Abstract
Objective: To investigate whether the phenomenal experiencing characteristics of female adults’ episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) are influenced by age × time interaction. Methods: There were 95 participants in total, including 33 young (18-33 years old), 30 middle-aged (38-55 years old) and 32 older women (60-76 years old). Each of the participants was instructed to recollect one recent (during the last year) and one remote (in childhood) episodic event in a semi-structured interview, and was required to complete the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (AMQ) following the recollection of each event. Results: The scores of most phenomenal experiencing features of recent memories were obviously higher than that of the remote memories, while age effect and age × life period interaction showed no significance. Middle-aged and older women experienced more positive emotion, and less negative emotion than young people in recent EAM. However no significant differences on childhood EAM were found among the three groups of participants. Conclusions: Compared to the young, the middle-aged and the old show no obvious disadvantages on autobiographical memories when focusing on phenomenal experiencing. Life period, rather than age, appears to evidently affect phenomenal experiencing characteristics of EAM, registering as stronger phenomenal feeling of recent EAM than that of childhood EAM. The middle-aged and the older women showed positive emotion bias compared with the young , but only on recent memories. This suggests that positive bias is affected by age × time (or life period).
Key words
age /
life period /
autobiographical memory /
phenomenal experiencing /
positive emotional bias
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Phenomenal experiencing characteristics of female adults’ autobiographical memory: Impact of age and time[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(5): 1101-1105
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