Características de los recuerdos autobiográficos sobre sucesos traumáticos

Laburpena

In the present study 120 autobiographical memories about traumatic events, with negative valence, and about happy events, with positive valence, were com-pared. In order to analyse the phenomenological characteristics of both type of memories an specific questionnaire based on the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (Johnson et al., 1988) and on the Trauma Memory Quality Questionnaire (Meiser-Stedman et al., 2007) was used. In general and in relation to positive memo-ries, results showed that memories for trauma contained less sensorial information, were more complex, and more difficult to verbalise. Traumatic memories were also less temporally contextualized, associated to more intense feelings, and people remembered better what they thought at the time of occurrence and think about the event more frequently. In contrast, no differences were found between positive and negative memories on spatial location, vividness, definition, accessibility, fragmentation, remember perspective, doubts about the accuracy of the memory, and talk about the event. We can therefore conclude that traumatic memory is not as special as previously suggested, and that there are no data that allows us to confirm the existence of repressed, and then recovered, memories.