Living in history effect in the important AMs_data

The tendency of a person to frequently use public (i.e., historical) events as temporal landmarks when dating personal memories is termed the Living in History (LiH) effect. We investigated this effect in autobiographical memories of Bangladeshi older adults who lived through the 1960s Bengali nationalist movement and the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. Four hundred seventy-six participants (Mean age = 67 years; SD = 6 years), including 62 war veterans, retrieved and dated three important memories from their life and completed two scales: (i) transitional impact of war scale and (ii) generational identity scale. Results showed that one-third of the total memories (32%) were dated using public event references, demonstrating a clear LiH effect. However, this effect was twice as stronger among war veterans (58%) than nonveterans (28%). The memory content analysis revealed that public event references were mostly used to date public memories (e.g., war and political struggle) and memories with negative valence. Multivariate analyses showed that veteran identity, material changes due to war and participants’ age significantly predicted the use of public event references to date one, two or three memories relative to no use of those references. The public memories that were personally significant and the extent participants experienced the material changes due to war mainly caused the LiH effect. We discussed the results considering current theories of autobiographical memory.