Involuntary Autobiographical Memories in Schizophrenia: Characteristics and Conditions of Elicitation

Abstract

Involuntary autobiographical memories are mental representations of personally experienced past events that come to mind spontaneously, with no preceding attempt to recall them. They have been showed to be more frequent and more emotional in the psychosis continuum. Although schizophrenia is strongly associated with thought disorders, including cognitive intrusions of thought, images, semantic knowledge, research on patients' involuntary autobiographical memories is limited. We undertook two studies to compare involuntary and voluntary remembering in schizophrenia and the conditions in which involuntary memories occurs in those patients, both in daily life (n = 40), using a diary method, and in an experimental context (n = 50). Overall, results showed that the conditions of elicitation of involuntary memories differ in patients, as patients were more sensitive to memory triggers, especially internal triggers, in comparison to controls. Relatedly, patients' involuntary memories-mostly related to mundane events with low emotional load-were experienced more frequently. Although patients' involuntary and voluntary memories were less clear, more poorly contextualized and associated with a lower belief in occurrence than those of controls, patients considered them as more central to the self, in comparison to controls. The results are discussed in relation to patients' self-reflective impairments.

The phenomenology of autobiographical retrieval

“…Overall, patients tend to lack a sense of agency which leads them to attribute their thoughts to someone else and be confident in this misattribution (Swiney & Sousa, 2013). In the case of autobiographical memory, Allé et al (2020) showed that patients have little trust in their involuntary memories. They interpreted this result as a consequence of a lack of control during retrieval and difficulties in seeing such memories as self‐generated; thus having deficits in metacognitive processes.…”

Mental time travel in psychiatric disorders

“…Relatively few studies have investigated 'involuntary MTT,' for which past or future events are spontaneously generated when participants are engaged with other tasks. For instance, two recent studies investigated involuntary MTT in patients with schizophrenia (Allé et al, 2020(Allé et al, , 2021. Therefore, future research should compare voluntary and involuntary MTT in psychiatric patients, and conduct cross-diagnosis comparisons of MTT.…”

Unraveling the role of retrieval deficits in autobiographical memory impairment in schizophrenia: A comparison of involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories

“…Of these additional questions, only the spontaneous rehearsal and memory coherence are relevant for the present article (see Table 2). The analysis of other qualitative characteristics is reported elsewhere (Allé et al, 2020).…”