Model of Personality Motives and Autobiographical Memory

Barnard College, New York NY

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by investigator): Previous work has begun to document how agentic and communal motives influence the accessibility of recently acquired information and of knowledge held in long term memory. Motives act to channel accessibility to long term knowledge such as autobiographical memories that carry information about the motive central to the individual. In addition, agentics are concerned with differentiation (contrasts, comparisons, and restrictions), whereas communals are concerned with integration (links, similarities, and resolutions). These different ways of organizing information also have powerful implications for how information is encoded into memory and, relatedly, how it is organized in the long term. Four studies will test the hypothesis that accessibility and recognition of autobiographical memories are mediated by motivation and narrative structure. In the accessibility studies, it is predicted that if differentiation and integration are key cognitive procedures in the organization of motive-related memories, then they should facilitate processing, as indicated by a negative correlation between the amount of differentiation and integration in the memories of agentics and communals respectively and response times in recalling these memories. In the recognition studies, it is predicted that agentics and communals should show superior recognition and shorter response times for memories that are content (agentic / communal) and structure (differentiation / integration) congruent. This will demonstrate that motives act as a channel for accessing motive-related information through a specific organization procedure. The hypotheses will be tested with both implicit and explicit motives, which are believed to tap into different levels of cognitive processing (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989; Woilce, 1995). Implicit motives should act as a channel for event specific knowledge, whereas explicit motives should channel accessibility to autobiographical knowledge of general events. The findings will provide powerful evidence for two separate motivational systems with different cognitive and behavioral corollaries.