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Essay about Gender differences and autobiographical memories

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Autobiographical memory is essentially a system that contains episodic memories from individuals’ lives, autobiographical memory is what makes each and every one of us different to another, and essentially what forms the self, connecting us to others, history and the future.
“Autobiographical memories from the mundane to the profound, help form the self, they provide personal historical context or personal biography for who we are now: they are in essence a ‘database’ of the self.”(Conway, A and Holmes, E, 2005, p228)
There has been research conducted into gender differences within autobiographical memories and although not fully understood it has become an apparent theme, that female participants provide more detailed, richer …show more content…

This like many other studies supports the idea that vivid memories are related to a higher level of emotion or arousal within the participant and therefore more easily accessible, by showing a picture rather than a verbal cue participants display a higher level of connection to the cue.
Research conducted by Popovski, M and Bates, G.W (2005) again concerned with the links between gender differences and recall within autobiographical memory, the difference within this study is that participants were scaled on the Depression and anxiety scale from a questionnaire completed and then categorised into dysphoric or non-dysphoric groups to see if more detailed or general responses were provided to a set of positive, neutral and negative cue words.
Research here was being conducted to see if particular genders, genetics or childhood experiences are more susceptible to depression.
Hypothesis here being tested was to see if patients with depressive and dysphoric symptoms had issues accessing autobiographical memories and whether it would be possible to determine between the two groups. It was suggested that patients who scored high on the scale for depressive symptoms would provide more general descriptions from autobiographical memory when relating to feelings.
Discussion of gender differences here suggested that women are more often diagnosed with depression than men, and that men were more likely to engage

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