Closure in autobiographical memories: Involuntary recall and spontaneous future thinking related to open life experiences

Emotional closure is a subjective feeling of resolution and completion associated to the past experiences. Personal events on which an individual does not have closure are called open autobiographical memories, so these memories are still incomplete and arouse more intense negative feelings than closed events (Crawley, 2010). The autobiographical memory literature surprisingly neglected this line of research, with only a few studies explicitly investigating open memories. This thesis extensively examines open and closed memories and compares their phenomenological experience and other memory characteristics. Additionally, this thesis aimed to explore future closure possibility as a separate feature of open memories, building a link between past and future events in relation to feelings of openness. More specifically, this thesis aimed to demonstrate involuntary thinking frequency and phenomenological properties of open and closed memories for the first time in the literature. Chapter 2 introduces a novel scale measuring the need for emotional closure over past events as a personality tendency. This study provided the literature a valid and usable Turkish scale and an English version with an adequate model fit. Moreover, a strong correlational relationship between need for emotional closure and rumination was reported that might inspire future studies to examine its association with certain clinical disorders. Throughout the studies in this thesis, this scale was repeatedly used to determine its link with open memory recall. Chapter 3 introduced closure potential and demonstrated the key differences between different types of open memories, revealing that open memories without closure potential evoke more feelings of regret and more negative valence upon involuntary recall than open memories with such potential. Chapter 4 delved into future thinking related to open experiences, namely future resolution events through which people can have closure over open events in the future. In line with the theories of spontaneous thinking of past and future events, frequent spontaneous thinking of open past experiences and future resolution events was reported. This study illustrated substantial similarities between these past and future events. Differently from previous studies, the last study experimentally manipulated event closure and closure possibility on a controlled setting by creating artificial laboratory events and measured their involuntary retrieval in the laboratory. In addition to replicating past findings on differences between open and closed memories, these studies provide critical implications for autobiographical memory theories. This thesis theoretically and methodologically contributes to the memory literature through significant findings in memory phenomenology and spontaneous thinking, a novel scale, and complex manipulation techniques. Introducing a novel perspective with a solid theoretical background, this thesis generates a pioneering line of research for cognitive, experimental, and clinical psychology.