The role of culture in the recollection of autobiographical memories

In everyday life we experience different emotions as we recollect of memories from our personal pasts. These personal past memories, called autobiographical memory, develop within a culture where we belong. Our autobiographical memories comprise both episodic and semantic details and are crucial for our daily living. In accessing those memory details, we require the involvement of other cognitive mechanisms such as working memory, which processes and maintains information for a brief period of time. Cross-cultural investigations have paid less attention to understanding how culture and emotional valence influence individuals’ access to their autobiographical memories. In this thesis, I examined how phenomenological qualities of autobiographical memories change across cultures and the valence of cues. I also examined the impact of concurrent performance both on the recollection of autobiographical memory and working memory. I developed a novel experimental paradigm to understand the relationship between working memory and autobiographical memory in the context of culture that has been ignored in previous literature. I present evidence of a cultural difference in phenomenological qualities of autobiographical memories. From a theoretical perspective, I show a cultural difference in the sequence of access to specific autobiographical memory and the recollection of episodic and semantic details. I also show how the underlying process behind the performance of working memory tasks are similar across cultures but differ other than the decision processes. The research I present in this thesis has theoretical implications and applications across a broad range of research areas, including theoretical development, methodological advancement, and cross-cultural understanding of everyday memory.