The Relationship Between Attachment And Autobiographical Memory:Relational-interdependent Self-construct As A Moderator

Autobiographical memory,a kind of social information with important personal significance and functions,is influenced by attachment.First,from the perspective of attachment,the individual's mental representations of self and attachment figures,which formation is based on the interactions with the primary caregiver,will affect the retrieval of attachment-related social information.Second,From the perspective of autobiographical memory,attachment may affect the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory through two pathways: the current working self-goal system and the conceptual self-system.Not only attachment can affect the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory,but it can affect the degree of individual's self-construction in intimate relationships,that is,the degree of relational-interdepend-dent self-construal,Relational-interdependent self-construal in turn affect how individuals organize relational information in their memory systems,and then affects the retrieval of relational information.Therefore,relational-interdependent self-constr-ual may play a mediating role in attachment and the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory.To sum up,this study introduced relational-interdependent self-construal as a moderator to further explore the possible mechanism of how attachment influence the retrieval of autobiographical memory.This research consists of three studies.In the first study,the relationships among individual attachment,relational-interdependent self-construal and retrieval characteri-stics of autobiographical memory were investigated by questionnaires.To overcome the shortcomings of the questionnaire method,study 2 and 3 adopted experimental method to further verify the results of study 1 and explore the underlying mechanisms.Both study 2 and 3 used the attachment priming paradigm to test the retrieval characte-ristics of autobiographical memory of individuals with different attachment security levels.Both experiments were single-factor experimental design.The independent variable was the priming type(secure attachment priming group and insecureattachment priming group),and the dependent variables were the retrieval characterist-ics of autobiographical memory: positivity,clarity,vividness,specificity and accessibility.In order to examine the direct effects of attachment on the retrieval characteristi-cs of autobiographical memory,the autobiographical memory task was performed directly after the attachment priming paradigm in study 2.In study 3,to test the mediating effect of relational-interdependent self-construal on attachment and the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory,after the attachment priming paradigm was done,the participants were asked to complete the relational-interdepenent self-construal scale first,and then the autobiographical memory task was performed.The results are as follows:(1)Attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance are significantly positively correlated,and both of them are significantly negatively correl-ated with relational-interdependent self-construal and the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory.(2)Attachment anxiety has a direct prediction effect on the accessibility of autobiographical memory,while attachment avoidance has a direct prediction effect on the clarity,specificity,vividness and accessibility of autobiograph-ical memory.(3)For relational-interdependent self-construal and the retrieval characte-ristics of autobiographical memory,the main effect of attachment priming is significa-nt,and the relational-interdependent self-construal and the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory scores of security attachment priming group were significan-tly higher than those of insecure attachment priming group.(4)Relational-interdepen-dent self-construal plays a partial intermediary role between attachment security and the clarity,specificity,vividness and accessibility of autobiographical memory.This study shows that attachment,relational-interdependent self-construal and autobiographical memory are closely related.Not only Attachment affects the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory,but also affects the relational-int-erdependent self-construal.The attachment impacts the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory throughtwo pathways.The first is that attachment directly affects the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory.The second is that attachment affects the retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memory indirectlyby influencing the relational-interdependent self-construal.