Autobiographical Elaboration and Memory for Adjectives

Abstract

Adjective recall was compared for three rating tasks that encouraged varying degrees of autobiographical elaboration: autobiography (subjects were instructed to remember an autobiographical episode for which the adjective described how they felt or behaved and to date the episode), self-reference (subjects rated how often the adjective was self-descriptive), and pleasantness (subjects rated the degree of pleasantness of the adjective). Subjects in both the autobiography and self-reference conditions recalled significantly more words than subjects in the pleasantness condition ( ns = 16).