On the power of autobiographical memories: from threat and challenge appraisals to actual behaviour

ABSTRACT

Autobiographical memories are a major feature of mental life in humans. However, research on the influence of autobiographical recall on actual behaviour is scarce. We predicted and found that general memories of failure and specific memories of success resulted in worse performance than general memories of success and specific memories of failure. This performance pattern was mediated by task appraisal, suggesting that autobiographical memories (of failure and success) impact performance by shaping the perception of the upcoming task. Combined with the fact that these effects occurred even when the content of autobiographical memories was unrelated to the upcoming task, the present research represents an important step forward in understanding how autobiographical recall influences actual behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• autobiographical recall
• threat and challenge appraisal
• cognitive performance
• mediation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Cécile Lièvre for help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Because the two tests differed in their score range, we computed percentage accuracy scores to have a similar measurement scale. For mental rotation, the number of attempted items was first multiplied by two, because each problem could bring a maximum of two points. This term represented the maximum score each participant could obtain, taking into account the number of attempted items. The raw score that was actually obtained was then divided by this multiplication term and subsequently multiplied by 100, to obtain a percentage accuracy score. For the Mill-Hill, the raw scores were divided by the number of attempted items and multiplied by 100 to obtain a percentage accuracy score.

2. This interaction was in fact marginal (p = .086), suggesting that the impact of memories on performance was stronger on mental rotation than on vocabulary performance. When the two tests are analysed separately, the results on each test mirrored the reported results on the averaged score, with two differences between the tests. First, there was a significant main effect of generality on vocabulary but not on mental rotation performance. Second, mental rotation performance was significantly mediated by both challenge and threat appraisals, while vocabulary performance was mediated only by challenge appraisal.