The effect of dysphoria on the relationship between autobiographical memories and the self

Grace, Lydia; Dewhurst, Stephen A.; Anderson, Rachel J.

doi:10.1080/02699931.2020.1802231

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Despite burgeoning research on the relationship between future thinking and the self, direct evidence for the role of future event representations in nourishing self-views is still scarce. To address this question, the present experiments investigated whether and how thinking about a personally important future event (a SDFP) modulates the content of the working self (i.e., the kind of self-conceptions that are active at a given moment), as has been demonstrated with memories for past events (Charlesworth et al, 2016;Çili & Stopa, 2015;Grace et al, 2021;Sedikides et al, 2015). With this in mind, we selected self-concept measures for which previous studies have shown consistent relationships with autobiographical memory.…”

Section: The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of past and future autobiographical thinking on the working self-concept

D’Argembeau,

Garcia Jimenez

2023

Memory

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While the role of autobiographical memory in self-representation is well established, the identity function of future thinking has received much less attention. Yet, most people commonly imagine future events that convey meaningful information about the person they wish or expect to become. In three experiments, we assessed the extent to which thinking about such self-defining future events influences the current content of self-representation (i.e., the working self-concept). Participants were asked to think about either a past or future self-defining event, or a control topic, before describing aspects of their identity in the form of 'I am' statements (Experiments 1 and 3) or completing scales assessing self-related dimensions (Experiments 2 and 3). We found that thinking about a future self-defining event led participants to conceptualize themselves more in terms of their psychological traits, as did thinking about a past self-defining event. Furthermore, thinking about a future self-defining event increased the sense of present-future self-continuity, whereas thinking about a past selfdefining event increased the sense of past-present self-continuity. These results suggest that self-representations are fuelled not only by autobiographical memories, but also by projections into the future.

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Section: The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%