scholarly journals Temporal Self-Extension: Implications for Temporal Comparison and Autobiographical Memory

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Grabowski ◽  
Philip Broemer

Abstract Research on temporal comparison has shown that people dissociate themselves from their past to attain a positive self view. Social comparison research has demonstrated that the distinctness of contextually activated information determines whether a recalled self exerts assimilation or contrast effects on the current self. However, hardly any study addressed individual differences. Also, very little is known about whether the ease or difficulty to date past events and experiences influences current self-judgments. We present a new scale capturing the degree of the current self time extension. Three studies support the notion that temporal self-extension determines how past selves are accessed and processed, regarding both the abstractness with which self-knowledge is retrieved and the experienced temporal distance to the past. These findings have important implications for temporal as well as social comparison processes.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Palombo ◽  
Signy Sheldon ◽  
Brian Levine

Although humans have a remarkable capacity to recall a wealth of detail from the past, there are marked inter-individual differences in the quantity and quality of our mnemonic experiences. Such differences in autobiographical memory may appear self-evident, yet there has been little research on this topic. In this review, we synthesize an emerging body of research regarding individual differences in autobiographical memory. We focus on two syndromes that fall at the extreme of the ‘remembering’ dimension, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) and Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). We also discuss findings from research on less extreme individual differences in autobiographical memory. This avenue of research is pivotal for a full description of the behavioral and neural substrates of autobiographical memory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (7) ◽  
pp. 1637-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A Dewhurst ◽  
Rachel J Anderson ◽  
Donna M Berry ◽  
Sarah R Garner

Previous research has highlighted the wide individual variability in susceptibility to the false memories produced by the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) procedure. This study investigated whether susceptibility to false memories is influenced by individual differences in the specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval. Memory specificity was measured using the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT). Memory specificity did not correlate with correct recognition, but a specific retrieval style was positively correlated with levels of false recognition. It is proposed that the contextual details that frequently accompany false memories of non-studied lures are more accessible in individuals with specific retrieval styles.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kentaro Oba ◽  
Motoaki Sugiura

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, has attracted attention in the fields of psychology and marketing in recent years. Although these studies have identified what nostalgia is, including its triggers and functions, the question of how nostalgia is induced remains unanswered. In this article, we review existing psychological models and recent neuroimaging studies that have investigated the neural correlates of nostalgia and propose a provisional framework of nostalgia induction. The multilevel memory‒reward coactivation framework expects that different types of autobiographical memory (AM), such as episodic AM and semantic AM, activate the associated mesolimbic reward system. This framework also assumes a working self, a complex set of active goals and associated self-images, which enables us to explain individual differences in nostalgia experience by influencing what is remembered and how the retrieved information is evaluated. This framework is advantageous in that it can integrate existing psychological models into one model and can explain individual differences in nostalgia that are important for the use of nostalgia, especially in clinical situations.


Author(s):  
Karen Salmon

Strong theory and research implicates parent–child conversations about the past in the child’s development of critical skills, including autobiographical memory and understanding of emotion and minds. Yet very little research has focused on associations between reminiscing and the development of childhood psychopathology. This chapter considers what is known about reminiscing between parents and children where there is anxiety or conduct problems. These findings provide clues as to how children come to manifest difficulties in autobiographical memory and emotion competence. Thereafter, the text reviews studies that have attempted to alter the style and content of parent–child reminiscing in clinical populations. The full implications of parent–child reminiscing, as a rich context for children’s development, have yet to be realized in clinically relevant research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Kristina C. Backer ◽  
Heather Bortfeld

A debate over the past decade has focused on the so-called bilingual advantage—the idea that bilingual and multilingual individuals have enhanced domain-general executive functions, relative to monolinguals, due to competition-induced monitoring of both processing and representation from the task-irrelevant language(s). In this commentary, we consider a recent study by Pot, Keijzer, and de Bot (2018), which focused on the relationship between individual differences in language usage and performance on an executive function task among multilingual older adults. We discuss their approach and findings in light of a more general movement towards embracing complexity in this domain of research, including individuals’ sociocultural context and position in the lifespan. The field increasingly considers interactions between bilingualism/multilingualism and cognition, employing measures of language use well beyond the early dichotomous perspectives on language background. Moreover, new measures of bilingualism and analytical approaches are helping researchers interrogate the complexities of specific processing issues. Indeed, our review of the bilingualism/multilingualism literature confirms the increased appreciation researchers have for the range of factors—beyond whether someone speaks one, two, or more languages—that impact specific cognitive processes. Here, we highlight some of the most salient of these, and incorporate suggestions for a way forward that likewise encompasses neural perspectives on the topic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 239821282110119
Author(s):  
Ian A. Clark ◽  
Martina F. Callaghan ◽  
Nikolaus Weiskopf ◽  
Eleanor A. Maguire

Individual differences in scene imagination, autobiographical memory recall, future thinking and spatial navigation have long been linked with hippocampal structure in healthy people, although evidence for such relationships is, in fact, mixed. Extant studies have predominantly concentrated on hippocampal volume. However, it is now possible to use quantitative neuroimaging techniques to model different properties of tissue microstructure in vivo such as myelination and iron. Previous work has linked such measures with cognitive task performance, particularly in older adults. Here we investigated whether performance on scene imagination, autobiographical memory, future thinking and spatial navigation tasks was associated with hippocampal grey matter myelination or iron content in young, healthy adult participants. Magnetic resonance imaging data were collected using a multi-parameter mapping protocol (0.8 mm isotropic voxels) from a large sample of 217 people with widely-varying cognitive task scores. We found little evidence that hippocampal grey matter myelination or iron content were related to task performance. This was the case using different analysis methods (voxel-based quantification, partial correlations), when whole brain, hippocampal regions of interest, and posterior:anterior hippocampal ratios were examined, and across different participant sub-groups (divided by gender and task performance). Variations in hippocampal grey matter myelin and iron levels may not, therefore, help to explain individual differences in performance on hippocampal-dependent tasks, at least in young, healthy individuals.


2014 ◽  
pp. 145-162
Author(s):  
David B. Pillemer ◽  
Amy B. Desrochers ◽  
Caroline M. Ebanks

Author(s):  
J. Ramsay ◽  
M. Hair ◽  
K. V. Renaud

The way humans interact with one another in the 21st Century has been markedly influenced by the integration of a number of different communication technologies into everyday life, and the pace of communication has increased hugely over the past twenty-five years. This chapter introduces work by the authors that considers the ways one communication-based technology, namely e-mail, has impacted workers’ “thinking time”, and become both a “workplace stressor” and an indispensable communications tool. Our research involved both a longitudinal exploration (three months) of the daily e-mail interactions of a number of workers, and a survey of individuals’ perceptions of how e-mail influences their communication behaviour in general, and their work-related communication in particular. Initial findings, in the form of individual differences, are reported here. The findings are presented in relation to the way workplace stressors have changed over the past quarter century.


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