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Traumatic events and autobiographical memory 1

TRAUMATIC EVENTS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Aloysius Soesilo

FAKULTAS PSIKOLOGI

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ABSTRAK

Tulisan ini berupaya untuk membahas hubungan antara pengalaman traumatik dengan memori autobiografis. Memori traumatik berbeda dari memori pada umumnya yang tidak berhubungan dengan peristiwa trauma. Perbedaan itu nampak di dalam tiga perspektif yang dikemukakan dalam artikel ini, yakni, memori intrusif, teori representasi ganda dan model self-memory-system. Selanjutnya, memori autobiografis serta ketiga fungsinya (self, sosial, dan direktif) dibahas. Emosi mempunyai peranan yang amat penting dalam

memori, khususnya di dalam pengaruhnya atas apa yang diingat dan bagaimana apa yang dingat kemudian direkonstruksikan dalam naratif. Di dalam kontruksi memori

autobiografis ada tiga komponen pokok yang dibahas, yakni tujuan, proses dan produk. Oleh karena memori autobiografis dan naratif bukan merupakan suatu phenomenon yang terlepas dari konteksnya, maka hubungan resiprokal yang dinamis antara keduanya dan konteks sosial-kultural harus diperhatikan. Naratif traumatis adalah upaya oleh individu untuk mengkontruksikan kembali dirinya dan dunianya setelah peristiwa trauma. Dengan demikian memori autobiografis dan naratif trauma menyediakan pintu masuk bagi studi tentang fenomena penting dalam praktek-praktek kekerasan yang menjadi salah satu ciri dari kehidupan sosial-politis modern.

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TRAUMATIC EVENTS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Exposure to a wide variety of violent and life-threatening events occurs with a relative frequency has been experienced by many people across the globe. The growing number of autobiographical and biographical accounts of victims of human inflictred trauma attest to the fact that traumatic memories can be remarkably enduring. An

emotional reliving of the traumatic experience demonstrate the lasting emotional salience in these people‟s recollection years after the event. This paper attempts to study

autobiographical memory (AM), in its relation to traumatic events, taking into account the psychological, social, and cultural-historic context in which it occurs. It will discuss first the effect of trauma on memory, to what ends AM is used by individuals, and how it is constructed. The primary concern is with why and how individuals remember both

mundane and significant life events, especially traumatic ones. Its concern is not with how much or how well they remember their personal past, although admittedly, these features often play some role in memory. Autobiographical memory and narrative are situated in a social-cultural context, and its dynamic reciprocal relationships among these factors are explored. Accordingly, the construction and understanding of AM cannot be independent of this context. Narratives eventually open the window for us to understand not only how trauma survivors have attempted to reconstruct themselves and share their life stories, but also to understand the often unspeakably violent practices of modern social-political consciousness.

MEMORIES FOR TRAUMATIC EVENTS

The way people process a trauma after the occurrence is critical for the stressor event to configured or not. The stressor stimulus is not the only factor in the

characterization of an event as trauma. This characterization also depends on the

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re-Traumatic events and autobiographical memory 4

experiencing, and representation of traumatic symptoms are encoded and organized in memory, and then retrieved.

Traumatic experiences and memories have been investigated in greater number in literature associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and with patients with depression (e.g., Brewin, 1998;Sotgiu & Mormont, 2008)). There is a large group of traumatized people, however, that do not meet the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) criteria for PTSD and other psychiatric disorders. Examples of events meeting the clinical criteria for trauma are natural disaster, interpersonal violence and torture, and road traffic accidents. The individual experiences or witnesses actual or threatened death, serious injury or threat to one‟s or others‟ integrity. In other words, the individual needs to experiences an intense negative emotional reaction at the time of the traumatic event. Several typical symptoms that emerge as a consequence of this

experience are delineated in the DSM-IV. These include re-experiencing of the traumatic event, avoidance behavior related to the trauma, and symptoms of hyperarousal (e.g., startle response, sleeping problems, and a general emotional numbing response). Re-experiencing of the trauma emerges in the form of intrusive traumatic memories, nightmares and distress in reaction to trauma reminders.

Intrusive memories

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full-Traumatic events and autobiographical memory 5

blown flashbacks. In the most severe form, the individual is completely engulfed, so to speak, in the memory and temporarily loses touch with the reality of the here-and-now.

The survivor often reports feeling like a different person after the event. This personal change relates to what Pillemer ( 1998) terms “originating events.” Death-related events, although not necessarily traumatic, can often be regarded originating events. As such, these events are perceived as a cause or reason for profound life changes. Several studies, however, have shown that trauma victims have also reported “posttraumatic growth”, that is, positive outcomes from the struggle with trauma that surpass the pre -trauma level (e.g., Joseph & Linley, 2008; Wilson, 2006).

Ehlers, Hackmann, and Michael (3004) propose that the majority of intrusive memories can interpreted as re-experiencing of warning signals, i.e., stimuli that signaled the onset of the trauma or of moments when the meaning of the events changed for worse. Accordingly, the content of intrusive memories do not appear to be random fragments (Ehlers et al., 2002). The warning signals seem to consist of markers of the situational context in which the traumatic event took place. In prolonged traumatic experience, there may be several crucial moments when meanings of the events change for worse, each of which can be represented in re-experiencing. Ehlers contends that moments with the largest emotional impact do not necessarily happen during the trauma itself, but may emerge later when the survivor realizes what could have happened to him or her, or when something gives the traumatic situation a more personal meaning.

Based on their theory of intrusive trauma memories, Ehlers, Hackmann, and Michael (2003) have identified several functions of intrusive trauma memory. First, it aims at the emotional processing of a traumatic event. Information of sensory and physiological details may not be available through deliberate recall. Second, intrusive memories may provide information about impending danger by way of an associated feeling of current threat. As a result, the individual may becomes more prepared for action. Third, it provides protection for the status quo of the self‟s goal structure and

self-coherence.

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at the time by identifying the course, circumstances, and outcome of the trauma. And finally, actively incorporating of the information using verbal and imagery technique. These therapeutic implications suggested by the authors set the stage for this paper to highlight the importance of autobiographical narratives that will be discussed later.

Dual representation theory of trauma

Another theoretical perspective about the relationship between trauma and memory is proposed by the Dual Representation theory (Brewin, Dalgleish, & Joseph, 1996). This theory assumes that traumatic information after early childhood is encoded in two

different memory system: verbally accessible memory (VAM) and situational accessible memory (SAM). These different types of memory systems are used to explain the complex phenomenology of PTSD, including re-experiencing traumatic events and emotional processing of the trauma. The dual representations in memory of traumatic experiences constitute the minimum cognitive architecture within which the complexity of trauma-memory can be understood.

One representation will be of the person‟s conscious experience of the trauma. This presentation is called VAM because it can in principle be deliberately retrieved from the store of autobiographical experiences. VAMs contain some information about the sensory features of the situation, the emotional and physiological reactions experienced, and the perceived meaning of the event. Immediately after trauma, these memories are likely to be dominated by detailed information concerning the conscious perception of sensory reactions. Repeated recall of certain aspects of the traumatic experience may lead to some features while other features may be harder to be remembered.

The second representation, which cannot be deliberately accessed, is the output of the more extensive nonconscious processing of the traumatic situation. It is termed SAM because the representations may be accessed automatically when the person is in a context in which the physical features or meaning are similar to those of the traumatic situation. This context may be internal, such as consciously thinking about the trauma, or external, such as hearing about a similar trauma on television. Brewin, Dalgleish and Joseph

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stimulus information automatically coded for its ability to discriminate the trauma from other nontraumatic events; (b) meaning derived from prior learning and from innate appraisal mechanisms concerned with the achievement of universal goals; and (c) information about the person‟s state of consciousness. The trauma survivor may only become aware that these representations have been accessed when they experience symptoms such as motor impulses, emotional arousal, dissociation, or intrusive images.

Ideally, SAMs are integrated with VAMs to form a coherent and elaborate trauma narrative. Under extremely negative emotional experience, however, the conscious processing that leads to VAMs is impaired. As a result, Brewin et al., explain that there is relatively more trauma information encoded in the SAM system and very little in the VAM system. Accordingly, intrusive trauma memories occur because VAMs does not inhibit the cue-activation of SAMs.

As has been briefly described above, SAMs contain a great amount of detailed information that is not available to conscious processing. Like implicit memories, SAMs cannot be deliberately retrieved, edited and are repetitive (as in flashbacks) and difficult to modify. In contrast, VAMs, like explicit memories, are less detailed and easy to be edited in various ways to control affect by emphasizing positive or negative aspects or by creating more or less detailed representation of the trauma. These characteristics lead to the prediction that verbal descriptions of the trauma should be different, depending upon whether the corresponding SAMs have been activated. “Verbal accounts that are

unaccompanied by the subjective experience of intense fear or of reliving the trauma should be more variable and should contain less detail than verbal accounts accompanied by the sensation of reliving the trauma. Whereas the former should become more

schematic and less specific over time, the latter should remain highly consistent, even after many years” (p. 682).

The self-memory-system model

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It should be noted here that the conceptualization of episodic memory in this model is slightly different from that of Tulving (1972). Tulving originally made a distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory and considered each as a separate and distinct memory system. For Tulving, episodic memory consists of personal experiences and the specific objects, people, and events that have been experienced at a particular time and place. Semantic knowledge consists of general knowledge and facts about the world. Tulving himself in his 1993 article (quoted in Pellimer, 1998) updated his conception of episodic memory by stressing conscious awareness in remembering. In his words:

“Episodic memory. . . makes it possible for a person to be consciously aware of an earlier experience in a certain situation at a certain time . . . The act of remembering a personally experienced event, that is, consciously recollecting it, is characterized by a distinctive, unique awareness of reexperiencing here and now something that happened before, at another time and place” (in Pellimer, 1998, p. 49).

For Conway et al., episodic and semantic knowledges are not two separate, compartmentalized structures, but are in an interactive and interdependent relationship. Semantic knowledge is derived from personal experiences by a process of abstraction and generalization. Episodic memories are interpreted and classified by Conway in terms of general semantic knowledge in the forms of schemas and scripts. More about the schemas and scripts will be discussed later.

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Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) propose that the instantiation of memories in consciousness and their incorporation into ongoing processing sequences is modulated by central or executive control process. Episodic memories are activated by cues that bear perceptual resemblances with the memory. If not lost, episodic memories are slowly integrated with more abstract levels of autobiographical knowledge, which hinders cued-activation of unwanted intrusion of the specific episodic memory. The working self controls access to the autobiographical knowledge base, which is made of conceptual knowledge from two broad areas: lifetime periods and general events.

Life-time periods contain general knowledge of significant others, common locations, activities, plans and goals that represent characteristics of a period. In other words, a life-time period represents thematic knowledge about common features of that period. General events are more heterogeneous and at the same time more specific than life-time periods. Both repeated events and single events are characteristic of general events. Organization of autobiographical knowledge at the level of general events is extensive and it appears virtually always to refer to progress in the attainment of highly self-relevant goals. One prominent feature of general events that Conway has identified is that they feature vivid memories of events relating to the attainment or failure to attain personal goals. General events then contain knowledge about locations, others, activities, feelings, and goals. General event knowledge can be used to access certain lifetime periods that contain associated knowledge.

In addition to this autobiographical knowledge, the SMS model contains episodic memories as mentioned above. The involvement of these two systems in remembering form specific autobiographical memories. Within this conceptualization of

autobiographical memory, the self is both the experience and the product of the experiences.

Williams, Conway and Cohen (2008) state that the defining characteristic of autobiographical memory is its relationship to the self. A person remembers events because they have personal significance and what is remembered as personally significant makes up the database from which the self is constructed. Thus, the SMS model of

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Autobiographical memory (AM) refers to the memories a person has of his or her own life experiences (Robinson, 1988). The beginning of systematic empirical research on AM can be traced back to Francis Galton and Sigmund Freud. Francis Galton and

Sigmund Freud have emerged from the Ebbinghausian tradition of learning and memory research as two prominent figures who favored the direct study o personal recollections (Boring, 1950, and Robinson, 1988, for review). Interest in biographical memory has also emerged in cognitive psychology, pioneered by Neisser. Based on his review of the work on AM by these scholars, Robinson concludes that people use memories of personal experiences to plan, solve problems, instruct and guide others, and justify and explain their actions to themselves and others. “Autobiographical memory is not only a record, it is a resource” (p. 23).

AM implicitly involves thinking about the past in the present (Bluck, 2003). Bluck and Alea (2002) summarize several views of AM as including event-specific details and images, complete memories for particular events, lifetime periods and life themes, and one‟s entire life story. Brewer (1986) used the term personal memory to refer to AM, while Pillemer (1998) favored the term personal event memory. The characteristics of personal event memory in Pellimer are actually an expansion of Tulving conception of episodic memory, Brewer‟s personal memory, and Nelson‟s (1993) autobiographical memory.

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and it is accompanied by a belief that the memory is a veridical record of the event that was personally experienced.

Nelson (1993, in Pillemer, 1998) asserted that as a subcategory of episodic

memory, AM contains certain events that have a privileged status in memory that matter to the person‟s evolving life story. She defines AM as “specific, personal, long-lasting, and (usually) of significance to the self-system . . . it forms one‟s personal life history” (p. 50). In line with Brewer‟s position, event representations need not be accurate to qualify as autobiographical memories. “Memories do not need to be true or correct to be part of that system” (p. 50). In agreement with this position, Pillemer (1998) states: “If a life story can be truthful even if it does not conform perfectly to the historical past, then personal

memories composing a life history are psychologically valid objects of analysis in their own right.” This is also the position taken by this paper in the understanding of AM and its interaction with traumatic experience.

After a brief discussion of each of theoretical perspectives upon which Pillemer (1998) has expanded his conceptualization of personal event memory, now the defining characteristics of this type of memory will be quoted at length:

 The memory represents a specific event that took place at a particular time and place, rather than a general event or an extended series of related happenings.

 The memory contains a detailedaccount of the rememberer‟s own personal circumstances at the time of the event.

 The verbal narrative account of the event is accompanied by sensory images, including visual, auditory, olfactory images or bodily sensations, that contribute to the feeling of

“reexperiencing” or “reliving.”

 Memory details and sensory images correspond to a particular moment or moments of phenomenal experiences.

 The rememberer believes that the memory is a truthful representation of what transpired. (Pillemer, 1998, pp. 51-52; italics original).

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identified that autobiographical memories may be represented from an observer or from a field perspective. Research by Nigro and Neisser (in Conway, 1996; see also Williams, Conway & Cohen, 2008) showed that when their memories, some were remembered from the field perspective, i.e., from the original viewpoint of the experience. However, a larger number of memories were found to be viewed from the outside, i.e., from the point of view of an external observer. Nigro and Neisser contended that the second type of memories cannot be merely copies of the original perception; they must have been reconstructed. These researchers found that older memories were more likely to be reconstructed ones, while recent memories were more likely to be copy-type memories experienced from the field perspective.

THREE FUNCTIONS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Before proceeding further, clarification of the term function is in order. According to Bluck and Alea (2002), function has two meanings that are related to each other,

connoting either use or adaptive function. Identification of two different senses of function was actually already put forth by Bruce (1989, in Pillemer, 1998). In his conceptualization, function refers to “real-world usefulness or adaptive significance of memory

mechanisms”(p.16). An analysis of real-world usefulness focuses on how personal event memories influence one‟s daily life, for better or for worse, whereas an analysis of adaptive significance focuses on how and why memory would have evolved into its current state.

Several researchers have discussed the theoretical functions of the human ability to remember the past and the benefits of a functional approach to memory (e.g., Baddeley, 1987; Bluck, 2003; Bluck & Alea, 2002; Kihlstrom, 2009; Pillemer, 2003). While different researchers may have a different focus on this topic, most of the theoretical discussion on the functions of AM fits has converged on three main positions as represented by Pillemer (1992). These three functions are self (self-continuity, psychodynamic integrity), directive (planning for present and future behaviors), and communicative (social bonding). Bluck (2003) has expanded this formulation and referred to these three functions as self, social, and directive functions. Although these functions have been made into discrete categories, they frequently overlap in real-world

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utility may then lie more in the way in which we organize our thinking about the functions of AM rather than in applying specific episodic recall. Furthermore, as Conway (2003) points out, these self, social, and directive functions are mediated by cognitive-affective mechanisms and processes that underlie the varied used of AM.

Self-function

In his notion of psychodynamic function, Pillemer emphasizes the emotional and psychological importance for the self of recalling one‟s own past. A variety of

formulations on the function of AM in the continuity of the self have been suggested by many researchers, although these formulations are not necessarily presented in the

psychodynamic tradition. Barclay (1996) emphasizes the preservation of a sense of being a coherent person over time. He refers this functions as the “intrapsychic function” of AM. The other function is to establish and maintain personal and meaningful relationships with others. This function is referred to as the “interpsychic function”, and it is perceptual and sociopsychological in nature. In addition to these two, Barclay also proposes two more functions, that is, “social-cultural” function, and “construction/reconstruction and production/reproduction of history” function. More will be said about the last two functions in the discussion of narratives.

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In various studies the dynamic link between self and (autobiographical) memory has received increasing attention. Wilson and Ross (2003), for instance, discuss the interdependent and reciprocal relations between the self and AM. These researchers provide an operationalization of two functions that memory serves for the self: providing a coherent view of self and a largely favorable view of the self. Their findings show that people self-enhance by evaluating past selves as inferior to their current one. This work highlights the truly autobiographical nature of AM because an autobiography is now conceived of, not only as a series of events, but also a record of a series of selves across time (Bluck, 2003). In turn, remembered events can have implications for the current self, including current affects and feelings of satisfaction with life.

How self-continuity or coherent sense of self develops from childhood, through adolescence, to adulthood have been investigated by several researchers (e.g. Beike, 2004; Brewer, 1986; Fivush & Haden, 2003; Graft & Ohta, 2002; Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). Discussion of the development of and continuity of the self throughout stages of human development is beyond the scope of this paper.

Social Function

The social importance of AM in developing, maintaining, and strengthening social bonds has been noted (e.g., Pillermer, 1998), and this function has been linked to its evolutionary adaptive value (Nelson, 1993, 203). Even Neisser (in Pillemer, 1998) claims that the social function of AM is the most fundamental one. The social function can be divided into three fundamental categories: social interaction, empathy, and social bonding Alea & Bluck (2002). AM provides material for social conversation and allows people to better understand and empathize with others. It offers a channel for instruction and information (Pillemer, 1998), and that way, it is developmentally important for relationships between parents and children (Fivush & Haden, 2003). Impairment in episodic memory may adversely affect social interaction.

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served? The second idea of function involves adaptivity : to what extent memory serves various social conditions (e.g., to what extent memory sharing would result in an increase in intimacy). In other words, adaptivity refers to the extent to which the use of memory results in adaptive or maladaptive outcomes. For example, the use of AMs to develop intimacy in relationships is adaptive when intimacy is enhanced when AMs are shared.

In their conceptual model, Alea and Bluck (2003) incorporate several components that include lifespan contextual influences, the qualitative characteristics of memory (emotionality and level of detail recalled), the person‟s characteristics (age, gender, and personality), the familiarity of and similarity of the person to the listener, the level of responsiveness during the memory-sharing process, and the nature of the social relationship in which the memory sharing takes place (valence and length of the

relationship). All these components have been shown to influence the uses and adaptivity of the social functions of AMs. A brief description of each component is provided below, following Alea and Bluck (2003).

The lifespan context constitutes a context that can directly influence how (well) AMs are used for social purposes. Taking a lifespan perspective helps us understand how changes in one‟s chronological age and their life context impact the uses and adaptation of AM. Emotionality and level of detail recalled are included here because they influence how meaningful memories are encoded. Memories of specific episode that are rich in emotion and vividness communicate “meaning over and above the particular informational content of the memories, and thereby help[s] the speaker achieve important interpersonal goals” (Pellimer, 1992, p. 242, quoted in Alea and Buck, p. 169). Enduring characteristics such as age, gender and personality, affect the way a person recalls significant events, thereby affecting the extent to which social functions are served. The person who constructs memories in conversational remembering also takes into account his or her listener or audience. How well the person knows the listener and how similar that person is with the listener in terms of age, gender, and personality influence the amount of information or vividness of memories shared. Numerous studies reviewed by Alea and Buck have shown that sharing memories with similar and known others influences the emotional quality and detail of the memory shared and should thereby affect the degree to which social functions are served.

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Responsiveness influences the type and extent of personal self-disclosure between both parties. In turn, responsive listening influences how memories are shared. Finally, two relationship qualities, valence and length, can influence the social functions of AM. A person with a poor valence (e.g, avoidant) discloses lower levels of positive emotional information during social interaction than those with positive valence (e.g., secure). Length of relationship relates to the use of the personal past during the initial stage of a social interaction. In those situations, AMs are likely to be employed to create intimacy, while in continuing relationships, AMs are used for maintaining intimacy.

Directive Function

While Neisser claims the primacy of social functions, Pillemer‟ primary focus is more on the directive function of AM. Pillemer characterizes this function as “the guiding power of the specific episode” as the subtitle of his 2003 article. He argues that “directive functions of personal event memories are not secondary in importance to self and social functions. Rather, they are among the most basic and elemental functions served by autobiographical memory, appearing early in human history and tied closely to survival pressures” (p. 194). Here, he intends to emphasize the evolutionary significance and practical importance of the directive function. Using examples of everyday and traumatic memories, he finds out that people recollect specific events or moments of personal significance and use these memories of both everyday and traumatic experiences as a guide towards successful functioning and a lesson about repeated failure.

The role of AM in problem solving and in the formation of opinions and attitude as guides for behavior has also been pointed out by other researchers (e.g., Baddeley, 1987; Conway, 1996, 2003). Also, Lockhart (1989, quoted in Bluck, 2003) has claimed that the major role of AM is to provide flexibility in the construction and updating of rules that allow one to comprehend the past experiences and predict future outcomes.

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their current behaviors accordingly. The use of a traumatic memory as an example should not imply that memory directives are invariably associated with negative emotional events. As noted earlier about posttraumatic growth, positive moments or unexpected successes may provide inspiration and guidance in the pursuit of a particular life course.

According to Pillemer (1998), most cognitive psychologist have located the predictive and directive functions of memory in abstract structures, such as scripts, schemas, rules, or plans. In other words, the knowledge is represented in semantic rather than in episodic memory. As a consequence, it is general and broadly applicable rather than specific and idiosyncratic. The emphasis on abstract knowledge structures has obscured the predictive and directive functions that vivid memories of particular episodes provide. In contrast, autobiographical memory has its own value, with its representations of particular instances, that may not be captured by the general memory function of prediction and preparation for future events.

In describing how specific memories are laid down and retrieved when mental processing falls, Pillemer (1998) quotes Schank‟s (1980) statement: “when we have failed to predict accurately what will happen next is when we are most in need of a specific memory to help us through the rough spots. To do this, our index of memories must be in terms of their relationship to processing prediction failures” (p. 88). In concluding our disccusion of Pellimer‟s conceptualization of the directive functions of autobiographical memory, his position is presented here in his own words:

Understanding of current situations is enhanced, and guidelines for behavior are unearthed, by recalling relevant prior episodes of learning. Personal event memories

also support a sirective function that operates at a higher, meta-cognitive level. Memorable episodes provide an organization skeleton for the production of extended autobiographical memory narratives; they guide or “direct” the reconstruc-

tion and retelling of life histories. Narrative representations of a person‟s life are built around highly salient and memorable episodic nodes.

Constructing a coherent, temporally ordered life history depends on having access not only to the meaning of momentous past events, but also to the imagistic components of personal event memories. As the narrative unfolds, the rememberer mentally moves from scene to concrete scene; general descriptions of “how things were” are punctuated with specific descriptions of particular instances. The extended narrative is anchored by concrete, perceptual landmarks. Moving from landmark to

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Pillemer‟s work, in Bluck‟s (2003) view, has revitalized research on how people use specific personal memories, consciously or not, to guide and direct the behavior. Another interest for further research, besides specific episode, would include life domains or themes and the life story or narrative to find out if each of these areas has similar power in directing one‟s future plans and behavior.

EMOTIONS IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES

Memory for past emotion plays a vital role in daily life, and emotions are elicited by experiences that matter to us. A central feature of AM is its relation to emotion (Holland & Kensinger, 2010; Sotgiu & Mormont, 2008 ;Welzer & Markowitsch, 2005). However, there is no simple relation between emotion and memory. Some research findings have shown that emotions, especially negative and unpleasant ones, impair memory, but other findings lead to generally detail, accurate and persistent memory. Indeed, people are more likely to remember emotion-arousing events than neutral, everyday events. They may even report near-perfect memories for circumstances

surrounding unique emotionally charged events (Christianson & Safer, 1995; Holland & Kensinger, 2010, for review)). However, there are cases in which victims of crimes may show a temporary inability to remember a traumatic event. There are also reports of early traumatic childhood experiences that are blocked until adulthood or never recovered, but which have profound effects on developing anxiety, depression, and dissociative

symptoms in later life (Brewin, Andrews, & Gotlib, 1993, in Christianson & Safer, 1995). Brewin (2009) points out that the idea that there is a fundamentally distinct type of memory for traumatic events dates back as far as Pierre Janet. Janet distingusihed

traumatic memory from ordinary or narrative memory. Extreme life-threatening

experiences made people unable to assimilate these experiences into their ordinary beliefs or assumptions and meaning structures. In Janet‟s view, this type of memory would be stored in a different form, dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control. Traumatic memory was inflexible and fixed, whereas narrative memory was adaptable to current circumstances. Janet believed that a dissociative process rendered a memory less accessible to voluntary retrieval but more prone to be automatically evoked by reminders

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enhancing rather than impairing memory. Brewin (2009) has reviewed numerous studies and concluded that the trauma memories of PTSD patients are distinguished from those of of non-PTSD samples in terms of them containing prominent perceptual features, being highly emotional, and involving an intense reliving of the event in the present. Memories of non-PTSD individuals are more likely to have an external observer perspective rather than a field perspective. Furthermore, PTSD patients recall more emotion and physical sensations, whereas those who report observer memories recall more spatial information, self-observations, and peripheral, as opposed to central, details.

In discussing memory for emotional events, Christianson and Safer (1995) suggest that we differentiate between situations where the to-be-remembered (TBR) event is accompanied by emotional arousal that is evoked by the TBR material proper on one hand, and situations where the source of the arousal is dissociated from the TBR event on the other hand. It is natural that in autobiographical memories, the emotional arousal is evoked by the TBR event.

Despite the fact that witnessing a genuine trauma is far more emotionally arousing than witnessing a simulated event in a laboratory setting, Christianson and Safer observe that laboratory setting do not necessarily produce qualitatively different memories than does witnessing real-life trauma events. Moreover, recent laboratory findings in many ways mimic various phenomena observed from real-life settings.

There are two phenomena related to the issue of how one‟s emotional feelings affect what is stored in or retrieved from memory: state-dependent effect and mood congruence effect. “State-dependent effects (state-dependent learning or state-dependent retrieval) refers to an impairment in performance when there is a mismatch between physical or mental states at learning and at retrieval. The state-dependent effect assumes that mood acts as a critical context cue, no matter what the nature is of the information being learned and retrieved. The state-dependent effect is similar to a dissociative effect, wherein existing memories may, under certain circumstances, be unavailable to

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About the second phenomenon, Christianson and Safer state that “mood

congruence effects occur when stimuli agreeing in affective valence with one‟s mood are learned and retrieved better than stimuli of different affective valence” (p. 229). Mood congruence effects occur, for example, in a typical experiment where subjects are asked to recall recent autobiographical memories. Those who are induced to feel happy tended to recall more happy than sad memories, whereas the reverse is true for subjects who are induced to feel sad.

Another useful formulation of implicit and explicit memories of emotion has been presented by Levine, Lench and Safer (2009). They point out that emotions are

represented in these two forms in memory with different properties. Explicit memories refer to “representations of specific experiences (episodic memory) or facts (semantic memory) that can be deliberately retrieved and verbally recounted to others” (p. 1060). These memories are accessible by a conscious feeling of remembering (episodic) and knowing (semantic) across situations. The other form is implicit memory which refers to “representations of past experience that are not accessible to conscious awareness but nonetheless influence current feelings, thoughts, or behavior” (p.1060). Implicit memories are elicited involuntarily by specific retrieval cues.

Explicit memory allows people to consciously retrieve and reconstruct their emotion of the past based on memory for prior cognitions, episodic and semantic information. Implicit memory for emotion is accessible without deliberation in the presence of retrieval cues that resemble the situation in which the emotion was originally experienced. And when it becomes accessible, the resulting experience shares many of the properties of the original emotional experience. Representation of past emotional

experiences persist in the implicit memory and thereby influence current feelings and behaviors, even when there is no recollection of the original experience.

What functions do remembering emotion serve? Levine, Lench and Safer (2009) suggest that “remembered emotion informs individuals‟ decisions about whether to seek out or avoid similar situations in the future. Remembered emotions also help the

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CONSTRUCTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

A particular memory, which is the building block of AMs, has an internal structure of its own. Accordingly, AMs are not just a collection of particular memories, but are organized and indexed so that they can be retrieved on demand (Williams, Conway, Cohen, 2008). The defining characteristic of AM is its relationship to the self. Events that are remembered are of personal significance and form the database from which the self is constructed. Moreover, personally significant memories are fundamental elements of one‟s personal identity. The self is represented as either the agent or object of some action, or as the experience of some state (Kihlstrom, 2009). As such, the person‟s cognitive,

motivational and emotional state at the time of the event is also represented in AM.

Because AMs are also episodic memories, there should be some sense of how one episode is related to each other in the flow of personal time. Kihlstrom (2009) points out that the sequence of events makes a difference to their meaning, and every person has their own particular ways of sequencing their life-events. Wilson and Ross (2003) have reviewed evidence that people‟s memories of their personal pasts (both what and when) are malleable and may be influenced by current self-identity and self-motives. Individuals‟ current self-views, beliefs, and goals influence their recollections and appraisals of former selves. People‟s current self-views, in turn, are influenced by what they remember about their personal past, as well as how they remember earlier selves and episodes. Likewise, their reconstruction of memories and perceived distance from past experiences have implications for how the past influences the present.

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While semantic self-knowledge reminds us who we are, episodic self-knowledge reminds us how we got that way” (p. 1186).

The interpsychic or interpersonal function of AM is practically inseparable from the intrapersonal function, because people do not simply rehearse their AMs to

themselves. They share their memories with others, and this sharing it and of itself is essential part of social interaction. Self-experience that is shared with others then forms individuated knowledge that composes AM. From this perspective, Nelson (2003) claims that “the personal and the social and cultural are both functionally and structurally related. This relation leads to the issue of the role of narrative in the composition of AM. Nelson notes that “[P]ersonal memories, which had been encapsulated within the individual, became transformed through verbal narratives into cultural memory, incorporating a cultural belief system. … like language, narrative is assumed to be a group construction, one that turns individual memories into shared conceptual systems” (p. 127).

There are diverse approaches to exploring the organization and structure of AM. A model will be outlined below, in a more simplified form, based on the work of Barclay (1988, 1996).

Barclay (1988) assumes that most AMs are reconstructions of past episodic events and these recollections are driven by self-schemata. Such self-schemata are acquired through a schematization process of one‟s memories for everyday events. Markus (1977, quoted in Barclay) defines self-schemata as “cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experiences, that organize and guide the processing of self-referenced information contained in the individual‟s social experiences” (p. 87). There are two broad modes of cognitive representations that compose self-schemata: information abstracted from episodic events, and more general information derived from exposure to repeatedly occurring events. Barclay (1988) asserts that autobiographical material may not be correct in detail, although it must maintain the integrity of one‟s life; in this process, self

-schemata help mediate self-referenced information so that what is remembered is congruent with one‟s existing self-knowledge.

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through summarizing regularities and consistencies in their experiences. Self-schemata and schematization also play an important in chronological organization of events, so that some causal relationships among these events can be inferred.

Barclay has proposed an ecological model of autobiographical memory to contextualize behavior and subjective experience. This model is primarily composed of purpose, process, and product of remembering. Behavior and experience have reasons for being used, for example, for adaptive or survival purposes.

Purpose

The most important purposefor reconstructing AM for Barclay is “to adapt to the present by conveying authentic meanings instead of simply preserving the past in an accurate fashion” (1996, p. 99). In addition to the intrapsychic and interpsychic functions that have been described earlier, there is another important purpose: the construction and reconstruction, production and reproduction of “history.” History is conceived of as

the story we wish to be known that justifies our being, culture, or way of life. History provides a context within which local, national, and world events are interpreted and understood. A conceptualization of history justifies certain actions for specific reasons, such as “national security.” This view of history implies that the construction of history is not “objective.” Instead histories are written and based largely on documents created by individuals and groups with certain motives in mind. History justifies these motives. . . . However, like the construction of personal histories, history cannot be constructed without restrictions; there are certain “facts” to be accounted for and events to be “explained” that are socially legitimated. (p. 99).

Process

As regards process, Barclay identifies five processes: framing, instantiation,

subjectification and consensus building, contextual restructuring (in reference to contexts), and subjectification (in reference to activities). Framing is a process that brings context to consciousness. As such, it provides the initial setting for remembering that allows

meaningful reconstructive work to occur. This context encompasses physical, psychological, social, cultural awareness.

Instantiation is a process in which language or other symbols (e.g., music, film, dance) are used for the objectification of reconstructed AMs. Instantiation is a

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Subjectification and consensus building refers to “the processes through which common knowledge comes to be shared and accepted. This knowledge is thus returned to the contexts that form the ground within which autobiographical remembering occurs…” (p. 100).

Contextual restructuring is a process that works in tandem with framing, in a bidirectional fashion. As contexts frame reconstructive work, this work in turn can change or influence the contexts that ground productive thinking or remembering. “. . . not only do reconstructive activities (potentially) restructure contexts, but those activities lead to objectifications that are represented mentally through a process of subjectification” (p. 101).

In explaining subjectification, Barclay quotes what Obeyesekere (1981) wrote: Subjectification is the reverse of objectification: cultural ideas are used to justify the introduction of innovative acts and meanings. Subjective imagery is to

subjectification what personal symbols are to objectification. The former help externalize . . . internal psychic states, yet such subjective externalization do not,

and cannot, constitute a part of the publicly accepted culture (pp. 123-124). Subjectification . . . is the process whereby cultural patterns and symbols are put

back into the melting pot of consciousness and refashioned to create a culturally tolerated set of images that I designated subjective imagery. Subjective imagery is often protocultural, or culture in the making (p.169).

Products

Three products proposed by Barclay are: contexts, reconstructive activities (which are actually processes as well), and objectifications. Contexts here have the same meaning as the ones in the framing process. However, Barclay now locates narrative forms and affective emotional states. “Narratives are intellectual, sociocultural, and historical techniques constructed and refined over time. They are used for the purpose of telling different kinds of „stories‟” (p.101). Reconstructive work is a process that yields a product, that is, AMs. This work involves the justification of affective emotional states as a means of adaptation. Reconstructive work of emotions, attitudes, and beliefs serves adaptive functions that use the past to meet a current goal. When combined with contextual

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associated with clear, well-formed, and commonly shared emotional subjective experiences” (p. 104).

CULTURAL CONTEXT OF AUTOBIOGRPAHICAL MEMORY

This last section of the paper deals more with the cultural context of the construction of narrative self in AM. As has been stated before, self and memory are constructed through particular forms of social-cultural interactions and frameworks that lead to autobiographical narrative. A autobiographical narrative defines what is

appropriate for one to remember, how to remember, and what it means to be a self with an autobiographical past (Fivush & Haden, 2003).

Story-telling is found in every human culture. McAdams writes: “Life-stories mirror the culture wherein the story is made and told. Stories live in culture. They are born, they grow, they proliferate, and they eventually die according to the norms, rules, and traditions that prevail in a given society, according to a society‟s implicit

understandings of what counts as a tellable story, a tellable life” (2003, p. 200). It can be pointed here that the construction of autobiographical or self-defining narratives are the collaborations of friends and foes, of cooperation and opposition, whether they real or imagined.

A dynamic reciprocal relationship between individual and cultural influences on AM construction and retrieval has been suggested by Wang and Conway (2004). These relationships are illustrated in Figure 1.

Macro cultural level

Micro individual level

Development, expression maintenance

Encoding, organization

retrieval Autobio-

graphical

memory self

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Figure 1. Relationships between culture, self, and memory (Reproduced from

Wang and Conway [2004], in Williams, Conway & Cohen [2008, p.70).

As noted earlier, the personal and the social and cultural are both functionally and structurally related. In her integrative view of memory and culture, Nelson (2003) has found a strong support from Brockmeier‟s (2002) statement: “there is no principal separation of what traditionally is viewed as individual or personal memory from what traditionally is viewed as social, collective or historical memory. Considering the manifold layers of the cultural fabric that weaves together individual, group and society, the idea . . . of an isolated and autonomous individual becomes meaningless” (in Nelson, p. 129). Because narrative form is a cultural invention which is adopted by the individual in organizing their AM, Nelson (2003) points out that to understand it, we have to situate in its cultural context. She states that “the relations between individual memory and communal forms of memory, between narratives of the self, social narratives of others, and communal narratives of all kinds are keys, I believe, to understand the source and meaning of the social and self functions of autobiographical memory” (p. 131).

How we are similar to our fellow human beings is defined in a cultural context, and how each of us is unique is manifested in the self. Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman indicate that “[O]ne way that autobiographical selves become public is by being based on narrative properties like genre and plot type that are widely shared within a culture, shared in a way that permits others to construe meaning as the narrator has. . . . Autobiographical memory, to be communicable, must be constructed of cultural materials” (p. 293). All narratives are implicitly dialectical and “the stories we tell to create ourselves reflect that dialectic” (Bruner, 2003, p. 233) or dialogical: “they invoke a response from the self and others that have „read‟ or listened‟ to them. Stories have audiences, real or imagined” (Singer & Blagov, 2004, p. 132).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

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quality. It often produces disruptive and profound turning pints in self-narrative, life has been violently changed. If traumatic experiences have such profound effects on the

survivor, they should also raise a serious concern for the culture. Barclay (1996), based on his intensive examination of the Holocaust survivors, is aware that humans have limited skills to conceptualize and articulate such profoundly traumatic experiences. He points out that

embodied experiences of atrocities do not yield a set of image schemata that lend themselves to a metaphoric language of extermination. There are no known narrative structures that can be used as referents from which to reconstruct traumatic experiences like those associated with the daily experience of seeing others selected and exterminated (murdered), especially when a witness to such atrocities does not know the basis upon which one might be “selected” from moment to moment and day to day. (p.96)

Many forms of victimization other than living through the Holocaust, like rape or traumatic violence, do not conform to widely known narrative systems (e.g., romantic sagas) or emotional scenarios that become the emotional contexts (e.g., depressing, anger) in need of narrative justification. . . . Nevertheless, the Holocaust has become a metaphor for victimization in contemporary world culture, and may well represent a unique narrative structure if a rhetoric for extermination can be created by the victims of the Holocaust. (p.97).

Modern history has attested to the fact that human inflicted trauma like the Holocaust is not the only modern phenomenon occurring exclusively in the Second World War Europe. Trauma has become an unfortunate product of modernity itself across the globe. Turning to traumatic autobiographical memories and narratives provide an entry for the investigation of atrocious and violent practices of contemporary social-political life, because psychological trauma is never an isolated phenomenon. For many victims, traumatic narratives represent a site of struggle and contestation. Survivors of human inflicted trauma always endeavor to find ways to construct themselves and carry on with their reconfigured lives. Scripting traumatic memories is an act of bearing witness to the trauma to make what is unspeakable speakable. To ignore this phenomenon is only to miss one of the key factors in understanding and contesting the nature of modern

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