Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 29, October 2014, Pages 10-22
Consciousness and Cognition

The roles of gender and temporal distance in the recall of dissonant self-related memories

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.07.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Participants reported self-consonant or self-dissonant events.

  • Questionnaire data, age of event, and coding for redemptive sequence were included.

  • Dissonant events were reported from further in the past than consonant events.

  • Gender differences found in time of events reported as well as self-report ratings.

Abstract

This study examined strategies employed to support a positive self-image in the face of dissonant self-related memories, especially focusing on the role of gender. Participants (N = 498) were recruited online and identified a self-descriptive trait. They then reported a memory of a time when they did or did not act according to that trait. Participants distanced themselves from dissonant, self-related memories by downplaying the event’s importance and relevance to identity and by emphasizing their lack of agency and the degree to which they had changed. Additionally, participants reported dissonant events from further in the past than consonant events, a tendency displayed more strongly amongst women than men. Women also rated events as more pertinent to the self on questionnaire measures. Findings demonstrate ways that autobiographical memories are reported and organized to support a positive self-image, and deepen an understanding of the role of gender in this process.

Introduction

The construction of a meaningful account of our experiences is an integral part of coming to terms with negative events in people’s lives (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a). Inevitably, bad things happen, we make mistakes, and situations that are beyond our control interfere with our daily lives; having a mechanism to come to terms with these occurrences is crucial for normal functioning. The experiment reported here aims to demonstrate how a positive self-image is supported when recalling a memory of violating a positive attribute of the self. Additionally, the experiment tested the degree to which gender differences play a role in how a person reacts to reporting an event in which his or her behavior contradicts that person’s positive self-image.

The life story approach to memory (McAdams, 1985) stresses the process through which an individual integrates memories with a self-image. Telling personal stories enables one to make meaning out of events and connect them to an understanding of one’s place in society at large, or in other contexts of one’s life, such as family, religion, or gender (McAdams, 2008). Through constructing personal stories, a person establishes a sense of coherence that provides a sense of continuity through life (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) and makes connections between life events and one’s self-image (Linde, 1993, Pals, 2006). This coherent self-image is central to models of autobiographical memory. According to the self-memory system model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), individuals summarize across events to derive a stable representation of their characteristics, which is a representation of the self. Specific memories provide evidence for the summaries that people generate, and the life story is one way to summarize across memories (Conway, 2005). Thus, if a person has a memory that contradicts one’s representation of self, then a way must be found to make sense of the self despite this event.

A recent review of gender differences in autobiographical memory (Grysman & Hudson, 2013) highlights findings that suggest women may find self-dissonant memories more challenging to the positive self-image than men. The model outlined by Grysman and Hudson (2013) emphasizes the role of parent–child conversations during early development of autobiographical memories (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). For example, it has been found that mothers discuss more information (Reese & Fivush, 1993), use more supportive speech (Leaper, Anderson, & Sanders, 1998), and more often ask evaluative questions (Fivush, Hazzard, Sales, Sarfati, & Brown, 2003) when speaking with daughters than with sons. Subsequent findings, including longitudinal research, have reported, for example, that girls use more evaluative language (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b), more internal state evaluations (Fivush, Haden, & Adam, 1995), and use more emotion language (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987). These findings suggest that, from an early age, girls, more than boys, are encouraged to report narratives of autobiographical events that emphasize evaluations and internal states, especially emotions.

As adults, women use more emotion language when describing self-consistent and self-discrepant behavior (Rice & Pasupathi, 2010), and write narratives that are longer and include more references to internal states (cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and physiological states, Bauer, Stennes, & Haight, 2003) than men’s. Additionally, it has been found that women are more likely than men to identify a theme in their self-defining narratives (McLean, 2008) and simply have more to say about themselves (e.g. Bohanek and Fivush, 2010, Bohn and Bentsen, 2008). Although not all autobiographical memory studies find or even test for gender differences (Grysman & Hudson, 2013), findings suggest that when gender differences are apparent, women have access to a greater amount of detail from their memories of self-related events, especially for information about thoughts and feelings (Davis, 1999).

Recent research has emphasized gender differences in autobiographical memory recall in ways that are especially relevant to violations of the positive self-image. For example, Schulkind, Schoppel, and Scheiderer (2012) found that women report richer, longer, and more evaluative personal event narratives than men, and Berntsen, Rubin, and Siegler (2011) found that women rated positive and negative events as more central to their lives than did men. Thompson, Skowronski, Larsen, and Betz (1996) reported that women’s memories were more personally revealing than men’s in a diary study, and Boals (2010) reported that women used more negative and fewer positive emotion words than men when describing a negative event in their lives.

Taken together, these findings suggest that women include more detail than men in recall of personal events, and more explicitly connect the details of their autobiographical memories to their self-images. Given these findings, the expectation in this study was that the drive to maintain a positive self-image in light of a dissonant self-related memory would be more powerful among women than among men.

Numerous strategies have been documented that contribute to how a person can maintain a positive self-image in the face of a negative memory. Negative events can be remembered as further in the past than they actually were, the importance of these events can be minimized, and individuals can emphasize positive consequences rather than personal errors. These three strategies are discussed in this section.

One way in which a positive self-image is maintained is by keeping positive events close and pushing negative events far away. Wilson and Ross (2001; Wilson, Gunn, & Ross, 2009), in their temporal self-appraisal theory, demonstrated through numerous experiments that, in maintaining a positive self-image, people conceive of negative memories as further in the past and positive memories as closer to the present. Happy memories seem clearer (Levine & Bluck, 2004) and more detailed (Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2009) than unhappy ones, and so positive experiences are kept salient and vivid, making them feel closer to the current self and maintaining a positive self-image. For example, Ross and Wilson (2003) used a timeline to induce participants to feel closer or further away from a past failure. Participants who felt closer evaluated themselves less favorably than those who felt further away. Thus, by keeping negative memories further away and positive events closer, people use the temporal distribution of memories to maintain a positive self-image.

Temporal self-appraisal theory shows that by remembering positive memories as temporally closer to the present and retaining greater vividness and detail from these events, an individual attains evidence that confirms a positive, current self-image. This approach highlights one way that the drive to maintain a positive self-image is achieved. In a related study, Escobedo and Adolphs (2010) elicited autobiographical memories from 40- to 60-year-old participants. In one analysis, the narratives of these events were classified on three dichotomous variables: moral weakness/strength, doing the right/wrong thing, and hurting/helping someone. For all three of these classifications, and for events evoked by negative versus positive cue words, analyses found that negative events were reported five to eight years earlier than the positive events. The authors argue, in line with temporal self-appraisal theory, that recalling negative events from further in the past enables participants to maintain a criticism of their behavior that does not directly challenge their current positive self-image. This finding builds on the temporal self-appraisal literature in that it shows evidence of participants varying calendar time (i.e., either recalling events that were actually further in the past or simply estimating these events as having occurred further in the past), as opposed to subjective time (Wilson & Ross, 2011). It suggests that, in a memory elicitation when time of event occurrence is not constrained by the experimenter, temporal distancing using calendar time can achieve similar results as a paradigm that employs subjective time.

In addition to recalling events from further in the past, another way to maintain the positive self-image is to downplay the consequences or the importance of the events recalled. Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman (1990) examined this strategy by comparing participants’ accounts of a time they made somebody else angry and a time they were angered by someone. Each participant in this study wrote one narrative of being a perpetrator and one of being a victim. Victim accounts were more likely to include negative consequences of the event, damage to a relationship, continued anger, and a focus on how the act was immoral and unjustifiable. Perpetrator accounts were more likely to include denial of lasting consequences, apologies, explanations as to why the anger experienced by the victim was an overreaction, and happy endings (Baumeister et al., 1990). Given that victims and perpetrators were the same people, the data reported in this study suggest that negative events are reported differently by different parties. Whereas the victims portray the event as having lasting consequences, the perpetrators protect the positive self-image by presenting the events as isolated occurrences that are not connected to the present self.

Another form of downplaying the role of the self in a negative event is to downplay the agency that a person has in making decisions. Broderick (2009) interviewed women who were opposed to abortion and also experienced unwanted pregnancies. She found that those who decided to abort downplayed their agency in making the decision, referring to themselves as victims and describing that they had no choice but to abort. Similar to Baumeister et al.’s (1990) findings, these participants emphasize the lack of agency, thus buffering against the threat to the self posed by actions that contradict their ideological beliefs.

Finally, telling one’s memory narratives as an event that moved from bad to good, i.e., the redemptive sequence (McAdams, 2006), is a means of limiting the threat of a negative memory by turning it into a positive outcome or lesson learned. It is also a way to derive meaning from a difficult experience. McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, and Bowman (2001) found that use of the redemptive sequence in life story narratives was a better predictor of well-being than the emotional tone of these narratives. They also found correlations between redemptive sequencing and a number of variables including sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1987), self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965) self-acceptance (Ryff, 1989), and satisfaction with life (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985). Although McAdams et al.’s (2001) findings do not directly show that redemptive sequencing is a way of maintaining a positive self-image, they do show relationships on a number of measures that are relevant to maintaining a positive self-image. Thus it was predicted that use of the redemptive sequence would moderate the effects of negative memories by reducing the amount of other strategies participants would use to protect the self.

In the current study, participants identified self-relevant traits and reported a memory of an event in which they acted according to that trait (consonant memory group) or of an event in which they did not act according to that trait (dissonant memory group). Half of participants were instructed to report events from within the last year and half were instructed to report events that occurred more than two years in the past.

It was hypothesized that participants would support the positive self-image by recalling dissonant self-related events from further in the past than consonant events, that they would downplay the relevance of dissonant events to the self, and that events told using the redemptive sequence would be less subject to these effects. Additionally, it was predicted that results on these variables would be stronger among women than men. Since it was predicted that women would react more strongly than men to dissonant events, but not to consonant events, an interaction between gender and condition was predicted.

Section snippets

Participants

The study was completed by 498 participants (265 female, 233 male) who were solicited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Age of participants ranged from 18 to 78 (M = 32.86, SD = 11.93). Reported ethnicity was: White (n = 402), Asian (n = 30), Black (n = 36), Hispanic (n = 15), Native American (n = 3), Indian (n = 3), Arabic (n = 1), and Bi-racial (n = 4). Four participants did not report ethnicity. Participants included respondents from 46 states in the USA. Level of education was also recorded, as the diversity of

Results

Results are presented in the following order: first, descriptive statistics are presented; second, analyses based on questionnaire ratings are reported; third, analyses of temporal distance of events are reported; fourth, analyses of redemptive sequence are reported.

Discussion

Results point to important findings regarding how dissonant self-related memories are recalled and regarding the role of gender in the recall process. When instructed to recall dissonant memories, participants rated these events as substantially different from consonant events in a number of ways, and reported events from further in the past than when reporting consonant events. These effects are particularly pronounced among women, who also report events as more meaningful, important, relevant

Conclusions

The findings reported here support current models of autobiographical memory, self-appraisal, and gender differences therein by comparing consonant and dissonant memories relating to the self-image. It was found here that dissonant memories were reported from further in the past than consonant memories, and were rated as less important, less relevant to identity, less agentive, and participants reported themselves to have changed more since their occurrence than consonant memories. These

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