behaviour positively and judge that of others harshly; meticulously describe an object, place, person or emotional sensation; decide to comment on events and episodes using symbolic images and metaphoric language (precisely like that I am attempting to use in the last part of this book) and a great deal more. Those managing an archive do not, unfortunately, enjoy these freedoms and must adhere to representational criteria regarding the present and the past which are generally less flexible that those used by writers. A second reason for preferring the book to the archive metaphor is that the former is better than the latter at representing the motivational dimensions of autobiographical memory. These dimensions are the conscious or unconscious motives prompting people to conjure up their autobiographical pasts so frequently and in so many communicative contexts (see Chapter 2, Sect. 2.1.3). In accordance with the arguments put forward in Chapter 1, I do not think it is going too far to say that we all feel a powerful need to take stock of our autobiographical pasts, given the way contemporary society is currently configured. Returning to a metaphorical language once again, we might say that we all nurture some form of desire to make a book of our life stories. Naturally, our personal autobiographies do not necessarily need to take book form. And neither is it to

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be taken as read that generating a personal autobiography requires being obliged to don the writer’s sometimes uncomfortable attire. Rather than a book, our personal autobiography might take the form of an album of photos or a collection of video footage depicting ourselves and those close to us or, if we have marked artistic talent, a collection of paintings which we ourselves have painted with the objective of depicting the most significant moments in our lives, perhaps in a metaphorical or abstract way. Whatever the expressive language and medium we choose for our life stories—paper, film, canvas, computer software or other memory intermediaries (Assmann, 1999/2011)—the material expressions of our personal autobiographies will, in any case, be products serving social functions and thus perform roles identical to those of a book (rather than an archive). Our autobiographical memories may, in fact, finally come out into the open, take concrete form, spread out, leave behind the protected environment of our brains—and more generally of our bodies—to reach and, perhaps change the people and the environment around us. The book you have just read is not a book on my autobiographical story. But it is certainly a product of a social nature. I cannot, in fact, deny that my intention in writing this book was to pass on my knowledge of the psychology of autobiographical memory to readers and attempt to share with those of you who have had the patience to read it the emotions I felt during the long and challenging journey which has culminated in these final pages. Undoubtedly my hope is that this book has enriched your baggage of autobiographical memory knowledge, stimulated your curiosity and perhaps even changed your approach to this complex but fascinating subject. I hope, however, that you will now be filled with a powerful desire to share with other people, both known and unknown, whatever you have found interesting and exciting in this book. Otherwise I would not have written it.

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References Agahi, N., Silverstein, M., & Parker, M. G. (2011). Late-life and earlier participation in leisure activities: Their importance for survival among older persons. Activities, Adaptation & Aging, 35 (3), 210–222. Assmann, A. (2011). Cultural memory and Western civilization: Functions, media, archives. Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1999). Bavishi, A., Slade, M. D., & Levy, B. R. (2016). A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity. Social Science and Medicine, 164, 44–48. Brockmeier, J. (2015). Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process. Oxford University Press. Draaisma, D. (2000). Metaphors of memory: A history of ideas about the mind . Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1995). Fivush, R., Habermas, T., Waters, T. E. A., & Zaman, W. (2011). The making of autobiographical memory: Intersections of culture, narratives and identity. International Journal of Psychology, 46 (5), 321–345. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10 (2), 227–237. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7 (7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316. Jacobs, J. M., Hammerman-Rozenberg, R., Cohen, A., & Stessman, J. (2008). Reading daily predicts reduced mortality among men from a cohort of community-dwelling 70-year-olds. Journal of Gerontology: SOCIAL SCIENCES, 63B(2), S73–S80. Koriat, A., & Goldsmith, M. (1996). Memory metaphors and the real life/laboratory controversy: Correspondence versus storehouse conceptions of memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19, 167–188. Rimé, B. (2005). Le partage sociale des émotions [The social sharing of emotions]. Presses Universitaires de France. Rimé, B. (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review, 1(1), 60–85. Roediger, H. L. (1980). Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 8(3), 231–246.

Index

A

Angell, James 47–50, 52 autobiographical memory general definition of 35, 41, 46 motivational dimensions of 169 neural correlates of 75, 80 ontogenetic development of 73, 79 phenomenological characteristics of 27, 31, 139, 162 reconstructive processes in 65, 146, 147, 162 selective processes in 65, 146, 162 autobiographical memory contents event-specific knowledge 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100 general events 94, 95, 96, 98, 100 life themes 70, 162 lifetime periods 70, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 162

repeated or categoric events 96 autobiographical memory disorders neurological disorders 71, 77, 81 psychopathological disorders 77, 80 autobiographical memory functions directive functions 129–134, 139 forgetting functions 146–153 self-reflective functions 140–146 social functions 135–140, 168 autobiographical memory metaphors archive 13, 163–166 book 13, 166–170 autobiographical narratives coda 112 coherence of 106, 108–113 eudaimonic happiness narratives 111 narratee 109 narrator-listener relationship 107

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Sotgiu, The Psychology of Autobiographical Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69571-2

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174

Index

turning point narratives 141 autobiographical novels 8 autobiographical reasoning 141, 146 autobiographies 6–8 autonoetic consciousness 56

emotional autobiographical memories 49, 73, 79, 137 encoding specificity principle 51 episodic future thinking 134 episodic memory 55, 56, 64 evolutionary psychology 130 eyewitness memory 76, 80

B

basic systems model 66–69 general coordination 68 specific coordination 68 Behaviourism 52–54, 56, 57 Berntsen, Dorthe 11, 24, 28, 62, 73, 74, 77, 98, 99, 131 Bluck, Susan 100–103, 105, 129, 138, 140, 143–145 Bruner, Jerome 105–107, 140

C

Carr, Harvey 47, 51, 52 childhood amnesia 35, 42, 43, 73, 79, 127, 148, 161 Cognitivism 18, 54–56, 58, 93, 105 Conway, Martin A. 45, 66, 69–72, 94–100 Cultural psychology 105

F

fading affect bias 149–151 field memories 41 first-person memories 41 flashbulb memories 74, 75, 80 Freud, Sigmund 12, 18, 33–46, 50, 52, 53, 63, 116, 127, 128, 148, 161, 162, 164, 165 Functionalism 46–49, 52 G

Galton, Francis 7, 18–30, 34, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 63, 161 breakfast questionnaire 25–27 cue word technique 22–24, 27 Gestalt psychology 52, 53, 56 H

D

Dewey, John 47, 50–52 dimensional model 108

E

early childhood memories 37, 148 ecological approach to the study of cognition 58 ecological validity 58

Habermas, Tilmann 46, 100–105, 142–145 Henri, Catherine 18, 28–33, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 63, 161, 162 Henri, Victor 18, 28–33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 63, 161, 162 highly superior autobiographical memory. See hyperthymestic syndrome

Index

high points 141 Homo neanderthalensis 3 Homo sapiens 3 hyperthymestic syndrome 147

I

identity 13, 44, 61, 65, 73, 77, 79, 81, 109 Individual psychology 28, 29, 31 infantile amnesia. See childhood amnesia involuntary autobiographical memories 73, 74, 79

J

James, William 47–49

K

175

M

memoires 8 memories viewed from outside 41 memories viewed from within 41 memory intermediaries 10, 170 mental associations 21–24, 63, 161 mental time travel 65, 162 Montaigne, Michel de 7 N

natural selection 131 negativity bias 148, 151, 153 Neisser, Ulric 12, 18, 41, 56, 57–61, 62, 63, 94, 127, 128 O

observer memories 41 overgeneral autobiographical memory 77, 80

Koffka, Kurt 53 P L

language ontogenetic development of 68–69 origin of 140 life stories causal coherence 103, 104 cultural coherence 102, 104 life story schema 104, 105 temporal coherence 102, 104 thematic coherence 102, 104, 113 low points 141 Luria, Alexander 116–119

Pennebaker, James W. 145, 146 personal semantic memories 64 positivity bias 148, 149, 151, 153 prehistoric rock art 2, 3 Psychoanalysis 13, 34, 36, 41, 44, 45, 127, 145, 148, 164, 165 R

redemption stories 141, 142 reminiscence bump 9, 73, 79 repression 37, 40, 43, 44, 148, 162 Rimé, Bernard 73, 136, 137, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 6–9 Rubin, David C. 9, 11, 28, 41, 62, 63, 66–69, 74, 97–99

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Index

S

screen memories 35, 37, 40–43, 148, 161 self-continuity 103, 143–145 chronological self-continuity 144 retrospective self-continuity 144 self-memory system model 69–72 autobiographical memory knowledge base 70, 71 correspondence 71 self-coherence 71 working self 70 semantic memory 55, 64, 77, 81, 162 sense images 22 Smorti, Andrea 113–115, 120 social sharing of emotional autobiographical memories 73, 79, 136–138, 167 primary social sharing 137 secondary social sharing 137

Structuralism 29, 46–47, 52

T

textual coding systems 110 third-person memories 41 Titchener, Edward 29, 46, 47 traumatic autobiographical memories 73, 77, 79, 80, 131–132 Tulving, Endel 51, 55, 56 turning points 141, 143, 144

V

visual imagery 20, 26, 27, 65, 161

W

Watson, John Broadus 53, 54, 57 working memory 66, 70, 119, 120 Wundt, Wilhelm 29, 46–48, 57