An item response theory/confirmatory factor analysis of the Autobiographical Memory Test

Abstract

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) is used to assess the degree of specificity of autobiographical memory. The AMT usually contains cue words of both positive and negative valence, but it is unclear whether these valences form separate factors or not. Accordingly, confirmatory factor analysis assessed whether the AMT measures one overall factor, or whether different cue types are related to different factors. Results were consistent across three datasets (N = 333, N = 405, and N = 336). A one-factor model fitted each dataset well, which suggests that responses to positive and negative cues are related to the one construct. In addition, item response theory analyses showed that the AMT is most precise for people who score low on memory specificity. Implications for using the AMT with high-functioning samples are discussed.

Keywords:

• Autobiographical memory
• Overgeneral memory
• Item response theory
• Factor analysis
• Emotional valence

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the National Institutes of Health for supporting our research (Grant# R01MH065652 to Drs Zinbarg and Mineka, and R01MH065651 to Dr Craske), and we acknowledge the assistance of countless undergraduate and graduate students for their help in collecting and processing our data. We would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for his or her helpful comments.

Notes

¹We classified some trials as specific/extended if a memory was most likely specific but could be interpreted as an extended event. An example of such a memory would be “When my grandfather died.” We adopted a stringent approach to scoring a memory as overgeneral by coding these as specific memories.

²We attempted to overcome this convergence problem by specifying in Mplus that the correlation between the factors could be no larger than .71, which would mean that the two factors shared no more than 50% of their variance. In other words, this parameter was still free to vary, but had a ceiling of .71. Although the two-factor models had one more free parameter than the one-factor model, both of the two-factor models had worse fit indices. Other attempts were made to re-specify the two- and four-factor models. However, we were unable to fit a sensible model that was superior to the one-factor model. Further details are available from the first author.

³One item, verrast (surprised), elicited very low rates of extended and categoric memories. We dichotomised this into specific versus non-specific.

⁴As shown in Table 3, the rate of extended memories was low for three items: verrast (surprised), lomp (stupid), and brutaal (bold). For these items, we combined categoric and extended memories into one category.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elise Debeer

Elise Debeer is a Research Assistant of the Research Foundation, Flanders