Personal Differences of Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

Introduction. The autobiographical memory is a subjective reflection of the passed life path segment, which is the fixation, preservation, interpretation and reproduction of significant events and states. Autobiographical memory always operates with a “personally related experience”. Personality differences are always manifested in autobiographical memories. They are of great interest to researchers. The purpose of the article is to find out the personality differences of autobiographical memory. Materials and Methods. Theoretical analysis of literature on the research problem; the free retrieval of events technique, The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) by Raymond B. Cattell (Form-C); correlation analysis. Results. The authors conducted an empirical study, which involved people aged 18 to 82 years. The results of the study allow saying about the personal differences of autobiographical memory in terms of the number of reproduced events with different signs and events from diverse fields of life. Confident, calm, emotionally stable people tend to remember the positive events (from free event replay list) more, unlike restless, emotionally unstable and underconfident people. The relationships between personal characteristics and the number of memories from various fields of life were revealed. Discussion and Conclusions. The autobiographical memory as a kind of long-term memory organized according to the semantic principle provides for each person the formation of the past subjective history and the experience of oneself as a unique subject. The obtained data can be used in the practice of the consulting psychologist, in the process of student’s education in general psychology, personality psychology and differential psychology courses. Keywords: autobiographical memory, event retrieval, personality, positive memories, negative memories, neutral memories, fields of life.