Abstract
The link between Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory (OGM) and depression has been\r shown in previous literature, however, OGM is not well explored in healthy individuals and in East Asian populations. Although a pattern of OGM is an indicator of depression for Americans, this might not be true for East Asians. East Asian cultures focus on holistic processing style, in which East Asians are more likely to allocate their attention more broadly to contextual details rather than prioritizing their attention to central information, which may lead East Asians to recall more general details, compared to Americans. Depressed individuals also often have difficulty recalling episodic details, but not semantic details, in order to avoid eliciting undesirable emotions; this tendency might suggest a potential role of emotional details in memory specificity. There have been cross-cultural differences in attention to emotions shown, in which East Asians attend more to negative self-relevant information while Americans embrace more positive self-relevant information. Thus, this study explores whether emotional details (including both positive and negative valence) predict memory specificity across cultures and whether emotional details mediate the association between culture and memory specificity. Results revealed that there are no significant cross-cultural differences in the relationships between emotional details and memory specificity and that emotional details did not mediate the relationship between culture and memory specificity. Future studies should continue to explore OGM in healthy individuals and examine the effect of emotions on memory specificity.