A Study Of Autobiographical Memory In The Perspective Of Constructionism

Autobiographical memory (AM), is one of the hot researches of moderncognitive psychology, and is a cross field between self and memory. It is a kind oflong-term memory storage, and storages a lot of schemas closely related to theindividual, which contains the understanding of individual (self-schema), alsocontains the understanding of their social (social schema). Self-schema and socialschema are learned in a social interaction between individuals and their socialenvironments, which are the active construction results between the outsideinformation with the existing memory.Constructivism is a new perspective in psychological research, emphasizing theconstruction of conversation, which believes that the psychological phenomenon doesnot exist in the individual, and not simply exist in the external, but exit betweenperson and person, that it is the result in relationship, and is the product of socialrelationship. No matter the self construction (information processing construction) orsocial construction, are constructions that certain people interact with other human incertain social and cultural background. For a particular phenomenon, it first appearedin social communication, through the discourse to construct meaning, such as theconcept of autobiographical memory, such as the extraction of autobiographicalmemory contents to share with others or to tell situational stories. Secondly, when aperson appears some psychological problem, he will find meaning in words andconstruct a reasonable relationship. Constructivism is accepted gradually by thepeople in theoretical study and practical application. Constructivism emphasizes thecultural relativity of psychological phenomenon, concerns the cultural and historicalfactors in psychology, and promotes the sports of psychological localization in theworld.Cross-cultural research has shown in the various field of psychologicalphenomena including autobiographical memory.There is a unified whole between self construction and social construction. Aperson accepts outside information in the interaction with the society, which includes information of evaluation by others for their own behaviors and attitudes thatconstructs self schema; also includes the social cultural information in order toregulate him that constructs social schema. Self construction and social constructioncomplete the processing of information, and realize self and social function ofautobiographical memory respectively. Self construction contributes to the formationand development of the individual self, social construction helps individuals toestablish intimacy with others and to inform or educate others. Social constructionemphasizes the effect of social environment, especially the cultural. The person maytransform region or country in all kinds of conditions, thus he will experience culturalchange, and adapt to the current culture and reduce the impact of the past culture,through the social construction of cross-cultural. A person must learn a language,construct conversation, get corresponding social schema, and then realize theinterpersonal interaction.This paper takes social constructivism as the background, which is one of themain trends of contemporary psychology, takes the history and achievements ofmodern psychology as the foothold, tracks autobiographical memory research whichis frontier of contemporary psychology closely, and studies autobiographical memoryand its psychological research systematically, in order to provide a new theoreticalperspective for autobiographical memory. The basic ideas in this paper are:The first chapter discusses several key themes as the basis of the research workbriefly, including autobiographical memory, constructivism and schema etc, andinvestigates the history and current situation of these researches in order to explain thebackground and significance of my research work.The second chapter introduces the relevant research, including self, memoryand autobiographical memory. On the content selection and arrangements, Iconducted a "construction on relevant issues". This article involves three importantconcepts: self, memory and autobiographical memory. First, I discriminated thesethree concepts; Second, I elaborated that the theories of the self related toautobiographical memory, including subjective-objective dimension and timedimension et al.; that the theories of memory related to autobiographical memory, including the important theories of Ebbinghaus and Bartlett, the former had asignificant impact on the traditional research on memory, while the latter is based oncriticizing the former on developing its own memory theory, proposed theautobiographical memory and thinking of construction; and that the analysis ofautobiographical memory from the perspective of constructivism.The third chapter explains how autobiographical memory completes its selfconstruction, including construction of information process; how it establish aneffective link between the self and the outside information though coding andextracting; and how autobiographical memory and self impact from the perspective ofindividual biometric identity, based on cognitive constructivism.The fourth chapter explains how autobiographical memory completes its socialconstruction, including construction of information process in social background, theinfluence factor of construction in social interaction between persons, and themeaning of social construction in cross-cultural background from the individual socialidentity, based on social constructivism.The fifth chapter is based on summary of this research work to further clarify thesense of Constructivism which can help autobiographical memory study.