The Autobiographical Memory And Personality Traits: The Relationship And Metal Representation

Autobiographical memory (AM) is memory for information related to the self, which is the recollection of the past life experiences. In these decades, it has made more and more progresses on the emergence, development, information process and neural mechanisms and so on, which provides us a better understanding of the human real memory. In addition, the research about the function of AM is just like a quiet revolution, which has been carried out gradually in the field of memory research. The AM has three functions, self function, direct function and social function. The self function of AM plays a very important role on the self-identity, self-consistency and self-enhancement, which will influence the personality trait indirectly. Moreover, the social function is also important for the judgment and development of personality trait. However, few researches mentioned it except Rubin et al., who, yet, only discuss the relationship between AM process components, beliefs and personality trait from the perspective of phenomenology. Apart from it, there are a few researches concerning the mental representation of each other. Based on the function of AM, this study tries to explore the mental representation and relationship of each other, and attempts to analyze the core of internal mechanism of it.In the first part of this study, according to the word-cueing technology, we design the autobiographical memory questionnaire (AMQ) from three aspects of AM, namely, beliefs and properties. There are some differences from previous studies. For example, the personality trait words are cues in our study. The results indicate that personality trait relates to the AM; however, the mental representation among them is our aim. Firstly, the characteristic of retrieval of AM following the personality trait words is discussed. Then, the experiment 2,3 discuss the possibility of abstraction view, computational view and the scope view. Experiment 4 discusses whether the retrieval of AM can facilitate the personality trait judgment, and experiment 5 tells us whether the influence can last for several minutes. The results are as follows:(1) The AMQ has good reliability and validity, while the NEO-FFI has low internal consistency reliability in the two factors of openness and agreement. For the process components of AM, the emotion and visual imagination are particularly important. The beliefs of AM have a close relationship with personality, and the totality of AM is significantly correlated with the five factors of personality and the totality of personality. The components and beliefs of AM have high correlation with personality corresponding to personality trait word. The five factors personality trait can predict the belief of AM, while the recollection of AM can be predicted by the components of AM.(2) Compared with the concrete nouns, people need more time to retrieve AM according to the personality trait words, and the subjects need more time on negative words compared with the positive. What's more, the result also shows that high personality trait self-descriptive words need more time to retrieve AM and make personality judgment compared with the low self-descriptive words, although there are no differences significantly.(3) Individuals don't need the AM to support their judgment of personality trait, which indicates that the abstraction view is possible, and it is opposed to the scope hypothesis. However, there are no differences between the self description and mother description. In this way, it can be concluded that AM and personality trait have independently functionally. In the prime paradigm, some factors can be found which influence the result in this study, for example, fixation.(4) As opposed to the experiments 2,3, this study converse the task, which means that the initial task is retrieval of AM, while the target task is to make judgment to the personality trait. The result points out that the retrieval of AM can help people make judgment to personality trait. However, it is not all right. If the understanding of words can be controlled, the different results can be found.