The Japanese Journal of Cognitive Psychology Vol. 14(2016) No. 2

Autobiographical memory refers to memory for one's own personal experiences (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and is characterized by a reminiscence bump. However, few studies have examined the relationships between this bump and the content and emotional aspects of the remembered events. We asked older Japanese adults to freely recall their autobiographical events for about 10 minutes and we analyzed the contents of those memories and the temporal transitions in associated emotions. We observed a reminiscence bump within the participants' 20s for events associated with pride and gratitude, as well as a small bump at the ages 10–20 for events associated with retrospective emotions. Moreover, the findings also indicate that, with time, positive feelings towards negative events increase, while negative feelings towards negative events fade. Most of the memories could be classified in terms of their content according to the following categories: work, family, recreation, love, death, injury/illness, and education/school; while most memories from the ages 20–30 were categorized as related to love and/or family. We discuss the emotional aspects and the content categories associated with the reminiscence bump.

Autobiographical reasoning refers to the reflective thinking that creates relations between past experiences and self. In addition to constructing the Autobiographical Reasoning Scale (ARS), the present study asked 467 participants, between the ages of 19 to 57 years, to recall their experiences of successes and failures. The participants provided ratings for the ARS items, items related to the vividness and valence of each recalled experience, and ones related to autobiographical memory functions (Japanese version of the TALE Scale: Ochiai & Oguchi, 2013). Moreover, 250 participants provided ratings on scales for identity development, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. The results indicate that (1) the ARS consists of five factors (self, turning-point, importance, lesson, rehearsal) and that it has sufficient reliability and validity,(2) successes elicited more autobiographical reasoning than failures, and (3) autobiographical reasoning for successes has a positive relationship with identity development, self-esteem, and life satisfaction.

The purpose of this study is to assess the usefulness of digital light processing (DLP) projectors as hardware for the presentation of visual stimuli, particularly within experiments that require highly accurate control over presentation durations and/or over the timing of successive visual stimuli. DLP (and liquid crystal displays (LCD)) projectors are commonly used within brain function studies. We used an inexpensive commercially-available DLP projector driven by a light emitting diode (LED) light source (NEC NP-L102WJD) and measured both its onset and offset transients and its response delays. The results indicated that the DLP projector could execute more rapid onset and offset transients than an LCD projector, and that transients were even faster than those of a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor. The response delays of the DLP projector were larger than those of a CRT monitor, but it was confirmed that the duration of the DLP projector delays were always constant. Accordingly, this study concludes that DLP projectors (specifically ones driven by LED light sources) are sufficiently useful tools for visual experiments that require strict temporal control of stimuli presentations, and that they may even be better than CRT monitors when one considers their future availability and applicability to functional studies of the brain.