Gender differences in autobiographical memory for childhood emotional experiences.

Abstract

Research to date has paid remarkably little heed to gender differences in autobiographical memory. To redress this, the author examined memory for childhood events in adult men and women remembering back to childhood, and in children themselves. Five studies were conducted, and results revealed that females consistently recalled more childhood memories than males did and were generally faster in accessing the memories recalled. Furthermore, the gender difference observed was specific to memories of events associated with emotion and was apparent across a diverse range of emotions experienced by both the self and others. The overall pattern of findings obtained is consistent with the proposition that gender-differentiated socialization processes influence the content and complexity of representations of autobiographical emotional events in memory. To some extent, then, autobiographical memory appears to be a socially constructed phenomenon.

A gender difference in the false recall of negative words: Women DRM more than men

“…Previous studies have shown that women typically recall more emotional information than men (Bloise & Johnson, 2007;Davis, 1999;Fujita et al, 1991;Seidlitz & Diener, 1998). The present findings show that, under some conditions, women's memory for negative emotional information may be less accurate than that of men.…”

“…For example, Davis (1999) found that women recalled more emotional childhood memories than men and recalled them more rapidly than men. Similarly, both Fujita, Diener, and Sandvik (1991) and Seidlitz and Diener (1998) found that women recalled more positive and negative autobiographical memories than men in timed retrieval tasks.…”

Personality and mental time travel: A differential approach to autonoetic consciousness

“…First, the gender distribution is quite uneven. Indeed, research has shown that females have more detailed and emotionally intense autobiographical memories than men (Davis, 1999;Fujita, Diener, & Sandvik, 1991). Second, the N of the study is a bit small, though the statistical analysis shows that it is large enough to obtain significant results.…”

A Preliminary Study of Gender Differences in Autobiographical Memory in Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…In adults, research has shown that on word cueing tasks, where participants are required to generate specific memories to cues, males are more likely to offer generalised memories (i.e., summaries of events) (Goddard, Dritschel & Burton, 1998). Compared with females, males also report less detailed, vivid, and emotional memories (Pillemer, Wink, DiDonato & Sanborn, 2003), fewer relationally oriented narratives (Buckner & Fivush, 2000) and they report fewer childhood memories and are slower to access them (Davis, 1999). Given the very small number of females generally included in autism studies the question arises as to whether autobiographical memory deficits are as prevalent among females with ASD as among males, or whether their retrieval style is more in line with females without ASD.…”