Emotion and vantage point in autobiographical

Abstract

Autobiographical memories may be recalled from two different perspectives: Field memories in which the person seems to remember the scene from his/her original point of view and observer memories in which the rememberer sees him/herself in the memory image. Here, 122 undergraduates participated in an experiment examining the relation between field vs. observer perspective in memory for 10 different emotional states, including both positive and negative emotions and emotions associated with high vs. low intensity. Observer perspective was associated with reduced sensory and emotional reliving across all emotions. This effect was observed for naturally occurring memory perspective and when participants were instructed to change their perspective from field to observer, but not when participants were instructed to change perspective from observer to field.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Heather J. Rice and Jennifer M. Talarico for helpful comments and National Institute of Mental Health (grant number R01 MH 066079) for funding.

Notes

¹We do not correct for multiple comparisons in this and the following tables, because we are looking for patterns of results, and we do not want to increase type II errors by changing the conventional .05 level. The degrees of freedom in Tables 1 and 2 vary because cases with missing data were excluded from the composite scores.