Mood regulation upon remembering open memories

ABSTRACTOpen autobiographical memories are personal life experiences on which an individual does not have closure. It is unknown whether emotion regulation strategies through recalling positive memories are active after recalling open memories. The current study aims to explore the presence of emotion regulation for open memories while testing for the interference of depressive tendencies. The participants were asked to remember an open memory and answer questions on phenomenological features of this event. Later, they recalled a memory without any restrictions and answered similar phenomenological questions. The results showed that the subsequent memories were significantly more closed, more positive, and less intense during retrieval than open memories. Additionally, open memories were reported as involuntarily rehearsed more frequently than the subsequent memories. Depressive tendencies were unrelated to emotion regulation after open memory recall. This study provides insight into the emotion regulation strategies after remembering open memories and how depression could be related to this strategy.

A deeper dive into the reminiscence bump: further evidence for the life script hypothesis

When older adults are asked to recall personal events that occurred at any point in their lives, memories from late adolescence and early adulthood are overrepresented, forming a reminiscence bump. Thematic analyses have indicated that the bump memories that emerge in response to such prompts frequently represent milestone events that are consistent with cultural life scripts. This study employed a novel method that explicitly targeted only memories of events occurring during late adolescence and early adulthood, allowing in-depth exploration of the contents and potential organising principles associated with these memories. Older adults (N = 197) completed an on-line survey in which they described 7 memories of personal events that had occurred at any time between the ages of 19 and 34. Content analyses indicated that memories frequently portrayed landmark events, consistent with cultural life script theory. After completing the memory task, participants who had been married or had their first child between ages 19 and 34 provided their age at the time of these events. Temporal distributions of memory ages centred on participants' ages at the time of their first marriage or childbirth also were consistent with the life script explanation for the reminiscence bump.

What characterizes the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory? New answers to an old question

The reminiscence bump represents one of the most robust findings in autobiographical memory research. As such, it has led to a number of different explanatory accounts that aim to elucidate it. Because most of these accounts have received some empirical support, it has been assumed that they may equally contribute to the explanation of the reminiscence bump phenomenon. In the present study, we used a multilevel multinomial mixed-effects model to examine the predictive power of explanatory variables selected from different accounts simultaneously. Analyses were based on 2,813 autobiographical memories that 97 older adults aged between 60 and 88 years reported in response to 31 cue words. Overall, the predictor variables (i.e., first-time experience, importance and emotional valence) meaningfully distinguished memories from the reminiscence bump from memories from life periods before and after. These effects, however, did not always go into the hypothesized directions. In addition, results of a Commonality Analysis indicated that although the explanatory accounts considered in the present study draw on qualities of autobiographical memories (within-person effects), they might be more useful in explaining why individuals differ in the number of autobiographical memories reported from the reminiscence bump period (between-person effects). Taken together, our findings are in line with a more integrative view on the reminiscence bump that, additionally, emphasizes the individual (e.g., the life-story account).

Introduction to the Cognitive Abilities Account for the Reminiscence Bump in the Temporal Distribution of Autobiographical Memory

People tend to recall more specific personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods, a finding known as the reminiscence bump. Several explanations have suggested that events from the reminiscence bump are especially emotional, important, or positive, but studies using cue words have not found support for these claims. An alternative account postulates that cognitive abilities function optimally in adolescence and early adulthood, which may cause more memories to be stored in those lifetime periods. Although other studies have previously discussed the cognitive abilities account as a possible explanation for the reminiscence bump, it was only recently shown that cognitive abilities are indeed related to autobiographical memory performance. When this recent finding is combined with previous findings that cognitive abilities as well as autobiographical memory function optimally in adolescence and early adulthood, they suggest that the cognitive abilities account is a promising explanation for the reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of word-cued memories. However, because the account does not aim to explain the reminiscence bump in the distribution of highly significant events, it should be regarded as complementary to the existing accounts.