There is a positivity bias in autobiographical memory such that people are more likely to remember positive events from their past than they are to remember negative ones. Inhibition may promote this positivity bias by deterring negative memories from being retrieved. In our first experiment, we measured individual differences in retrieval-induced forgetting, a phenomenon believed to be the con...

Autobiographical memories are recalled with varying degrees of psychological closure. Closure is a subjective assessment of how far a remembered experience feels resolved, and it has been suggested that one predictor of closure is the amount of emotional detail in the memory. Study 1 examined which aspect of emotional detail is important for closure, and showed that open and closed negative mem...

Already after 6 months we found that the students had forgotten a lot of the scientific content. Very often they showed a familiarity (recognition) with the situations and objects showed to them but they were unable to identify (recall) and label them. However they did remember some spectacular moment, the sudden appearance of a fox and a moose. They did also remember things and situations when...

Reminders of happy memories can bring back pleasant feelings tied to the original experience, suggesting an intrinsic value in reminiscing about the positive past. However, the neural circuitry underlying the rewarding aspects of autobiographical memory is poorly understood. Using fMRI, we observed enhanced activity during the recall of positive relative to neutral autobiographical memories in ...

Are elevated rates of false recall and recognition in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm associated with false autobiographical memories in everyday life? To investigate this issue, the authors recruited participants who reported improbable memories of past lives and compared their DRM performance with that of control participants who reported having lived only one life (i.e., their cu...

Space perception provides egocentric, oriented views of the environment from which working and long-term memories are constructed. "Allocentric" (i.e. position-independent) long-term memories may be organized as graphs of recognized places or views but the interaction of such cognitive graphs with egocentric working memories is unclear. Here we present a simple coherent model of view-based work...

Sleep benefits veridical memories, resulting in superior recall relative to off-line intervals spent awake. Sleep also increases false memory recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Given the suggestion that emotional veridical memories are prioritized for consolidation over sleep, here we examined whether emotion modulates sleep's effect on false memory formation. Participants l...

Recall of tourism experiences evokes pleasant affect tied to the trip, which leads mood and behavioral intentions. Based on experimental design with two studies, this research investigates mood-repairing role memory, memory characteristics, affective consequences memory. Study 1 confirmed that both positive negative groups recall memories, effect repair motivation valence is moderated by state....

This study investigated whether self-esteem (SE) moderates the mood regulation function of autobiographical memory. Music was used to induce a negative mood in participants. Mood was then assessed following one of three tasks: (1) free recall participants were not constrained to retrieve memories of a particular valence; (2) directed recall participants were told to retrieve positive memories; ...