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The Reminiscence Effect In Autobiographical Memory And Tests Of Its Prominent Accounts, Justin T. Coleman

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The reminiscence effect, in which people aged 40 and over remember more autobiographical memories from between ages 10 to 30 than from adjacent periods, producing a “bump” in lifespan distributions, is a highly robust effect. When it was discovered to occur for highly positive emotional memories, but not negative ones, the cultural life script account of reminiscence was proposed. The cultural life script account asserts that individuals possess scripts for important events in the normative life that structure autobiographical recall. The reminiscence effect is explained by the fact that in life scripts, positive events have highly prescribed timings and cluster …