Collective transition and personal identity in autobiographical memory organization_data set

The organisation and recall of autobiographical memories (AMs) have been a significant topic of research for many years. This study investigated the AMs of Bangladesh liberation war veterans and nonveterans to test the predictions of the Self Memory System theory and the Transition theory. The participants retrieved twenty memories to cue words, dated the memories, and finally rated them for emotional valence, importance, vividness, and centrality to their life narrative on 5-point Likert-type scales. The results revealed that while the veterans and nonveterans have a similar lifetime distribution of memories, veterans had significantly more war memories than nonveterans and that they used different reference events to date their memories. Although 15.8% of the memories were dated in reference to the historical/public events; in other words, they contained historically defined autobiographical periods (i.e., H-DAPs), this effect was not equally pronounced across the two groups. The veterans used proportionally more historical/public events to date their memories than nonveterans. The veterans rated their memories as more importance, self-defining, and emotionally intense than did the nonveterans. The veterans also reported a stronger sense of generational identity than nonveterans. These results are more consistent with the Self-Memory System theory than the Transition theory. However, because these two theories appeal to different psychological processes, we suggest the theories should be integrated to drive theoretical advances in the understanding of AM. These two file contain data set for this study.