The Self and Memory

Denise R. Beike, James M. Lampinen, Douglas A. Behrend

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781841690780
• eBook ISBN: 9781135432614
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Noted scholars from a broad range of sub-disciplines in psychology discuss the ways in which the memories of our lives come to influence who we are, our personalities, and our emotional functioning. Other topics covered include how our personalities and self-concepts influence what we remember from our lives, and the notion of memory and the self as interdependent psychological phenomena.

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THE EMERGENCE OF THE SELF AND MEMORY

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Evolving Conceptions of the Self and Memory

DENISE R. BEIKE

JAMES M. LAMPINEN

DOUGLAS A. BEHREND

University of Arkansas

The present volume was inspired by the three coeditors’ independent explorations of the expanding literature on autobiographical memory. One of us is trained as a social psychologist with expertise in the self–concept, another as a cognitive psychologist with expertise in the phenomenology of false memories, and another as a developmental psychologist with expertise in language and cognition. Despite our different backgrounds, the critical role of the self in autobiographical memory became apparent to each of us, as it has to other autobiographical memory researchers. Indeed, serious study of the interrelation of the self and memory is currently at its apex. A breakthrough occurred in 2000 with the publication of Conway and Pleydell–Pearce’s article on the self–memory system in Psychological Review. This truly seminal article brought together research from clinical, cognitive, developmental, personality, and social psychology, as well as neuroscience. Virtually every psychologist can find research from his or her subfield cited in this article, brought together cogently with research from other subfields into a broad theory of personal memory and the self. Suddenly, a common language was available for researchers from disparate areas to communicate and compare findings. To celebrate and to encourage the exploration of the self and memory, we hosted a symposium at the University of Arkansas in November 2000, inviting the major theorists who are working at the juncture of these two once-separate areas of endeavor. The quest to discover how the self and memory influence one another can be an exercise in trying to pin down elusive concepts, as an analysis of the history of the self and personal memory in psychology attests.

THE SELF

Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of the self, and its relation to memory. Descartes famously postulated, “I think, therefore I am.” We might modify this to read, “I remember, therefore I am.” Along these lines, Berkeley (1734/1979) posited an entity that “exercises divers [sic] operations, as willing, imagining, remembering. . . . This perceiving, acting being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, myself [italics in original]” (p. 43). Hume (1739/1979), however, thought that the idea of a self that unified perceptions and memories was a mere illusion: “We feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption [i.e., the break from one perception to the next]; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation” (p. 61). By the time of James, however, the notion of a self, however fanciful or imagined it might be, had taken hold in the new science of psychology. James claimed that there could be no science of psychology that ignored the self; indeed, “the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology” (1890/1981, pp. 220–221), because thoughts and perceptions and feelings are perceived as belonging to the self. Except for a lengthy reprieve in America during the dominance of behaviorism, a psychology of the self has flourished ever since. The main players in the game of self have been social and personality psychologists, with cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists as very recent entrants.

James is generally credited not only with defining the new science of psychology around the self, but also with introducing an important distinction among senses of the self. He proposed the self as “I” versus the self as “me,” the knower versus the object to be known. This distinction continues to be made today (e.g., Brown, 1998; Pinker, 1997). Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (1997) calls these aspects sentience and self–knowledge, respectively. Pinker agrees with James that sentience rather than self–knowledge presents the more interesting and mysterious problem. Contributors to the present volume demonstrate, however, the complexity and mystery of both aspects of the self. Some contributors, such as Sedikides, Green, and Pinter, or Cameron, Wilson, and Ross are interested in self–description and self–evaluation, the clear earmarks of the “me” self, or self–knowledge. Others, such as McAdams, Fivush, or Lampinen, Odegard, and Leding are interested in identity and the sense of continuity of the self. These are aspects of the “I” self, or sentience. Many of the contributors to this volume address aspects of both.

How the self should be defined is an ongoing debate in psychology and other social sciences. Current theories emphasize the social and interpersonal nature of the self (e.g., Brewer & Gardner, 1996); its fluidity (e.g., Gergen, 1982); its temporal aspects (Halberstadt, Niedenthal, & Setterlund, 1996; Ross & Wilson, 2002; Ryff, 1991); and its relation to both momentary and enduring goals (e.g., Conway & Pleydell–Pearce, 2000; Emmons & Kaiser, 1996; Singer & Salovey, 1993). Contributors to the present volume reflect this diversity of definitions of the self as well. As a consequence, there is no single definition of the self that can easily be laid out to cover all the senses of the self that are relevant for this volume. It remains for future research to determine which sense of self is most critical for personal memory, or whether all senses are relevant.

PERSONAL MEMORY

Despite the absence of a single agreed–upon definition of the self, research on the self and memory has been underway for decades. Our focus in this volume is on the relationship of the self to a particular subtype of memory, variously called autobiographical, personal, or sometimes episodic memory. As distinguished from memory for facts, personal memory is memory for the events that happen to oneself. As has been noted by numerous scholars of autobiographical memory, memory research progressed mainly through laboratory study of words, pictures, and lists until Neisser (1982) and Tulving (1983) opened the door and challenged the field to take on the neglected but arguably more important topic of personal memories.

A flurry of research followed, resulting in hundreds of journal articles and dozens of volumes on the topic. A 1986 volume on autobiographical memory begins with the following statement clearly linking personal memory and the self: “Autobiographical memory is about the self. . . . Autobiographical memory is the source of information about our own lives, from which we are likely to make judgments about our own personalities and predictions of our own and, to some extent, others’ behavior. Autobiographical memory, however, also provides a sense of identity and continuity. . .” (Rubin, 1986, p. 7). Conway (1990) distinguished autobiographical memories from other types of memories by virtue of their high self–reference, the subjective experience of remembering, and the presence of personal interpretation. He further explained the role of the self in personal memory this way: “Remembering . . . events is heavily dependent upon reconstruction and beliefs, theories about the mind, and the self, all of which . . . lead to ‘memories’ which are consistent with the current state of the cognitive system at the expense of accurately representing the past” (p. 104).

By 1996, Rubin felt the literature justified the claim that autobiographical memory was composed of these components: verbal narrative, imagery, and emotion. The self was not mentioned, nor was it mentioned in the introduction to a 1998 volume on the topic (Thompson, Herrmann, Bruce, Read, Payne, & Toglia, 1998). Perhaps the presence of the self was seen as so self–evident that it was no longer necessary to mention it. Contrary to the unstated role of the self, the introductory chapter in each volume explicitly mentions the narrative nature of autobiographical memory or its study. Some theorists see the narrative quality of personal memory as axiomatic (e.g., Fivush, 1991; McAdams, 1997; Nelson, 1993; Pillemer, 1998), whereas others see it as one of several possible ways that personal memories may be studied (Robinson & Taylor, 1998). Contributors to the present volume take different stances on this issue, with some strongly advocating a narrative approach (Fivush, McAdams) and others taking what might be called a featural or episodic approach (Beike, Kleinknecht, & Wirth–Beaumont; Lampinen et al.; Sedikides et al.). Contributors also differ on how they see features and narratives as being causally related: Do features or episodes exist or are they reconstructed? And are narratives the true representation, or an epiphenomenon of reporting? Aside from the issue of narratives versus episodes, there is the issue of the level of generality of personal memories. Several contributors acknowledge that personal memories exist on multiple levels of a hierarchy (e.g., Singer & Blagov), reflecting Conway and Pleydell–Pearce’s (2000) notion of a three–tiered structure. Still other contributors investigate remembered selves as well as remembered events (e.g., Cameron et al., Skowronski). Past or remembered selves are important cognitive and emotional constructs, and play a vital role in the self–memory system, but have no clear place in a three–tiered system composed of lifetime periods, general events, and specific events. As was the case for the self, it is impossible to construct a definition of personal memory that is sufficiently broad to encompass the contributions to this volume and yet sufficiently narrow to distinguish it from other types of memory.

MAJOR THEMES

Four major themes weave throughout the volume, differentially emphasized by each contributor. These themes became apparent to us as we perused the chapters, so we used them as the organizing framework for this volume. One theme is the emergence of autobiographical memory. Barth, Povinelli, and Cant compare the personal memory abilities of nonhuman primates with those of human children and suggest an evolutionary framework for differences in these abilities. Howe discusses his theory that personal memories depend upon the presence of a cognitive self. A second theme is the narrative nature of personal memory. Fivush discusses what can be gleaned from the narrative form of the memories of sexual abuse survivors. McAdams reviews his life story model of personal identity, and discusses research on two different types of life stories that might be told, the contamination sequence and the redemption sequence. Singer and Blagov discuss how the stories encapsulated in self–defining memories reveal the nature of the self and its current goals. A third theme is emotion. Beike and colleagues discuss the different roles that emotional and nonemotional (what they call open and closed) memories play in the momentary construction of the self. Sedikides and colleagues consider how the need for positive evaluation of the self influences memory for personal events.

A fourth theme is time. Skowronski reviews research on how time is represented in autobiographical memory and how memory for time undergirds our concept of our lives and ourselves. Cameron and colleagues present their theory of temporal selves, in which memory for past selves is dependent upon current goals and the desire for a positive self–view. Lampinen and colleagues analyze the basis for a sense of continuity of the self over time, in particular people who describe themselves as no longer being the same self. They refer to the first state of affairs as diachronic disunity and explore its consequences for the representation of personal memories and for adjustment.

COMPARISON TO ISSUES THAT ONCE PREDOMINATED

The present volume, as a time capsule of the state of research and theory on autobiographical memory, reflects the changing focus of the field. Although the primary focus of each chapter varies, common assumptions pervading all of the chapters represent a break with past research and theory. Most notably, two issues that were once of central concern in research on personal memory have faded. One such issue that dominated earlier research was a concern with the accuracy of personal memories. Indeed one of the best–known volumes of the early 1990s was titled Affect and Accuracy in Recall (Winograd & Neisser, 1992). Although it is often necessary to use errors and distortions as a dependent measure, inaccuracies per se are less integral to theories today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. A second issue that once dominated was that of imagery in personal memory. The presence of sensory images is currently viewed as merely one of many subjective properties of personal memory that may be investigated.

In the new millennium, researchers of the self and personal memory concern themselves with issues of greater breadth than accuracy or imagery. One such issue is the form of personal memory representation. Some theorists see it as hierarchical (Conway & Pleydell–Pearce, 2000; McAdams, this volume; Singer & Blagov, this volume), others as narrative (Fivush, this volume; King, 2002), and still others as featural or configural. Relatedly, the processes by which personal memories and the self come to bear upon one another are of much greater interest now than they were ten or twenty years ago. Conway and Pleydell–Pearce (2000) are quite specific about this process, as are Cameron and colleagues, Sedikides and colleagues, and Skowronski (all found in this volume).

Another newly emerging theme is that of subjective experience. What do personal memories feel like? How do they make the rememberer feel? What are their subjective properties rather than their objective accuracy? Beike and colleages, Lampinen and colleagues, and Singer and Blagov all discuss subjective qualities of personal memories. In addition, a concern with adjustment pervades much current research and theory. Given the central role that personal memories play in everyday life, they are now being given a central role in adjustment and mental health. The positive, self–protective skew of the self–memory system is addressed by many of the contributors to this volume (e.g., Cameron et al., Sedikides et al.), and the distinction between healthy and less healthy ways of integrating the self and memory is made by others (e.g., Beike et al., Fivush, Lampinen et al., McAdams, Singer & Blagov).

Finally, the cross–talk among theorists in historically separate subfields of psychology (e.g., developmental and social) is finally taking place. We believe the present volume presents a compelling picture of an area of research that is the product of a diverse yet loosely affiliated group of scientists. Self and personal memory is a topic at the full flowering of its development, with theories that address the specifics of process and representation as well as the implications for health and happiness. Klein (2001) noted, “Within academic psychology . . . self and memory historically have been approached as separate areas of inquiry, with one domain largely ignoring the other. Fortunately, this situation has begun to change and research investigating self and memory, though still in its infancy, has produced a general outline of the relation” (p. 26). That general outline may be gleaned from ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTRIBUTOR LIST
• 1. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SELF AND MEMORY
• 2. NARRATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF AND MEMORY
• 3. THE SELF AND MEMORY FOR EMOTIONALLY VALENCED INFORMATION
• 4. THE SELF AND MEMORY ACROSS TIME