Memories defining the self in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

There is a debate over the extent to which personal identity or the self is preserved in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Autobiographical memory deficits at early stages of AD could contribute to altering patients’ self. However, the nature of the relationship between autobiographical memory deficits and the self in AD has not been much investigated experimentally. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the integrative meaning of self-defining memories (SDMs) in early stages of AD and to analyse its relationship with the self-concept. The results showed that, when compared to the control group, AD patients less frequently extracted meaning from their SDMs and the meaning was less frequently tied to the self. Patients exhibited some altered aspects of the self-concept (i.e., complexity and strength), though some other components still persisted (i.e., valence and certainty). Correlation analyses showed that the impaired integrative meaning in the AD group was correlated with some changes in self-concept. We suggest that integrative meaning may act as a bridge between autobiographical memories and the self-concept, with reduced integration abilities appearing as a potential mechanism for the deterioration of the self-concept in AD.

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• self-defining memories
• autobiographical memory
• integrative meaning
• self

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the patients and control subjects for their participation in the study and to their relatives that also contributed. We are grateful to Catherine Demuynck, Pierre Antony, Catherine Martin-Hunyadi, Marie Noblet-Dick, Martial Malaret, Dominique Wittersheim, Marjorie Fritsch, Frédéric Ostre, Cindy Mathis and the ‘Centre d’investigation Clinique’ for their help in recruiting patients and healthy volunteers. We also thank Melanie Stackfleth, Barbara Jung, Laetitia Berly and Ouafaa Aberkane for their technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

Informed and written consent was obtained from all the participants, in the presence of a relative in the case of patients. The study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the local Ethics Committee (Est IV).

ORCID

Hédi Ben Malek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9403-7036

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Strasbourg Foundation (grant to [HBM]), the French ‘‘Fondation Alzheimer’’ to [NP], and the ‘Appel à projets Jeunes Chercheurs’ (APJ) from GIRCI Est – 2012 (grant to [NP]).