Content and emotional aspects of autobiographical memories within older Japanese adults

Abstract

Autobiographical memory refers to memory for one's own personal experiences (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and is characterized by a reminiscence bump. However, few studies have examined the relationships between this bump and the content and emotional aspects of the remembered events. We asked older Japanese adults to freely recall their autobiographical events for about 10 minutes and we analyzed the contents of those memories and the temporal transitions in associated emotions. We observed a reminiscence bump within the participants' 20s for events associated with pride and gratitude, as well as a small bump at the ages 10–20 for events associated with retrospective emotions. Moreover, the findings also indicate that, with time, positive feelings towards negative events increase, while negative feelings towards negative events fade. Most of the memories could be classified in terms of their content according to the following categories: work, family, recreation, love, death, injury/illness, and education/school; while most memories from the ages 20–30 were categorized as related to love and/or family. We discuss the emotional aspects and the content categories associated with the reminiscence bump.