Autobiographical Memory Characteristics Of Individuals With Different Types Of Self-esteem

Autobiographical memory is a kind of memory about self. Autobiographicalmemory has been attached by psychologists, because it has lose relation with somepsychological phenomena such as self and emotion. Self-esteem is a corecomposition of ego structure. Therefore, autobiographical memory characteristics ofindividuals with different types of self-esteem may be different.We attempt to study the autobiographical memory of people with differentself-esteem types under two experiment tasks. In this paper, university students wereconducted for tested groups. We explore the autobiographical memory of people withdifferent self-esteem types by way of combining questionnaires and experiments.Before the start of formal experiments,90subjects which contains true highself-esteem, low self-esteem and defensive high self-esteem were differentiated bySES and Mar1owe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. The research set twoindependent experiments with AMT task. Experiment1discussed about the quantityof memory with word-related incidents while experiment2discussed about howspecific the memory with word-related incidents is. All subjects attended experiment1at first, and conduct experiment2right after the end of experiment1for a week. Inthese two experiments, self-esteem is between-subject variable, word-related iswithin-subject variable.The following conclusions can be made in this dissertation study:1. How specific the memory is and the memory bias is influenced by theproperty of a word-related. Individual’s autobiographical memory bias tends to bepositive. The positive memory is more specific than the negative memory.2. The autobiographical memory bias of defensive high self-esteem group is themost intense, whether the memory bias is positive or negative. The positive memorybias of true high self-esteem group is more intense than low self-esteem group. Thenegative memory bias of low self-esteem group is more intense than true highself-esteem group.3. The defensive high self-esteem group and true high self-esteem group tend tomore specific clues to memory with a positive word-related incidents, while thedefense high self-esteem group and low self-esteem group tend to be less specificclues to memory with a negative word-related incidents.The research expanded the study of the relation between self-esteem andcognition, perfect the relevant theories of autobiographical memory. The paperrevealed the autobiographical memory characteristics of individuals with differenttypes of self-esteem and play a certain guidance to the personality education,especially the defensive high self-esteem individuals.