Gender differences in autobiographical memory for childhood emotional experiences

Rat Models in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Research: Strengths, Limitations, and Implications for Translational Studies

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a multifaceted psychiatric disorder triggered by traumatic events, leading to prolonged psychological distress and varied symptoms. Rat models have been extensively used to explore the biological, behavioral, and neurochemical underpinnings of PTSD. This review critically examines the strengths and limitations of commonly used rat models, such as single prolonged stress (SPS), stress-re-stress (S-R), and predator-based paradigms, in replicating human PTSD pathology. While these models provide valuable insights into neuroendocrine responses, genetic predispositions, and potential therapeutic targets, they face challenges in capturing the full complexity of PTSD, particularly in terms of ethological relevance and translational validity. We assess the degree to which these models mimic the neurobiological and behavioral aspects of human PTSD, highlighting areas where they succeed and where they fall short. This review also discusses future directions in refining these models to improve their utility for translational research, aiming to bridge the gap between preclinical findings and clinical applications.

Gender Differences in the Cortical Distribution of Corpus Callosum Fibers

Introduction Research on gender-based disparities in human brain structure has spanned over a century, yielding conflicting results and ongoing debate. While some studies indicate minimal distinctions, others consistently highlight differences in the corpus callosum (CC), even after accounting for average brain size. Methods Diverging from previous approaches, this study examines the morphology of the entire CC fiber rather than solely focusing on its midsagittal structure. Utilizing advanced neuroimaging techniques and generalized Q-imaging tractography, CC streamlines were constructed to assess gender differences in fractional anisotropy (FA), volume ratio, and cortical distribution. Student's t-test was employed to examine the disparities in FA between gender groups, while gender-based distinctions in the normalized volume of the CC and its segments were assessed using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), with absolute whole white matter volume serving as a covariate. Results No significant gender-based disparities were found in either FA or normalized CC volume. While females exhibited consistently larger normalized volume CC streamlines than males, these differences lost statistical significance after adjusting for absolute total white matter volume as a covariate. Nonetheless, CC streamlines in females displayed a broader spatial distribution, encompassing various cortical regions, including the bilateral prefrontal cortex (medial and lateral surfaces), as well as medial parietal and temporal regions. Conclusion This study elucidates gender-related variations in the morphology of the brain's white matter pathways, indicating a more widespread cortical distribution of CC fibers in females compared to males. However, the study underscores the need for further investigations into connectivity patterns to fully elucidate these gender-based disparities.

“I remember the attack”: a pilot study investigating flashbulb memory in individuals with schizophrenia

Flashbulb memories are autobiographical memories for important and emotional events, which have the particularity of being at the intersection of personal and public events. Autobiographical memory impairments are highly prevalent in schizophrenia, a psychiatric condition intrinsically linked to self-disorders. Thus, we aimed to evaluate flashbulb and event memory functioning in individuals with schizophrenia. Twenty-four individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and 25 control participants were tested on a flashbulb memory questionnaire about the July 14th, 2016, Nice (France) terrorist attack, including questions on flashbulb and event memory, certainty, vividness, rehearsal, emotion, novelty, consequentiality, implication, and importance. Participants also underwent cognitive assessments. Analysis showed lower scores for both flashbulb and event memories in patients compared to control participants. Subjective ratings of the phenomenological characteristics of flashbulb memory were similar between the two groups overall. However, individuals with schizophrenia reported having higher levels of emotion when they first learned about the attack compared to the control group. Our results replicate findings of impaired autobiographical memory functioning in schizophrenia and extend these findings to public events. Our findings also indicate that flashbulb memories may lead to substantial contextual recall in schizophrenia patients and that collective memories, such as a terrorist attack, can have a profound emotional impact on patients.

Personal characteristics of World War Two survivor offspring related to the presence of indirect intrusions

Background: A substantial proportion of clinical World War Two survivor offspring reports intrusions about war events they did not experience themselves. Objective: To help identify factors that contribute to the development of such indirect intrusions (i.e. intrusions about non-self-experienced traumatic events), we examined the personal characteristics of survivor offspring that were related to the presence of indirect intrusions. To explore the specificity of these relationships, we compared characteristics related to the presence of indirect and direct intrusions (i.e. intrusions about self-experienced traumatic events). Methods: Participants (N = 98) were post-war offspring of World War Two survivors in treatment in one of two clinics specialized in mental health services for war victims. We assessed the presence of indirect and direct intrusions as well as the following personal characteristics: gender, education level, trait dissociation, affect intensity, attentional control, mental imagery, fantasy proneness, and current psychopathology. Results: Reports of indirect intrusions were more frequent in individuals high in fantasy proneness, trait dissociation, and current psychopathology. Reports of direct intrusions were more frequent in women, individuals scoring high on trait dissociation, affect intensity, and current psychopathology. Fantasy proneness was a unique correlate of indirect intrusions. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the idea that intrusions are the result of (re)constructive processes affected by several factors including personal characteristics.

HIGHLIGHTS

Offspring of World War Two survivors often experience indirect intrusions.We examined personal characteristics related to indirect and direct intrusions.Fantasy proneness was the best predictor of indirect intrusions.Gender was the best predictor of direct intrusions.

High emotional experience during autobiographical retrieval in women with Korsakoff syndrome

INTRODUCTION

In this exploratory study, we investigated gender differences regarding autobiographical memory in KS.

METHOD

We invited 33 patients with KS and 35 matched control participants to retrieve autobiographical memories and, afterward, to rate mental time travel during retrieval, emotional value and importance of memories.

RESULTS

Analysis demonstrated lower specificity (i.e., lower ability to retrieve memories situated in a specific time and space), mental time travel, and importance in patients with KS compared to control participants. Analysis also demonstrated no significant difference between patients with KS and control participants regarding emotion. Critically, analysis demonstrated no significant differences neither women and men with KS, nor between women and men in the control group, regarding autobiographical specificity, mental time travel, or importance. However, women with KS attributed higher emotional value for memories compared to men with KS, and the same results were observed in the control group.

DISCUSSION

These findings demonstrate that the higher emotional experience during autobiographical retrieval, as observed in the general population, can also be observed in KS.

Gender identity better than sex explains individual differences in episodic and semantic components of autobiographical memory: An fMRI study

Advances in the literature of sex-related differences in autobiographical memory increasingly tend to highlight the importance of psychosocial factors such as gender identity, which may explain these differences better than sex as a biological factor. To date, however, none of these behavioral studies have investigated this hypothesis using neuroimaging. The purpose of this fMRI study is to examine for the first time sex and gender identity-related differences in episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in healthy participants (M=19, W=18). No sex-related differences were found; however, sex-related effects of masculine and feminine gender identity were identified in men and women independently. These results confirm the hypothesis that differences in episodic and semantic autobiographical memory are best explained by gender but are an interaction between biological sex and gender identity and extend these findings to the field of neuroimaging. We discuss the importance of hormonal factors to be taken into consideration in the future.

Eavesdropping on Autobiographical Memory: A Naturalistic Observation Study of Older Adults' Memory Sharing in Daily Conversations

The retrieval of autobiographical memories is an integral part of everyday social interactions. Prior laboratory research has revealed that older age is associated with a reduction in the retrieval of autobiographical episodic memories, and the ability to elaborate these memories with episodic details. However, how age-related reductions in episodic specificity unfold in everyday social contexts remains largely unknown. Also, constraints of the laboratory-based approach have limited our understanding of how autobiographical semantic memory is linked to older age. To address these gaps in knowledge, we used a smartphone application known as the Electronically Activated Recorder, or “EAR,” to unobtrusively capture real-world conversations over 4 days. In a sample of 102 cognitively normal older adults, we extracted instances where memories and future thoughts were shared by the participants, and we scored the shared episodic memories and future thoughts for their make-up of episodic and semantic detail. We found that older age was associated with a reduction in real-world sharing of autobiographical episodic and semantic memories. We also found that older age was linked to less episodically and semantically detailed descriptions of autobiographical episodic memories. Frequency and level of detail of shared future thoughts yielded weaker relationships with age, which may be related to the low frequency of future thoughts in general. Similar to laboratory research, there was no correlation between autobiographical episodic detail sharing and a standard episodic memory test. However, in contrast to laboratory studies, episodic detail production while sharing autobiographical episodic memories was weakly related to episodic detail production while describing future events, unrelated to working memory, and not different between men and women. Overall, our findings provide novel evidence of how older age relates to episodic specificity when autobiographical memories are assessed unobtrusively and objectively “in the wild.”

Gender differences in the experienced emotional intensity of experimentally induced memories of negative scenes

It is well documented that women have an increased risk of emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Such disorders are typically characterized by intrusive memories and rumination of past events, but findings are mixed as to whether women have enhanced access to memories of emotional events. Some studies have found that women, compared with men, report more frequent and more intense memories of emotionally stressful events, whereas other studies have failed to replicate this effect. These conflicting findings may reflect the use of different memory sampling techniques (e.g., retrospective vs. experimental data) and limited control for factors associated with both gender and emotional memory. The purpose of the present study was to investigate gender differences in memory for emotionally negative events, using three different sampling methods, while at the same time controlling for parameters that might co-vary with gender. Consistent with some previous studies, we found that women and men did not differ in their frequencies of emotionally negative involuntary memories. However, women rated their memories as more intense and arousing than men did, and women also reported higher increases in state anxiety after retrieval. Female gender accounted for unique variance in the emotional intensity and subjective arousal associated with negative memories, when controlling for other theoretically derived variables. The findings provide evidence that female gender is associated with a stronger emotional response to memories of negative events, but not that women remember such events more frequently than men do.

Recognizing images: The role of motivational significance, complexity, social content, age, and gender

Memory for affective events plays an important role in determining people's behavior and well-being. Its determinants are far from being completely understood. We investigated how recognition memory for affective pictures depends on pictures' motivational significance (valence and arousal), complexity (figure-ground compositions vs. scenes), and social content (pictures with people vs. without people) and on observers' age and gender. Younger, middle-aged, and older adults viewed 84 pictures depicting real-life situations. After a break, the participants viewed 72 pictures, half of which had been viewed previously and half of which were novel, and were asked to endorse whether each picture was novel or had been presented previously. Hits, false alarms, and overall performance (discrimination accuracy) were our dependent variables. The main findings were that, across participants, recognition memory was better for unpleasant than pleasant pictures and for pictures depicting people than pictures without people. Low-arousal pictures were more accurately recognized than high-arousal pictures, and this effect was significantly larger among middle-aged and older adults than younger adults. Recognition memory worsened across adulthood, and this decline was steeper among men than women. Middle-aged and older women outperformed their male counterparts. This study suggests that how well we are able to successfully discriminate previously seen pictorial stimuli from novel stimuli depends on several pictures' properties related to their motivational significance and content, and on observer's age and gender.

The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART): A Measure of Individual Differences in Autobiographical Memory

We introduce the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART) to examine individual differences in how well people think they remember personal events. The ART comprises seven theoretically motivated and empirically supported interrelated aspects of recollecting autobiographical memories: reliving, vividness, visual imagery, scene, narrative coherence, life-story relevance, and rehearsal. Desirable psychometric properties of the ART are established by confirmatory factor analyses demonstrating that items probing each of the seven components form well-defined, yet highly correlated, factors that are indicators of a single underlying second-order factor. The ART shows high test-retest reliability over delays averaging three weeks and correlates meaningfully with a test of different categories of memory. Overall, the findings document that autobiographical recollection is a dimension that varies among individuals. The ART forms a reliable and easily administered autobiographical memory test that will help to integrate autobiographical memory research with fields generally concerned with individual differences, such as health and personality psychology.

Sex differences in sleep and sleep loss-induced cognitive deficits: The influence of gonadal hormones

Males and females can respond differentially to the same environmental stimuli and experimental conditions. Chronic sleep loss is a frequent and growing problem in many modern societies and has a broad variety of negative outcomes for health and well-being. While much has been done to explore the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation (SD) on cognition in both human and animal studies over the last few decades, very little attention has been paid to the part played by sex differences and gonadal steroids in respect of changes in cognitive functions caused by sleep loss. The effects of gonadal hormones on sleep regulation and cognitive performances are well established. Reduced gonadal function in menopausal women and elderly men is associated with sleep disturbances and cognitive decline as well as dementia, which suggests that sex steroids play a key role in modulating these conditions. Finding out whether there are sex differences in respect of the effect of insufficient sleep on cognition, and how neuroendocrine mediators influence cognitive impairment induced by SD could provide valuable insights into the best therapies for each sex. In this review, we aim to highlight the involvement of sex differences and gonadal hormone status on the severity of cognitive deficits induced by sleep deficiency in both human and animal studies.

Sex differences in intrusive memories following trauma

Background

A key mechanism thought to underlie Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is enhanced emotional memory consolidation. Recent evidence in healthy controls revealed that women have greater negative memory consolidation following stress relative to men. This study examined emotional memory consolidation in women and men with PTSD, and in trauma-exposed and non-trauma controls to test the hypothesis that emotionally negative memory consolidation would be greater in women with PTSD.

Method

One hundred and forty-seven men and women (47 with PTSD, 49 trauma-exposed controls, and 51 non-trauma controls) completed an emotional memory task where they looked at negative, neutral and positive images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Delayed recall and an intrusive memory diary were completed two days later.

Results

Women displayed greater recall, and reported more negative intrusive memories than men. A gender x group interaction effect showed that both women with PTSD and trauma-exposed women reported more intrusive memories than women without trauma exposure or men.

Conclusion

This study provided preliminary evidence of sex differences in intrusive memories in those with PTSD as well as those with a history of trauma exposure. Future research should include measures of sex hormones to further examine sex differences on memory consolidation in the context of trauma exposure and PTSD.

Retrospective Report Revisited: Long-Term Recall in European American Mothers Moderated by Developmental Domain, Child Age, Person, and Metric of Agreement

Retrospective parental reports are common in the developmental science literature, but their validity has been questioned. We investigated the consistency of retrospective maternal recall by comparing original with retrospective maternal reports in three domains (maternal cognitions, mother-reported child and mother behaviors, and observed child and mother behaviors) at three retention intervals (12, 14, and 15 years) in two metrics (individual standing and group level). In a longitudinal study, European American mothers (N=46) provided data when their children were 5, 20, and 48 months of age and retrospective recall data for each age when their children were 16 years. Overall, mothers recalled similar average mean levels (49% of variables explored) or better mean levels (41% of variables) retrospectively; better levels indicating a positive recollection bias. At least moderate consistency in relative standing was evident for 52% of variables. Still, the findings varied somewhat by domain, child age, and person. Retrospective parental reports can provide accurate accounts of the past, but should be used with caution, as their consistency varies and is specific to moderating factors.

The Role of Sex in Memory Function: Considerations and Recommendations in the Context of Exercise

There is evidence to suggest that biological sex plays a critical role in memory function, with sex differentially influencing memory type. In this review, we detail the current evidence evaluating sex-specific effects on various memory types. We also discuss potential mechanisms that explain these sex-specific effects, which include sex differences in neuroanatomy, neurochemical differences, biological differences, and cognitive and affect-related differences. Central to this review, we also highlight that, despite the established sex differences in memory, there is little work directly comparing whether males and females have a differential exercise-induced effect on memory function. As discussed herein, such a differential effect is plausible given the clear sex-specific effects on memory, exercise response, and molecular mediators of memory. We emphasize that future work should be carefully powered to detect sex differences. Future research should also examine these potential exercise-related sex-specific effects for various memory types and exercise intensities and modalities. This will help enhance our understanding of whether sex indeed moderates the effects of exercise and memory function, and as such, will improve our understanding of whether sex-specific, memory-enhancing interventions should be developed, implemented, and evaluated.

"You Blame Me, Therefore I Blame Me": The Importance of First Disclosure Partner Responses on Trauma-Related Cognitions and Distress

Trauma recovery processes may be understood within a socioecological model. Individual factors (such as sex of the survivor) and microsystem factors (including trauma characteristics) have been studied extensively. However, there is a paucity of research examining the effects of macrosystem factors on the impact of trauma-especially examining how the response of the first person to whom the survivor disclosed affects trauma-related cognitions and distress. Sixty-three college student participants reported a history of disclosing at least one traumatic event in an online, anonymous survey. Participants also provided information on the first person they told about the trauma, the social reactions of that person, general social reactions to trauma disclosure, the participants' trauma-related cognitions and psychological distress (PTSD, other mental health issues), details about the traumatic event, and basic demographic information. Paired sample t tests showed that participants experienced the responses of the first person they told about their trauma as more favorable than the responses of the all of the people to whom they told about the event. Women and survivors of non-interpersonal trauma reported more supportive responses than men and survivors of interpersonal trauma. Hierarchical linear regressions showed that interpersonal trauma and victim blame on the part of the first person the survivor told were associated with more negative trauma-related cognitions. Interpersonal trauma, emotional support, and victim blame were associated with a greater degree of trauma-related distress. The results suggest that participants perceived the response of the first person they told as more beneficial than the response of the rest of their exosystem. However, the reactions of the first person the survivor told differed based on the sex of the survivor and the type of trauma they experienced. Consistent with previous research, interpersonal trauma and victim blame by the first person the survivor told about the trauma were associated with more trauma-related distress and negative cognitions. Trauma-related distress was also associated with greater emotional support by the disclosure partner. The results support the use of the socioeological model to better understand the complex nature of trauma recovery and have implications for prevention.

Self-regulation and the specificity of autobiographical memory in offenders

Certain clinical populations exhibit an Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory (OAM), characterized by difficulty remembering specific events. One study has observed OAM for positive events in a group of offenders. This study analyzed the stability of the valence effect in the OAM of offenders, the executive control impairments facilitating OAM in offenders, and the relationship of self-esteem and social desirability with AM specificity. The specificity (Autobiographical Memory Test) and emotional properties of the AMs of 59 prisoners (30 men, 29 women) and a control group (29 men, 30 women) were compared. Social desirability, depression symptoms, self-esteem and executive functions (Mazes, Stroop, Verbal Fluency) were assessed. The offenders recalled fewer specific positive AMs than controls, and did not perceive the emotional intensity of their negative AMs to decrease over time, unlike the controls. The offenders' recall of specific negative AMs seemed to influence negatively their performance in the subsequent executive control tasks. Dysfunctional coping strategies in offenders were related to OAM, but not social desirability or self-esteem.

Association between intrusive negative autobiographical memories and depression: A meta-analytic investigation

The study investigated several associations between depression and intrusive negative autobiographical memories. A systematic literature search identified 23 eligible studies (N = 2,582), which provided 59 effect sizes. Separate meta-analyses indicated that depression was moderately, positively associated with intrusive memory frequency, memory distress, maladaptive memory appraisals, memory avoidance, and memory rumination. Intrusive memory vividness was not significantly associated with depression. There were insufficient data to examine the relationship between depression and memory vantage perspective. Between-study heterogeneity was high for intrusive memory frequency and memory avoidance, and the percentage of females in studies significantly moderated the relationship between these variables and depression. An additional exploratory meta-analysis (3 studies; N = 257) indicated that intrusive memories were experienced more frequently by those with posttraumatic stress disorder than those with depression. Overall, the findings suggest that intrusive memories warrant clinical attention as they may contribute to the maintenance of depressive symptomatology.

Emerging Directions in Emotional Episodic Memory

Building upon the existing literature on emotional memory, the present review examines emerging evidence from brain imaging investigations regarding four research directions: (1) Social Emotional Memory, (2) The Role of Emotion Regulation in the Impact of Emotion on Memory, (3) The Impact of Emotion on Associative or Relational Memory, and (4) The Role of Individual Differences in Emotional Memory. Across these four domains, available evidence demonstrates that emotion- and memory-related medial temporal lobe brain regions (amygdala and hippocampus, respectively), together with prefrontal cortical regions, play a pivotal role during both encoding and retrieval of emotional episodic memories. This evidence sheds light on the neural mechanisms of emotional memories in healthy functioning, and has important implications for understanding clinical conditions that are associated with negative affective biases in encoding and retrieving emotional memories.

The significance of negative correlations in brain connectivity

Understanding the modularity of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-derived brain networks or "connectomes" can inform the study of brain function organization. However, fMRI connectomes additionally involve negative edges, which may not be optimally accounted for by existing approaches to modularity that variably threshold, binarize, or arbitrarily weight these connections. Consequently, many existing Q maximization-based modularity algorithms yield variable modular structures. Here, we present an alternative complementary approach that exploits how frequent the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal correlation between two nodes is negative. We validated this novel probability-based modularity approach on two independent publicly-available resting-state connectome data sets (the Human Connectome Project [HCP] and the 1,000 functional connectomes) and demonstrated that negative correlations alone are sufficient in understanding resting-state modularity. In fact, this approach (a) permits a dual formulation, leading to equivalent solutions regardless of whether one considers positive or negative edges; (b) is theoretically linked to the Ising model defined on the connectome, thus yielding modularity result that maximizes data likelihood. Additionally, we were able to detect novel and consistent sex differences in modularity in both data sets. As data sets like HCP become widely available for analysis by the neuroscience community at large, alternative and perhaps more advantageous computational tools to understand the neurobiological information of negative edges in fMRI connectomes are increasingly important.

Does Who I Am or How I Regulate Matter? Consequences of Manipulation of Emotion Regulation Strategies

This study experimentally examined the affective and social consequences of emotion regulation in men and women from young adulthood to old age. Participants were instructed to reappraise, suppress, or given no instructions while recalling a negative memory about their romantic relationship. Participants were 191 adults in a Trinidadian lifespan sample. Engaging in suppression resulted in higher relationship satisfaction, particularly for women, whereas engaging in reappraisal reduced negative affect for middle-aged versus younger adults. Reappraisal was, however, particularly consequential for young women who experienced higher levels of negative affect compared with men of the same age and older aged women. Regardless of instructions, older adults experienced higher relationship satisfaction, higher positive and lower negative affect than younger aged adults. Results are discussed considering the positivity effect for older adults, and how the current and historical climate of Trinidad influences the way women regulate their emotions.

Traumatic Impact Predicts Long-Term Memory for Documented Child Sexual Abuse

Prospective studies of adults' memories of documented child sexual abuse (CSA) reveal that the majority of individuals remember their victimization. However, the accuracy of these memories has rarely been investigated scientifically. The present study examined predictors of memory accuracy and errors 12 to 21 years after abuse ended for individuals with legal experiences resulting from documented CSA. Severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology was positively associated with memory accuracy. However, individuals nominating CSA as their most traumatic life event exhibited relatively accurate memory regardless of indicators of PTSD. Predictors of memory errors were also identified (e.g., less maternal support). These results indicate that, in addition to understanding the role of traditional cognitive factors, understanding an event's traumatic impact is important for predicting the accuracy of long-term memory for reported CSA.

Retrospective assessment of childhood ADHD symptoms for diagnosis in adults: validity of a short 8-item version of the Wender-Utah Rating Scale

The Wender-Utah Rating Scale (WURS) is a widely used self-report instrument for retrospective assessment of childhood ADHD. However, many WURS items are not specific to ADHD. Here, we investigated the effect of excluding these items on the performance of the WURS in predicting adult ADHD based on previous diagnosis and current clinically significant symptoms. The study was conducted on a sample of adults (n = 1014; 48 % male) participating in a family-based investigation of ADHD. Participants completed the 61-item WURS questionnaire and the 66-item Conners Adult ADHD Rating Scale. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to compare the performance of the eight-item WURS (WURS-8) and the longer WURS-25 in predicting previous ADHD diagnosis and current clinically significant ADHD symptoms. WURS-8 and WURS-25 have approximately the same power to predict adult ADHD, based on either previous diagnosis or current symptoms (area under the ROC curves >0.8). WURS-8 performs at least as well as the longer WURS-25 in predicting adult ADHD. This 8-item questionnaire is thus a valid instrument and is especially useful for screening for ADHD in large epidemiological samples.

Life Review: Implementation, Theory, Research, and Therapy

A selective literature review of publications on life review generated ideas on implementation, theory, research, and therapy. The review begins by differentiating life review from reminiscence, and summarizing ways to conduct a life review. A dozen theories that have been influenced by the life review technique are presented, with a focus placed on Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development. Erikson's theory has not only been influenced by the life review, it has had a major impact on life review research. Three research topics are discussed: Erikson's ego integrity versus despair in old age, demographical differences in the practice of life reviews, and the impact of conducting life reviews on staff in institutional settings. Most practitioners of life reviews are institutional staff, university students, and family members, many of whom have had limited prior training. The prospect of a certified life review training program is discussed.

Sex Differences in Emotional Awareness

The present study examined sex differences in the complexity and differentiation of people’s representations of emotional experience. Female participants from seven different samples, ranging in age, scholastic performance, socioeconomic status, and culture, scored higher on a performance test of emotional awareness than did male participants. Women consistently displayed more complexity and dif ferentiation in their articulations of emotional experiences than did men, even when the effect of verbal intelligence was controlled. Together, the findings suggest that a sex difference in display of emotional awareness is a stable, highly generalizable effect. Implications of these findings are presented.

Sex Differences in the Neural Correlates of Specific and General Autobiographical Memory

Autobiographical memory (AM) underlies the formation and temporal continuity over time of personal identity. The few studies on sex-related differences in AM suggest that men and women adopt different cognitive or emotional strategies when retrieving AMs. However, none of the previous works has taken into account the distinction between episodic autobiographical memory (EAM), consisting in the retrieval of specific events by means of mental time travel, and semantic autobiographical memory (SAM), which stores general personal events. Thus, it remains unclear whether differences in these strategies depend on the nature of the memory content to be retrieved. In the present study we employed functional MRI to examine brain activity underlying potential sex differences in EAM and SAM retrieval focusing on the differences in strategies related to the emotional aspects of memories while controlling for basic cognitive strategies. On the behavioral level, there was no significant sex difference in memory performances or subjective feature ratings of either type of AM. Activations common to men and women during AM retrieval were observed in a typical bilateral network comprising medial and lateral temporal regions, precuneus, occipital cortex as well as prefrontal cortex. Contrast analyses revealed that there was no difference between men and women in the EAM condition. In the SAM condition, women showed an increased activity, compared to men, in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal and precentral gyrus. Overall, these findings suggest that differential neural activations reflect sex-specific strategies related to emotional aspects of AMs, particularly regarding SAM. We propose that this pattern of activation during SAM retrieval reflects the cognitive cost linked to emotion regulation strategies recruited by women compared to men. These sex-related differences have interesting implications for understanding psychiatric disorders with differential sex prevalence and in which one of key features is overgenerality in AM.

Commitment in romantic relationships as a function of partners' encoding of important couple-related memories

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how significant couple-related events are encoded in the episodic memory of each partner of a romantic relationship and how they relate to each of these partners' level of commitment in an independent and additive fashion. Each partner of a couple reported a significant couple-related memory and rated their level of need satisfaction experienced during the event of the memory. In addition, each partner was shown his/her partner's memory and also rated their own level of need satisfaction for this event. Results showed that partners need satisfaction ratings of their own memory positively predicted their own commitment to the relationship directly (for women) as well as through their need satisfaction generally experienced in the relationship (for men). In addition, men's need satisfaction ratings of their own memory were associated with women's commitment while controlling for women's need satisfaction ratings of men's memory, but no such cross-partner effects were found for women. Overall, the findings shed light on an initial understanding of how a person's own memory of an event can impact another person's attitudes even when taking into account this other person's memory encoding of that same event.

The Centrality of Events Scale in Portuguese Adolescents: Validity Evidence Based on Internal Structure and on Relations to Other Variables

We explored the measurement model of the adolescent version of the Centrality of Event Scale and its invariance across community ( n = 1,079; 42.8% male), referred for foster care ( n = 205; 58.0% male), and detained ( n = 206 male) adolescent participants. Results indicated a three-factor measurement model, including all three functions that memories of significant life events may have, as a good fit to our data, particularly for male participants. This measurement model was invariant across boys taken from those different samples but not across gender. As for the short version of the instrument, a one-factor solution was the best fit to our data. It was invariant across boys taken from those different samples and across gender. Boys and girls expressed similar experiences, whereas community male adolescents reported the lowest impact of a meaningful event, in comparison with referred and with detained boys. These findings provide evidence on the validity of the scale for use with diverse adolescent samples, which may contribute for a better understanding of the impact that significant life events may have on the development of gender-specific and group-specific vulnerabilities.

Going global: the functions of autobiographical memory in cultural context

This special issue of Memory brings together research from around the globe, from Japanese, Chinese and East Indian cultures, to American and European societies, to the Caribbean, to Turkey and to Australia and New Zealand, which examines how and why people, from childhood to old age, remember the personal past in daily life. This journey highlights the important role of the cultural context in shaping the functional usages of autobiographical memory. We illuminate six major contributions of cross-cultural research to a broader and deeper understanding of the functions of autobiographical memory, and call attention to the filed that memory research must "go global."

The power of competition: Effects of social motivation on attention, sustained physical effort, and learning

Competition has often been implicated as a means to improve effort-based learning and attention. Two experiments examined the effects of competition on effort and memory. In Experiment 1, participants completed a physical effort task in which they were rewarded for winning an overall percentage, or for winning a competition they believed was against another player. In Experiment 2, participants completed a memory task in which they were rewarded for remembering an overall percentage of shapes, or more shapes than a “competitor.” We found that, in the physical effort task, participants demonstrated faster reaction times (RTs)—a previous indicator of increased attention—in the competitive environment. Moreover, individual differences predicted the salience of competition’s effect. Furthermore, male participants showed faster RTs and greater sustained effort as a result of a competitive environment, suggesting that males may be more affected by competition in physical effort tasks. However, in Experiment 2, participants remembered fewer shapes when competing, and later recalled less of these shapes during a post-test, suggesting that competition was harmful in our memory task. The different results from these two experiments suggest that competition can improve attention in a physical effort task, yet caution the use of competition in memory tasks.

Music evokes vivid autobiographical memories

Music is strongly intertwined with memories-for example, hearing a song from the past can transport you back in time, triggering the sights, sounds, and feelings of a specific event. This association between music and vivid autobiographical memory is intuitively apparent, but the idea that music is intimately tied with memories, seemingly more so than other potent memory cues (e.g., familiar faces), has not been empirically tested. Here, we compared memories evoked by music to those evoked by famous faces, predicting that music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) would be more vivid. Participants listened to 30 songs, viewed 30 faces, and reported on memories that were evoked. Memories were transcribed and coded for vividness as in Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J. F., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. [2002. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. Psychology and Aging, 17, 677-689]. In support of our hypothesis, MEAMs were more vivid than autobiographical memories evoked by faces. MEAMs contained a greater proportion of internal details and a greater number of perceptual details, while face-evoked memories contained a greater number of external details. Additionally, we identified sex differences in memory vividness: for both stimulus categories, women retrieved more vivid memories than men. The results show that music not only effectively evokes autobiographical memories, but that these memories are more vivid than those evoked by famous faces.

Memory and reward systems coproduce 'nostalgic' experiences in the brain

People sometimes experience an emotional state known as 'nostalgia', which involves experiencing predominantly positive emotions while remembering autobiographical events. Nostalgia is thought to play an important role in psychological resilience. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown involvement of memory and reward systems in such experiences. However, it remains unclear how these two systems are collaboratively involved with nostalgia experiences. Here, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of healthy females to investigate the relationship between memory-reward co-activation and nostalgia, using childhood-related visual stimuli. Moreover, we examined the factors constituting nostalgia and their neural correlates. We confirmed the presence of nostalgia-related activity in both memory and reward systems, including the hippocampus (HPC), substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), and ventral striatum (VS). We also found significant HPC-VS co-activation, with its strength correlating with individual 'nostalgia tendencies'. Factor analyses showed that two dimensions underlie nostalgia: emotional and personal significance and chronological remoteness, with the former correlating with caudal SN/VTA and left anterior HPC activity, and the latter correlating with rostral SN/VTA activity. These findings demonstrate the cooperative activity of memory and reward systems, where each system has a specific role in the construction of the factors that underlie the experience of nostalgia.

Schizotypy, autobiographical memory, and theory of mind: sex differences

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit a range of cognitive impairments, including tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and autobiographical memory (AM). This study appears to be the first to examine how ToM and AM abilities interact in relation to schizotypy. Forty-seven undergraduate students reporting a wide continuous range of scores on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) completed a measure of ToM and a measure assessing various phenomenological qualities of AM. Female participants exhibited a negative correlation between the ToM score and the SPQ total score and a positive correlation between enhanced phenomenological qualities of AM and the SPQ disorganized factor score. No statistically significant relationships were found for male participants. ToM was negatively correlated with AM across the entire sample, which was not moderated by sex or schizotypy. It is possible that distinct underlying mechanisms account for the observed sex differences on ToM and AM performance in schizophrenia-related conditions.

Exploring the cognitive load of negative thinking: a novel dual-task experiment

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Females are more likely to engage in the preoccupation of past negative experiences than males, which might contribute to their greater tendency toward depression. However, there is limited understanding regarding the cognitive basis for the negative autobiographical information processing of females. In the present study, we assessed the cognitive resources required for negative thinking, by using a novel dual-task paradigm that combined think-aloud and time-estimation tasks.

METHODS

Fifty-three Japanese undergraduate students were asked to think aloud about personal past or future emotional episodes for a particular duration. In addition, they were asked to estimate the duration of their speech. Their estimates were compared to the actual time taken, and the errors were used as indices of cognitive burden during the speech task.

RESULTS

As compared to males, females exhibited greater judgment errors, particularly when thinking about their past negative experiences. This suggests that females allocate more attentional resources toward thinking about the past.

LIMITATIONS

Participants could rehearse the task during the time reproduction phase, and the quality of the rehearsal and their memory capacity might have influenced the accuracy of their duration judgment.

CONCLUSIONS

Females tend to allocate more attentional resources than males to thinking about past negative episodes, which in turn might be associated with reduced availability of resources for central cognitive control processes such as inhibition of and switching away from processing of negative autobiographical information.

A preliminary study of gender differences in autobiographical memory in children with an autism spectrum disorder

Autobiographical memory was assessed in 24 children (12 male, 12 female, aged between 8 and 16 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a comparison group of 24 typically developing (TD) children matched for age, IQ, gender and receptive language. Results suggested that a deficit in specific memory retrieval in the ASD group was more characteristic of male participants. Females in both the TD and ASD groups generated more detailed and emotional memories than males. They also demonstrated superior verbal fluency scores; verbal fluency and autobiographical memory cueing task performance were significantly positively correlated in females. Results are discussed in light of recent research suggesting gender differences in the phenotype of ASD.

Occurrence, plausibility, and desirability for 124 Life Events Inventory items

Imagination inflation is where imaginative elaboration of possible childhood experiences inflates (increases) participants' estimation that these events actually occurred, as indicated by pre- to post-manipulation ratings changes. This research primarily uses the Life Events Inventory (LEI), listing possible experiences that could have happened during childhood (Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 208-214, 1996). Although imagination inflation research has spawned more than 50 investigations, no normative ratings exist on individual items contained in the LEI. To address this, we present descriptive statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, confidence interval) for 124 LEI items on occurrence (how likely is it that this experience happened to you), plausibility (how plausible is it that this event could have happened to someone), and desirability (how desirable is this experience). Occurrence and plausibility showed similar patterns of mean item ratings and were highly correlated, whereas desirability was moderately correlated with plausibility and unrelated to occurrence. These data should facilitate a more informed selection of specific LEI items to use in further research and can assist in clarifying the contributions of normative occurrence, plausibility, and desirability to imagination inflation effects.