Organization of emotional autobiographical memories: How is emotional knowledge of personal events represented in one's autobiographical knowledge base?

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate the organization of autobiographical memory, and to reveal how emotional knowledge for personal events is represented in the autobiographical knowledge base. For these purposes, an event-cueing technique (Brown & Schopflocher, 1998a, b) was employed. University students at a national university in Tokyo (28 men, 18 women) were provided 8 retrieval cues, and asked to generate a personal event related to each of them (i.e., cueing events). Following this, they responded to each cueing event by retrieving 2 personal episodes (i.e., cued events). The results indicated that cued events shared life themes with cueing events, suggesting that autobiographical memory has a thematic organization. The results also revealed that the life themes of each personal episode determined the types of emotional states with which they were associated. Implications for the affect and memory literature, and the emotion regulation literature, were discussed.