Autobiographical Narratives

Definition

Autobiographical narratives are the stories people remember (and often tell) about events in their lives. Some autobiographical narratives refer to memories of important personal events, like “my first date” or “the day my father died.” Others may seem trivial, like a memory of yesterday's breakfast. Many psychologists study the extent to which memories of personal events are accurate. They ask questions like these: How true is the memory? Is the story a distortion of [Page 84]what really happened? Other psychologists are interested in what autobiographical narratives say about a person's self-understanding or about social life and social relationships more generally. Their questions include these: What does a particular memory mean for the person remembering it? How do people use autobiographical narratives in daily life?

What Do We Remember?

People's memory of personal events is not like a video recording that can simply be played back. For one thing, people eventually forget most of the events that occur to them. Try to remember what you ate for lunch on June 1, 2005. Or what you wore the day before that. Clearly, the brain has more important things to do than remember every event that has ever occurred. Second, the details of those events people do recall, even when they recall them vividly, often turn out to be inaccurate and mixed up, especially as those events fade into the distant past. At the same time, research suggests that while people often make errors in recalling the details of important personal events from long ago, their narrative accounts are surprisingly accurate in conveying the overall gist of those events. People remember the big picture better than they do the small facts.

Many psychologists see autobiographical memory as an active and creative process. People construct memories by (a) attending to certain features of a tobe-remembered event, (b) storing information about that event according to personally meaningful categories and past experiences, (c) retrieving event information in ways that help solve social problems or meet situational demands, and (d) translating the memory of the event into a coherent story. What people attend to, how they store autobiographical information, what they eventually retrieve from their memory, and how this all gets told to other people are all influenced by many different factors in the person's life and social world, including especially a person's goals. For example, a person whose life goal is to become a physician may have constructed especially vivid personal memories of interacting with doctors and nurses growing up, positive experiences with biology and the health sciences, and episodes of helping other people. Autobiographical narratives provide a ready supply of episodic information that people may consult in making important decisions about the future.

Development and Functions

Most people can recall virtually nothing from before the age of 2 years. Autobiographical memory begins to manifest itself in the third and fourth year of life as young children begin to form simple memories about events that have happened to them. Parents, siblings, and teachers often provide considerable assistance in the development of early autobiographical memory. They will ask young children to recall recent events (yesterday's trip to the park, Sarah's birthday party) and encourage them to relate the event as a story. By the age of 5, most children are able to tell coherent stories about events in their lives, complete with setting, characters, plot, and a sense of beginning, middle, and end. As children move through elementary school, their autobiographical memories become more complex and nuanced.

...