Living-in-history effect in the dating of important autobiographical memories

The tendency of a person to frequently use public (i.e., historical) events as temporal landmarks when dating personal memories is termed the living-in-history (LiH) effect. We investigated the LiH effect in autobiographical memories of Bangladeshi older adults who lived through the 1960s Bengali nationalist movement and the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. 476 participants (mean age = 67.16 years; SD = 5.96 years), including 62 independence war veterans, retrieved and dated three important memories from their life and completed two scales: (a) a transitional impact-of-war scale and (b) a generational identity scale. Results showed that nearly one-third of the total memories (32%) were dated using public event references, demonstrating a LiH effect. However, this effect was twice as strong among veterans (58%) than among nonveterans (28%). The memory content analysis revealed that public event references were mostly used to date public memories (e.g., war and political struggle) and the memories with negative valence. Multivariate analyses showed that veteran identity, material changes due to war and participants’ age significantly predicted the use of public event references to date one, two or three memories relative to no use of those references. The public memories that were personally significant and the extent participants experienced the material changes due to war mainly caused the LiH effect. We discuss the results considering current theories of autobiographical memory. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-021-01250-6.