Schema Theory and Autobiographical Memories

Abstract

This study examines autobiographical memories of personal schemata. The participants reported life-historical memories that were prototypical for the respective schema. The selected schemata were emotional neglect, submission and emotional inhibition. The corresponding memories were classified by participants on given scales, such as vivid not pictorial; personally very significant insignificant; very intense not intense; pleasant unpleasant; frequently rarely etc. Two factors of subjective evaluation were extracted for memories of episodes of emotional neglect and emotional inhibition as part of a factor analysis: personal conciseness and pictoriality and emotional importance of repetition in the previous biography. The general factor of pictoriality, repetition and personal significance were generated for the memories of subjugation episodes. Significant correlations with the first factor were found with all three schema-specific episodes in bivariate product-moment correlations of the factor scores. Canonical correlations were used to analyse the infrastructure of the first factors of the three schema-specific
memories. The items of pictoriality and personal involvement were correlated. Significant correlations were found in the memories related to situations of neglect and subordination. As far as the memories of emotionally inhibiting situations are concerned, this correlation could be proven in a multiple regression.