Otobiyografik bellek özelliklerinin ilişki anıları üzerinden incelenmesi: Cinsiyet ve anı türlerinin etkisi

Autobiographical memories have often been investigated in self context whereas other-related memories are important components of self-in-relation to others. This study explored young adults' personally significant and relationship memories. Forty- six young adults from Turkey and 31 young adults from the USA, aged 18-25, participated in Study 1A and 1B, respectively. In these two studies, participants narrated about their sibling relationship quality and turning points in their relationships. The major purposes of these two studies were to validate sibling relationships as an autobiographical memory context and to develop a new coding scheme for use with relationship memories. Results revealed that siblings were able to produce recounts of turning points in their sibling relationships. These turning-point memories revealed similar characteristics with prior research. Following this, in Study 2, young adults from Turkey (N=100) wrote about memories of three different events which were self-significant, sibling-significant, and family-significant. The major purposes of this study were to explore these significant-event narratives as a function of gender and memory type. We predicted a main effect of memory type, gender, and an interaction between self and sibling gender. Linear mixed model analyses revealed no systematic difference between females' and males' significant-event memories either for the main or interaction effects. Yet, memories varied on level of detail, transformativeness, emotional valence, and tone dimensions across memory types. Personally significant memories scored higher on most of these dimensions whereas sibling-significant and family-significant memories represented similar characteristics. These two memory types both characterize relationship narratives, and sibling narratives are particularly informative about developmental details of adolescence and emerging adulthood periods as well as sibling relationships.