1st Edition

Autobiographical Memory Remembering What and Remembering When

    252 Pages
    by Psychology Press

    Providing an unusual perspective on self and social memory different from the norm in social cognitive research, this volume describes the results of the authors' diary research now in progress for more than 15 years. It investigates the topic of autobiographical memory through longitudinal studies of graduate students' diaries. Recalled and examined in this volume, a recent collection of several long-term diaries -- spanning up to two-and-one-half years in length -- replicated and significantly extended the authors' earlier knowledge of autobiographical memory. These studies are analyzed for commonalities and differences within the entire body of their data. Organized by the major themes suggested by the authors' theoretical views, this volume will be significant to students and researchers of both memory in general, and personal or episodic memory in particular.

    Contents: Preface. About the Authors. Theory and Overview. The Diaries. Remembering What. Memory for Everyday Events. Emotional Pleasantness and Intensity. Effectiveness of Self-Schema in Memory. Reconstructive Memory for Time. Reconstructing Event Dates: The Effects of Retention Interval, Event sharacteristics, and Person Characteristics. Emotional Pleasant and Event Dating. The Role of the Self-Schema in the Reconstruction of Time. Overview and Summary. Appendix.

    Biography

    Thompson, Charles P.; Skowronski, John J.; Larsen, Steen F.; Betz, Andrew L.

    "Autobiographical Memory: Remembering What and Remembering When is another contribution to this literature. A research monograph, it draws together results on memory of personal events investigated for 15 studies conducted by the four authors at three different universities over the space of some 15 years. There is no other corpus of diary data as extensive as this, nor is there likely to be so in the future. The book is nicely structured."
    Contemporary Psychology

    "This book is packed with studies about memory accuracy. ...it provides a more elaborated, dynamic and contextualized picture of how and why we remember what, to whom, when, and where."
    American Journal of Psychology

    "This book is specifically aimed at the type of memory, autobiographical, that is involved in assessing the facticity of claimed prior events. The authors have done a careful and well-designed job of teasing out variables and papameters that are of crucial interest and may often be misunderstood."
    Issues in Child Abuse Accusations.