Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Azriel Grysman was the co-author of two recently-published articles on gender and memory. “Emotion, gender, and gender typical identity in autobiographical memory,” published earlier this month in the journal Memory, was written with Natalie Merrill and Robyn Fivush of Emory University. “The influence of gender and gender typicality on autobiographical memory across event types and age groups” was published last week in Memory & Cognition. Grysman’s co-authors included Merrill and Fivush, along with Matthew Graci, also of Emory University.
Both articles detailed the results of the authors’ studies of the influence of gender identity and categorical gender on the emotional intensity and content of autobiographical memory (AM).
The researchers analyzed the results of studies in which participants, split evenly between men and women, narrated four memories – a neutral event or one that had occurred in the previous two years, a high point event, a low point event and a self-defining memory. Participants also completed ratings of emotional intensity for each event and completed for measures of gender typical identity.
In the first article, the authors said the results showed “how the dynamic nature of gender can be expressed variably across measurement techniques and can deepen an understanding of AM itself and the influences of gender thereupon.”
In the second article, they noted that the “results indicated that females expressed more affect, connection, and factual elaboration than males across all narratives, and that feminine typicality predicted increased connectedness in narratives. Masculine typicality predicted higher agency, lower connectedness, and lower affect, but only for some narratives and not others.” The authors suggested that “implicit gendered socialization and more explicit gender typicality each contribute to gendered autobiographies.”
