Vicarious memories

Abstract

People not only have vivid memories of their own personal experiences, but also vicarious memories of events that happened to other people. To compare the phenomenological and functional qualities of personal and vicarious memories, college students described a specific past event that they had recounted to a parent or friend, and also an event that a friend or parent had recounted to them. Although ratings of memory vividness, emotional intensity, visualization, and physical reactions were higher for personal than for vicarious memories, the overall pattern of ratings was similar. Participants' ratings also indicated that vicarious memories serve many of the same life functions as personal memories, although at lower levels of intensity. The findings suggest that current conceptions of autobiographical memory, which focus on past events that happened directly to the self, should be expanded to include detailed mental representations of specific past events that happened to other people.

I Know My Story and I Know Your Story: Developing a Conceptual Framework for Vicarious Life Stories

“…Studies of autobiographical memory also target past events that are personally experienced (e.g., Conway, ; Singer, & Salovey, 1993). There is little current research and theorizing on individuals' representations of the events, meanings, and themes that compose other individuals' life stories, what we will term vicarious life stories (Habermas & Bluck, ; McAdams, ; McLean, ; Pillemer, Steiner, Kuwabara, Thomsen, & Svob, ; Singer, Blagov, Berry, & Oost, ; Thomsen, ).…”

“…This new understanding cuts across the episodic‐semantic distinction, where episodic memory is limited to self‐experienced events and representations of other individuals' memories per definition cannot be episodic (Tulving, ). We take the position that theories of memory should be expanded to include representations of events and general knowledge from both one's own and other individuals' lives (Pillemer et al, ; Rubin & Umanath, ; Thomsen, ). People may construct representations of events or conceptual knowledge that are attributed to their personal past or to another individual's memory.…”

“…Studies confirm that individuals form detailed mental representations of circumscribed events in other people's life stories. Young adults readily identify important events in their parents' life stories (Svob & Brown, ), and they can recall specific vicarious memories for parents and friends, that is, memories of specific events that they knew their parents or friends had experienced, but where the participant was not a part of the event (Pillemer et al, ). This study also showed that vicarious memories had phenomenological qualities (e.g., vividness) that were lower in intensity but otherwise similar to the qualities of the individual's personal memories.…”

Heroic Memory: Remembering the Details of Others' Heroism in the Aftermath of a Traumatic Public Event Can Foster Our Own Prosocial Response

“…Moreover, this finding extends previous work demonstrating that imagining episodes involving someone else as the helping agent can increase prosocial responses (Gaesser et al, 2015) to the domain of memory, suggesting that remembering episodes of others helping likewise increases prosocial responses. Indeed, 'vicarious memories' of events that happened to other people have been recently shown to contain similar content and phenomenology as personally experienced events, albeit with lower levels of intensity (Pillemer, Steiner, Kuwabara, Thomsen, & Svob, 2015). Thus, vicarious memories as compared with personal memories of helping may have a similar but perhaps less potent impact of prosocial responses.…”

Beyond memory again: Risk, teamwork, vicarious remembering

“…David Pillemer et al (2015) introduce their questionnaire study of vicarious memories with powerful motivations for investigating 'recollections people have of salient life episodes that were told to them by another person'. Their project draws inspiration from published autobiographies, but not from relevant literature in cultural memory studies.…”