Individual Differences in Memory Specificity and Cultural Self-Orientation: Autobiographical Recall Strategies in Greek Adults

Autobiographical memory (AM) is shaped by both individual traits and culturally shared models of the self. The present thesis focuses on the Greek subsample (N = 26; 25–52 years) of a larger cross-cultural project investigating AM retrieval strategies. In a Zoom-based session, participants generated memories to ten neutral cue words (e.g., market, sea, home) and answered follow-up questions on age and emotional valence of each event. Each narrative was coded as episodic, extended, categorical/abstract, or semantic associate. Mood (SAM), trait affect (PANAS), and the Autobiographical Recollection Test (Berntsen et al., 2019) were also administered. Cultural self-orientation was assessed with the Symbolic Self-Inflation family-circle drawing task (Kitayama et al., 2009). Guided by recent multidimensional models of independence and interdependence that move beyond the simple East–West binary (Vignoles et al., 2016)—and noting that Mediterranean contexts such as Greece remain understudied despite combining Western socioeconomic features with strong family collectivism—we hypothesized that: (1) a higher self-inflation ratio (larger self-circle relative to family members) would be associated with a greater proportion of episodic memories, reflecting an individualistic orientation; (2) drawings emphasizing family interconnectedness would be associated with more categorical or extended memories, echoing relational self-construals. To test these predictions, we used Spearman’s rank-order correlations (two-tailed; pairwise deletion; n = 26) between memory-type counts and the variables of interest (ART, affect indices and individualistic/collectivistic orientation). Overall, we found that a tendency to construct vivid scenes while remembering was modestly related to more episodic memories; a higher typical positive affective state was associated with fewer time-spanning and more summary-style narratives; an increase in arousal over the course of the experimental session was associated with more time-spanning narratives; and the drawing-based cultural self-orientation index was not clearly related to memory specificity.