Memories of a shameful episode: Multiple access routes towards understanding self-memory integration
Abstract
Shame, a self-conscious emotion, plays a crucial role in understanding the interplay between autobiographical memory and the self. Self-incongruent memories—particularly those eliciting shame—are often difficult to integrate with the self and may persist in a distressing and fragmented format. At the same time, it remains unclear how phenomenological, semantic, and behavioral access routes to autobiographical memory uniquely capture the effects of interventions and provide complementary insights into how such memories are represented and transformed. Here, we investigated the effects of a novel experimental shame-induction procedure and subsequent manipulations aiming to reduce self-incongruence. Healthy participants (N = 75) were instructed to sing a difficult song in front of a committee providing negative social feedback; salivary cortisol levels and subjective ratings indicated successful induction of shame and psychosocial stress. Participants were then assigned to self-affirmation, reframing, or control conditions. Phenomenological analyses revealed no significant group differences. By contrast, participants in the self-affirmation condition mentioned “not remembering” less often, produced semantically more similar narratives, used more negative emotion words (trend), and showed better recall for central objects from the shameful scene. Participants in the reframing condition produced more semantic jumps per sentence, indicating a less linear recall structure.…
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