Self-Serving Episodic Memory Biases: Findings in the Repressive Coping Style
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals with a repressive coping style self-report low anxiety, but show high defensiveness and high physiological arousal. Repressors have impoverished negative autobiographical memories and are better able to suppress memory for negatively valenced and self-related laboratory materials when asked to do so. Research on spontaneous forgetting of negative information in repressors suggests that they show significant forgetting of negative items, but only after a delay. Unknown is whether increased forgetting after a delay is potentiated by self-relevance. Here we asked in three experiments whether repressors would show reduced episodic memories for negative self-relevant information when tested immediately versus after a 2-day delay. We predicted that repressors would show an exaggerated reduction in recall of negative self-relevant memories after a delay, at least without anew priming of this information. We tested a total of 300 participants (experiment 1: N = 95, experiment 2: N = 106; experiment 3: N = 99) of four types: repressors, high-anxious (HA), low-anxious, and defensive HA individuals. Participants judged positive and negative adjectives with regard to self-descriptiveness, serving as incidental encoding. Surprise free-recall was conducted immediately after encoding (experiment 1), after a 2-day delay (experiment 2), or after a 2-day delay following priming via a lexical decision task (experiment 3). In experiment 1, repressors showed a bias against negative self-relevant words in immediate recall. Such a bias was neither observed in delayed recall without priming nor in delayed recall with priming. Thus, counter to our hypothesis, negative information that was initially judged as self-relevant was not forgotten at a higher rate after a delay in repressors. We suggest that repressors may reinterpret initially negative information in a more positive light after a delay, and therefore no longer experience the need to bias their recall after a delay.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".