Memories of me, memories of we: Trait self-knowledge, prototypical norms, and autobiographical memories

ABSTRACT

To more fully understand the complex relationship between self-knowledge and significant autobiographical memories, two studies examined the degree to which agency and communion orientations were consistently represented across self-views and autobiographical memories, and measured the strength of these relationships in relation to prototypical thematic norms in autobiographical recall. Participants completed measures assessing agentic trait and communal trait self-knowledge in the laboratory and later wrote descriptions of six significant autobiographical memories. Results of two studies indicated that agentic trait and communal trait self-knowledge were positively associated with thematic content across memories; however, these associations were more pronounced for events in which the themes were consistent with prototypical thematic tendencies. The roles of trait self-knowledge, prototypical norms, and temporal aspects of the self-concept on significant autobiographical memories were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-concept
• autobiographical memory
• agency
• communion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Study 1 was part of a larger project examining the role of individual characteristics and thematic content of autobiographical memory. In addition to the measures of agentic and communal trait endorsement, participants also completed measures related to gender identity, feminism, regulatory focus, relational self-construal, and prosocial behavior. Results of analyses examining the relationship between feminism and thematic content themes can be found in Boytos and colleagues (2019).

2. Because some categories had low base rates (e.g., agency in negative childhood event), we used the G-index (Holley & Guilford, 1964) to assess inter-rater agreement because G is less sensitive to base rates than is Cohen’s kappa (Gwet, 2008).

3. In Study 1, gender (coded 0 = female, 1 = male) was associated with both communal traits (r = -.20, p = .008) and communal themes in low point essays (r = -.17, p = .031) and in Study 2, gender was associated with agentic traits (r = .12, p = .037), communal traits (r = -.17, p = .002), communal themes in low point essays (r = -.27, p < .001), and communal themes in high point essays (r = -.11, p = .045).  Thus, we conducted regression analyses with and without controlling for gender.  Controlling for gender did not change the statistical significance of the findings.  Analyses presented in the manuscript report the results without controlling for gender.  See supplemental materials for regression results that control for gender.

4. Four participants did not complete one or more of the six essays and thus, data from these participants were not included in the above analyses. Consonant with our research aims, predictors in regression and path analyses were constrained to examine how agentic traits related to agentic themes in autobiographical memory, and how communal traits relate to communal themes in autobiographical memory in this manuscript. We conducted exploratory analyses in which we examined agentic traits and communal traits as simultaneous predictors of memory themes which can be found in supplemental materials.