Physiological reactivity during autobiographical narratives in older adults: the roles of depression and anxiety

Childhood trauma and college student health: a review of the literature

The experience of childhood trauma is known to predict health-relevant outcomes across the lifespan. Previous reviews summarize existing knowledge of the implications of childhood trauma for health in young adults and adults more generally. The current theoretical review aims to integrate the existing literature on the relationship between childhood trauma and health-relevant outcomes specifically in college students, consolidating findings across specific health domains. Further, the following theoretical review highlights the need for more research in this area and discusses how college campuses may use the knowledge in this area of work to develop targeted interventions aimed at improving the health of college students who experienced trauma in childhood.

“Look at Me” – Eye Movements During Autobiographical Retrieval in Face-to-Face Interactions

Abstract. There has been a surge in social cognition and social neurosciences research comparing laboratory and real eye movements. Eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories (i.e., personal memories) in laboratory situations are also receiving more attention. We compared eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories using a strict laboratory design versus a design mimicking social interactions. In the first design, eye movements were recorded during autobiographical memory retrieval while participants were looking at a blank screen; in the second design, participants wore eye-tracking glasses and communicated autobiographical memories to the experimenter. Compared with the “screen” design, the “glasses” design yielded more fixations ( p < .05), shorter duration of fixations ( p < .001), more saccades ( p < .01), and longer duration of saccades ( p < .001). These findings demonstrate how eye movements during autobiographical memory retrieval differ between strict laboratory design and face-to-face interactions.

Order effects in the recall of autobiographical memories: evidence for an organisation along temporal and emotional features

Investigating the recall process of autobiographical memories (AMs) and, particularly, the order in which AMs are recalled has the potential to shed light on the organisation of autobiographical memory. However, research on order effects in the recall of AMs is relatively rare. Moreover, to date, no study addressed the question of where emotion fits into the organisation. The present study aimed to close this gap by examining whether emotional valence serves as one organising principle. Data come from 117 older adults (M = 74.11; SD = 7.06) who reported up to 39 AMs. The use of a multivariate multilevel model with autoregressive effects allows us to analyse the order effect within one person, as well as how the order effect differs between persons. The results replicated a temporal first-order effect that has been shown in previous studies and moreover, demonstrated a temporal second-order effect. Furthermore, our results indicated an emotional first-order effect that was even stronger than the temporal first-order effect and an emotional second-order effect. In addition, both first-order effects differed reliably between persons. Thus, the present study emphasises the need for considering emotion in current theoretical formulations of autobiographical memory and also of considering individual differences in the order of AMs recalled.

J. Janssen S, Gallouj K, Lenoble Q. Autobiographical Memory Increases Pupil Dilation

BACKGROUND

Pupil activity has been widely considered as a "summed index" of physiological activities during cognitive processing.

METHODOLOGY

We investigated pupil dilation during retrieval of autobiographical memory and compared pupil diameter with a control condition in which participants had to count aloud. We also measured pupil diameters retrieval of free (i.e., first memory that comes to mind), positive, and negative memories (memories associated, respectively, with the words "happy" and "sad").

RESULTS

Analyses demonstrated larger pupil diameters during the free, positive, and negative autobiographical memory retrieval than during the control task. Analyses also demonstrated no significant differences in pupil diameters across the three autobiographical memory conditions.

CONCLUSION

These outcomes demonstrate that, compared with counting, autobiographical retrieval results in a larger pupil size. However, the emotional valence of memories yields non-significant effect on pupil diameters. Our findings demonstrate how autobiographical memory retrieval yields pupil dilation.

How is physiological arousal related to self-reported measures of emotional intensity and valence of events and their autobiographical memories?

Research suggests that emotionally intense experiences that elicit higher-than-average physiological arousal responses lead to particularly durable and detailed autobiographical memories. Yet, the lack of objective measures of physiological arousal while events unfold in everyday life makes it hard to corroborate this lab finding. Also, it is uncertain how well arousal maps onto self-reports of the phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical events and memories. Here, we examined how physiological measures of arousal, taken while everyday life events develop, correlate with self-reports. Our results showed that physiological arousal during an event not only was related to self-evaluations of its assessed physical reaction -at the time of report-, but also predicted evaluations of physical reaction, positivity, and importance of their memories one week after. Further analyses revealed that, while arousal affected evaluations of emotional intensity of events and memories, this relationship was moderated by participants' level of awareness about their own emotional processes.

When your face describes your memories: facial expressions during retrieval of autobiographical memories

Thanks to the current advances in the software analysis of facial expressions, there is a burgeoning interest in understanding emotional facial expressions observed during the retrieval of autobiographical memories. This review describes the research on facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval showing distinct emotional facial expressions according to the characteristics of retrieved memoires. More specifically, this research demonstrates that the retrieval of emotional memories can trigger corresponding emotional facial expressions (e.g. positive memories may trigger positive facial expressions). Also, this study demonstrates the variations of facial expressions according to specificity, self-relevance, or past versus future direction of memory construction. Besides linking research on facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval to cognitive and affective characteristics of autobiographical memory in general, this review positions this research within the broader context research on the physiologic characteristics of autobiographical retrieval. We also provide several perspectives for clinical studies to investigate facial expressions in populations with deficits in autobiographical memory (e.g. whether autobiographical overgenerality in neurologic and psychiatric populations may trigger few emotional facial expressions). In sum, this review paper demonstrates how the evaluation of facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval may help understand the functioning and dysfunctioning of autobiographical memory.