The role of motives in the content and structure of autobiographical memory

Findings from 4 studies suggest that differentiation and integration are us ed by individuals high in agency and communion to structure motive-related information in episodic memory. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that agentic a nd communal individuals recalled more emotional experiences related to thei r motives, and that agentic individuals used more differentiation whereas c ommunal individuals used more integration to structure these memories. Stud y 3 showed that agentic and communal individuals used more differentiation and integration to structure memories about social separation and connectio n, respectively. Study 4 demonstrated a similar pattern of recall in an exp erimentally controlled retrieval task. For a motive-congruent topic, agenti c individuals recognized more differentiated information and had fewer diff erentiation recognition errors, and communal individuals freely recalled mo re integration.