Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 1298-1304
Consciousness and Cognition

The self and involuntary memory: Identifying with the victim increases memory accessibility for stressful events

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The effect of self-relevance of a stressor on involuntary recall was tested.

  • Distressing film clips varying in self-relevance were presented.

  • Self-relevant film clips produced more involuntary memories of the film.

  • The sample sizes were small and generalizability to a clinical context is limited.

Abstract

Autobiographical memory is intimately linked to the self. However, the relation between the self and involuntary recall has been understudied. Theoretically, the more relevant an event is to the self the more accessible the memory should be. In line with this prediction, the present study tested the hypothesis that self-relevance of a stressor modulates involuntary recall. Healthy student participants viewed distressing film clips and were presented with information that defined the main characters as more or less similar to them, or without any information about the characters. In line with predictions, participants in the high self-relevance condition reported more involuntary memories of the film clips after one week compared to participants in the low self-relevance and control conditions. The findings support the theoretical relation between the self and memory accessibility and extend findings from previous research to the domain of involuntary recall.

Introduction

The Self-Memory System model of autobiographical memory (SMS; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) proposes that events that are highly threatening to the self, such as a traumatic event, result in highly accessible memories. These memories may become accessible to the point where they are recalled involuntarily such as traumatic flashbacks. These involuntary memories may function to fuel action directed at minimizing the threat to the self (Conway, 2005, Conway et al., 2004). Although the importance of autobiographical memory for our sense of self is broadly accepted much less is known about the role of the self in memory accessibility. The current study experimentally tested the hypothesis that involuntary recall of a stressor depends on the extent to which the stressor is perceived as relevant to the self. To the extent that this perceived threat can be viewed as an appraisal of the traumatic event and/or its impact this hypothesis would also be in line with the cognitive model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). The cognitive model identifies negative appraisals of the trauma as a key mechanism in the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms, including involuntary memories.

The idea that a stimulus becomes a stressor if it poses a threat to the self has been evident for some time in the emotion regulation literature. In 1964, Speisman and colleagues (Speisman, Lazarus, Mordkoff, & Davison) wrote: “a stimulus must be regarded by the person as a threat to his welfare in order for stress responses to be produced. Thus, the same stimulus may be either a stressor or not, depending upon the nature of the cognitive appraisal the person makes regarding the significance for him.” (pp. 367). This proposition has been validated since by a series of classic studies in the emotion literature (Gross, 1998, Lazarus and Alfert, 1964, Speisman et al., 1964).

Empirical evidence for the relation between memory accessibility and the self is also emerging from the clinical literature. Sutherland and Bryant (2005) asked individuals with PTSD and trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD to provide memories that showed who they are as a person (self-defining memories). Respondents with PTSD retrieved more trauma-related memories than trauma-exposed respondents without PTSD. The same pattern emerged in another sample when participants were asked to recall memories in response to positive and negative word cues (Sutherland & Bryant, 2008).

Although these studies underline the importance of the link between the self and memory the conclusions are limited to voluntary recall. Initial support for the relation between the self and involuntary recall comes from two studies. In a study by Pearson (2012) participants were shown a distressing film clip and afterwards rated the self-relevance of the film clip on a single visual analogue scale (VAS). Participants reported their involuntary memories of the film in a one-week diary. In line with the rationale of the present study, the self-relevance rating was significantly and positively correlated with the overall number of involuntary memories of the film reported by the participants. This finding provides initial support for the idea that self-relevance is related to involuntary recall although no causal inferences can be made based on this correlation. One study experimentally investigated the causal effect of self-efficacy on involuntary memory development (Brown, Joscelyne, Dorfman, Marmar, & Bryant, 2012). Student participants were led to believe that, based on a questionnaire score, they were either very capable (high self-efficacious) or not very capable (low self-efficacious) of coping with distressing events. They were then presented with a distressing film showing the aftermath of road traffic accidents. Participants in the high self-efficacy condition reported fewer intrusions of a negative film clip immediately after the film and 24 h later compared to participants in the low self-efficacy condition. The findings are in line with the hypothesis that the self-image (in this case, perceived ability to cope with the stressor) influences involuntary recall. However, this study did not directly manipulate self-relevance and did not measure involuntary recall over a period longer than 24 h.

The main aim of the present study was to experimentally test the role of perceived relevance to the self in the involuntary recall of a laboratory stressor. Several distressing film clips were used to induce involuntary memories (see Krans, Näring, Becker, & Holmes, 2009, for a review of studies using this paradigm). Relevance to the self was established by varying the extent to which student participants could identify with the main characters in the film clips based on their social roles and self-descriptions. Accordingly, one third of participants (high self-relevance condition) viewed the film clips after receiving information that defined the main character as being very similar to them in terms of social role (e.g., a student). In contrast, one third of the participants (low self-relevance condition) viewed the exact same film clips but received information that the main characters were very different from them (e.g., a businessperson in their 40’s). Finally, one third of participants viewed the film clips without any context information in the control condition. Participants reported their involuntary memories of the film in a one-week diary and then returned for follow-up.

Based on the Self-Memory System model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and the empirical studies as reviewed above (Brown et al., 2012, Pearson, 2012, Sutherland and Bryant, 2005, Sutherland and Bryant, 2008), it was predicted that participants in the high self-relevance condition would report a higher frequency of involuntary memories than those in the low self-relevance and control conditions. No specific difference was expected between the low self-relevance and control condition.

Section snippets

Method

This study was approved by the ethical committee of the Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University Nijmegen where the data was collected.

Statistical approach and outliers

Group differences were tested using statistical analyses of variance (ANOVA). Effect sizes are reported in Cohen’s f for main ANOVAs and Cohen’s d for pairwise comparisons. All reported tests are two-tailed. The data were checked for multivariate outliers using Mahalanobis distances (Tabachnick & Fidell, 1996). Two multivariate outliers were detected and removed from the dataset (final n = 40). The data was subsequently checked for univariate outliers across and within groups using a criterion of

Discussion

The main goal was to test the hypothesis that higher self-relevance of a stressor predicts memory accessibility to the point of involuntary recall of the stressor. Overall, participants indeed reported more involuntary memories of a distressing film when they believed that the main character shared a social role with them (i.e., young students) than when they believed that the main character was very different from them (e.g., older professional) or without information about the victims.

This

Acknowledgments

The author was supported by a Rubicon Fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She would like to thank Elisabeth Penz, Lisa Dickmann, Hanneke van Dam and Joyce Verhelst for their help with the data collection, Richard Heijtenis for his help in programming the study, and Aliza Werner-Seidler, Kate Hetherington, and Michelle L. Moulds of the University of New South Wales for their helpful comments on a draft version of this paper.

References (31)

  • A.T. Beck et al.

    Manual for the beck depression inventory – II

    (1996)
  • A.D. Brown et al.

    The impact of perceived self-efficacy on memory for aversive experiences

    Memory

    (2012)
  • M.A. Conway et al.

    Images and goals

    Memory

    (2004)
  • M.A. Conway et al.

    The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system

    Psychological Review

    (2000)
  • M. Davies et al.

    Predictors of analogue post-traumatic intrusive cognitions

    Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy

    (1998)
  • Cited by (6)

    • Effects of inhibitory control capacity and cognitive load on involuntary past and future thoughts: A laboratory study

      2022, Consciousness and Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      Finally, it may be possible that inhibitory control is more oriented towards the content of IAMs and IFTs rather than their occurrence per se. Thus, future studies could also manipulate and/or analyse the consistency of the content of IAMs and IFTs with current self-goals (e.g., task requirements, current concerns, e.g., Cole & Berntsen, 2016; Krans, 2013) to verify the idea that only IAMs and IFTs that are consistent with and/or reflect people’s goals may indeed get through this inhibitory control mechanism and reach awareness (Conway & Playdel-Pearce, 2000). Taken together, it appears that several variables may actually influence the occurrence of IFTs and IAMs in addition to, or instead of, the putative inhibitory control mechanism.

    • Visuospatial context learning and configuration learning is associated with analogue traumatic intrusions

      2017, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
      Citation Excerpt :

      Supporting models of PTSD, our results indicate that the vulnerability to develop intrusions may be related to weaker visual contextualization of trauma memories. Interestingly, scholars have also pointed to a lack of contextual memory in terms of verbal and conceptual elaboration (e.g., see Ehlers & Clark, 2000), and studies have shown that semantic contextual information can also increase intrusions (Krans, 2013; Pearson, Ross, & Webster, 2011) if it alters the idiosyncratic meaning of a traumatic memory in a negative way (for discussion, see also Brewin & Burgess, 2014). Our results complement this literature by showing the importance of visual contextualization – and this memory function may or may not be independent of verbal or conceptual elaboration.

    • Contextual representations of negative images modulate intrusion frequency in an intrusion provocation paradigm

      2016, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
      Citation Excerpt :

      Previous studies have found that self-relevance can be an important factor in influencing intrusion frequency. For example, Krans (2013) found that undergraduate participants reported more intrusive memories of a distressing film clip when they thought the victim was also a student. However, in the present study there was no significant effect of the contextual manipulation on self-relevance ratings.

    View full text