Towards a better integration of emotional factors in autobiographical memory

ABSTRACT

While the role of emotion in autobiographical memory (ABM) is acknowledged in some models, its specific effects are blurred by narrow approaches towards emotion that are often limited to a distinction between intensity and valence. After presenting a critical review of the role assigned to emotion for the development of ABM, this paper surveys current perspectives which encourage a broader approach to emotion in the development of ABM. Research on Flashbulb memories provides an important context where the role of emotion has been the most extensively investigated. This paper makes three important recommendations for future research, which are to (1) provide an assessment of emotional responses that includes appraisals, action tendencies, bodily sensations, and emotion intensity; (2) investigate the role of specific emotional states; and (3) adopt systematically a multi-component approach of ABM measurement, which takes accuracy, consistency, vividness, degree of details, and confidence into account.

KEYWORDS:

• Appraisals
• autobiographical memories
• emotion
• Flashbulb memories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The purpose of this literature review was to select a reasonably extensive period of time (the last 20 years) that also corresponded with a key turning point in the literature: 9/11. I made the selection based on paper titles and not abstracts because I wanted to test the proportion of papers that consider emotion as a major domain of investigation in the paper. Titles are better at revealing the main focus of a study, while abstracts can include issues that are presented in a minor way.

2 There have also been some attempts to investigate FBMs with an experimental approach in the laboratory (see Lanciano et al., 2018). Although these approaches are interesting to evaluate issues like misleading post-event information (Niedzwienska, 2003) or prospective memory (Lanciano et al., 2010), they do not allow for the examination of the effect of eliciting a surprising situation in FBM elaboration in a sufficiently ecologically valid context. There has only been one attempt to do so (Lanciano & Curci, 2011).