Abstract

The implications of the emergence of autobiographical memory research are viewed as an effort to study memory in context of real life world and personality. The current researches on autobiographical memory are reviewed in terms of memory types, its determinants, memorability across the life-span, schematization processes, and its hierarchical structure. This article conceptualizes autobiographical memory as reconstructed narratives on self and one's own life history and emphasizes its parameter as thematic coherency and integratedness as a meaningful whole, which is subjectively experienced as ego-strength. The significance of this parameter is viewed as reflecting the effects of self-relevant factors, such as self-knowledge, self-motives, and ego-identity status, which are vita! to the adaptation to life and the development of personality.