Gender differences in autobiographical memory: females latently express communality more than do males

Abstract

Gender differences have been found in several aspects of autobiographical memory (i.e. personally experienced events). For example, previous studies have shown that females’ autobiographical memories contain more communal and emotional expressions than do males. However, an important question concerns whether these differences can be observed both in the manifest content (i.e. what is actually said) and in the latent content (i.e. the underlying meaning of what is said). In the present exploratory study, we extended the current knowledge concerning gender differences in autobiographical memory by investigating the manifestly expressed words, as well as the latently expressed words in autobiographical memory descriptions. We observed an overall gender difference in the latent content of the autobiographical memories. Furthermore, females latently described their memories in more communal terms than males did. No other gender differences were found. Our results indicate that females’ autobiographical memories are more communally oriented than male's.