Research For Generality Of Autobiographical Memory Under Different Mood State And Self-concept

In recent years psychologists had paid more attention to research autobiographical memories. In the field of clinical psychology, the research fellows verified the overgeneral autobiographical memory that appear to the depression patients, attempted suicide patients and PTSD patients. That is, when such patients have the autobiographical memory test, they can not report the memories that describe the specific events, but the general memories that are abstract and vague, it seriously does harm to the ability of problem-solving, and damages their normal daily functions. The research fellows explained such phenomenon by different theories, one considers that it is due to the childhood trauma, the other thinks that the self processing the autobiographical knowledges abnormally results in it. The previous studies, had explored the influence of depressive mood on overgeneral memories, but seldom to studied whether the anxiety play the same role, and the conclusions of related studies are questionable. In addition, research fellows had paid attention to the overgeneral memories on psychiatric patients, but seldom to studied the appearance and regularity of such psychopathic tendency on normal people. So the author selected the college students as object and studied how the factors of anxiety-ralated experiences influence on the generality of autobiographical memories.There are three parts in the research: the first used the State—Trait Anxiety Inventory to difined the level of anxiety and explored how it influence the generality of autobiographical memory, the second induced the experiences of pleasure and anxiety by photo priming method and explored how it influence the generality of autobiographical memory, the last activated the emotional self-concepts, explored the role of the positive or negative self-concept on the generality of autobiographical memory.It shows that: (1) The generality of pleasure-related memories is influenced by the mood states: the general degree of pleasure-related memories is decreased under pleasure state, while is more obvious under anxiety state. (2) The generality of pleasure-related memories is influenced by different levels of anxiety: compare to high or middle level of anxiety, The general degree of pleasure-related memories is more obvious under low level of anxiety. (3) The mood state does not play the same role in anxiety-related memories, such generality always keep in a steady range. (4) Activating the negative emotional self-concepts can decreases the general degree of anxiety-related memories, and amplifies the possibility of reporting specific memories.