Centre for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Mem Cognit. 2021 Feb;49(2):276-292. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01092-8.
Previous research has suggested that sharing autobiographical memories in a coherent manner has a beneficial impact on consequent social reactions of listeners. In this experimental study, we were able to replicate earlier findings by demonstrating that listeners (N = 107) showed significantly more willingness to interact with, more social support towards, and a more positive attitude towards coherent than incoherent narrators. Remarkably, these beneficial effects of coherence were observed only for narratives about positive memories. Results are explained in the light of the relevance of positive memories for the social bonding function of autobiographical memory. Furthermore, earlier work was extended and refined by investigating effects of the individual constituting dimensions of coherence (context, chronology, theme) on social responses. In line with our predictions, the dimensions of chronology and theme were most important in impacting social responses of listeners. Possibly a reduction of the attraction effect due to increased effortful processing and reduced credibility due to insufficient emotional elaboration might explain these results respectively. Furthermore, social responses were worse when narratives were incoherent with regard to more than one dimension, in line with the expected additive effect. Overall, fully incoherent narratives, which had had low scores on context, chronology, and theme, had the most adverse effect on listeners' social responses. This study adds significantly to the domain of memory and cognition by showing how cognitive psychological research would benefit from extending a merely intrapersonal perspective to include an interpersonal perspective that considers social implications of memory and cognition as well.
先前的研究表明，以连贯的方式分享自传体记忆对听众的后续社交反应有积极影响。在这项实验研究中，我们通过演示听众（N=107）明显更愿意与连贯的叙述者而不是不连贯的叙述者互动、提供更多的社会支持和持有更积极的态度，成功复制了早期的发现。值得注意的是，这种连贯性的有益影响仅在关于积极记忆的叙述中观察到。研究结果从积极记忆对自传体记忆的社交联系功能的重要性方面得到了解释。此外，我们通过研究连贯性的个体构成维度（上下文、时间顺序、主题）对社交反应的影响，进一步扩展和完善了早期的研究。与我们的预测一致，时间顺序和主题维度对听众的社交反应影响最大。由于增加了费力的处理和由于情感表达不足而降低了可信度，可能分别解释了这些结果。此外，当叙述在多个维度上不连贯时，社交反应会更差，这符合预期的累加效应。总体而言，完全不连贯的叙述，在上下文、时间顺序和主题方面得分较低，对听众的社交反应影响最大。这项研究通过展示认知心理学研究如何从仅考虑个人视角扩展到包括考虑记忆和认知的社交影响的人际视角，从而为记忆和认知领域做出了重要贡献。
