The phenomenology and temporal distributions of autobiographical memories elicited with emotional and neutral cue words Yoichi Maki, Steve M. J. Janssen, Ai Uemiya, and Makiko Naka Department of Psychology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan In this study we examined whether the temporal distribution of autobiographical memory changes when different types of cue words are used to elicit the memories, and how the type of cue word affects the phenomenal characteristics of the memories. A total of 76 participants, ranging in age from 21 to 69 years, were presented with 22 cue words (emotional, emotion-provoking, and neutral). They were asked to recall a personal event and to complete the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (Rubin, Schrauf, & Greenberg, 2003, 2004) for each cue word. Results showed that the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memories which were cued with emotional and emotion-provoking words were rated higher than those of memories which were cued with neutral words, and that the peak in the temporal distributions of the autobiographical memories that were cued with emotional or emotion-provoking words were located later than the peak of the distribution of the memories that were cued with neutral words. Keywords: Autobiographical memory; Phenomenology; Temporal distribution; Emotionality; Cue words. The reminiscence bump is the tendency of people to recall more personal events from the period in which they were between 10 and 30 years old than from other lifetime periods (Rubin, Rahhal, & Poon, 1998; Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986). The location of the reminiscence bump depends on the method that is used to elicit the autobiogra- phical memories. Rubin and Schulkind (1997) found that, when cue words are used, the peak of the reminiscence bump is usually located in the second decade of people’s lives (1020 years), but when asked for the most important events from their personal lives, people mainly recall events from the third decade (2030 years). Besides the location of their peak, the two distributions also differ in the size of the reminis- cence bump and the proportion of recent events. The temporal distribution of word-cued memories tends to have a smaller reminiscence bump and a very strong increased recall of recent events, whereas the temporal distribution of important memories often has a larger reminiscence bump and no recency effect (Fitzgerald, 1996; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997). When one compares the dis- tributions of word-cued and vivid memories (Fitzgerald, 1988), one can observe the same differences: A smaller reminiscence bump and a very strong increased recall of recent events for memories elicited with cue words and a larger reminiscence bump and no recency effect for vivid memories. Both differences can be ex- plained in terms of unrestricted and restricted memory searches. When the memories are cued with words the search is unrestricted, but when Address correspondence to: Yoichi Maki, Hokkaido University, Department of Psychology, Kita-10 Nishi-7, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan. E-mail: yomaki@image.ocn.ne.jp Steve Janssen is now at Flinders University, South Australia. The research was in part supported by a grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to SJ. Memory, 2013 Vol. 21, No. 3, 286300, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2012.725739 # 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 19:13 07 April 2013