Living in history effect in the important AMs_data

Living in history (LiH) is the tendency of a person to frequently use public (i.e., historical) events as temporal landmarks when dating personal memories – termed as the LiH effect. We investigated the LiH effect in autobiographical memories of Bangladeshi older adults who lived through the 1960s Bengali nationalist movement and the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. Four hundred seventy-six participants (Mean age = 67 years; SD = 6 years), of which 62 were liberation war veterans, retrieved and dated three important personal memories from their life. They also completed two scales: (i) transitional impact of war scale, and (ii) generational identity scale. Results showed that 32% of the total memories were dated using public references, demonstrating a robust LiH effect. However, this effect was stronger among war veterans (57.92%) than nonveterans (28.12%). The analysis of memory content revealed that public references were overwhelmingly used to date public memories (e.g., war and pollical struggle) and memories with negative valence. Further multivariate analyses showed that veteran identity, material change due to war and participants’ age were significant predictors of the usage of public references to date one, two or three memories relative to no usage of public references. The public events that were personally significant to the participants and the extent to which they experienced the material change due to the war basically caused the LiH effect. Results are discussed considering transition theory and SMS theory of autobiographical memory.