TY - JOUR
T1 - In my life: memory, self and The Beatles
AU - Akhtar, Shazia
AU - Conway, Martin A.
AU - Justice, Lucy.V
AU - Morrison, Catriona M.
N1 - © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
PY - 2024/3/5
Y1 - 2024/3/5
N2 - In a large-scale study, we asked people for their memories of The Beatles. Over four thousand respondents completed an online questionnaire. The memory could be related to a song, album, event, TV, film, or even a personal encounter. Respondents judged the age at which the event remembered had occurred and rated the memory for vividness, emotional intensity, valence and rehearsal. We found 38% of the memories were classified as “seeing The Beatles live”, 25% “buying Beatles music”, 20% “love of The Beatles” and 17% of the memories were “listening to Beatles songs with other people” – what we refer to as cascading memories. Among the younger respondents (aged 26 and under), 84% of the memories were cascading in nature. The memories dated to what we term the “self-defining period” in autobiographical memory (previously termed “the reminiscence bump”), with a mean age-at-encoding of 13.6 years, which is consistent with other studies of memories associated with music. We propose that these memories reflect the formation of generational identity [Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generations. In K. Mannheim (Ed.), Essays on the sociology knowledge (pp. 276–321). Routledge & Keegan Paul].
AB - In a large-scale study, we asked people for their memories of The Beatles. Over four thousand respondents completed an online questionnaire. The memory could be related to a song, album, event, TV, film, or even a personal encounter. Respondents judged the age at which the event remembered had occurred and rated the memory for vividness, emotional intensity, valence and rehearsal. We found 38% of the memories were classified as “seeing The Beatles live”, 25% “buying Beatles music”, 20% “love of The Beatles” and 17% of the memories were “listening to Beatles songs with other people” – what we refer to as cascading memories. Among the younger respondents (aged 26 and under), 84% of the memories were cascading in nature. The memories dated to what we term the “self-defining period” in autobiographical memory (previously termed “the reminiscence bump”), with a mean age-at-encoding of 13.6 years, which is consistent with other studies of memories associated with music. We propose that these memories reflect the formation of generational identity [Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generations. In K. Mannheim (Ed.), Essays on the sociology knowledge (pp. 276–321). Routledge & Keegan Paul].
KW - Beatles
KW - Memories
KW - reminiscence bump
KW - self-defining period
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85187177539&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09658211.2024.2314510
DO - 10.1080/09658211.2024.2314510
M3 - Article
SN - 0965-8211
VL - 32
SP - 296
EP - 307
JO - Memory
JF - Memory
IS - 3
M1 - 2314510
ER -