The retrospective self in memory (retro SiM)

• Applicants: Dr. Julia Englert; Professor Dr. Nexhmedin Morina
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509510897

Retro SiM connects research questions, methods, and experimental paradigms from cognitive and clinical psychology. We will investigate representations of the temporally extended self and their clinical implications. The main empirical focus will be on retrospective self-reference. We seek to disentangle different aspects of the self using different empirical paradigms. This includes the depth-of-processing paradigm, comparing memory performance and experience after self- and other-reference under conditions of mental time travel, as well as performance in a perceptual matching task for the similar conditions. We will further assess self-defining memories, life structure, self-evaluations, as well as social and temporal comparison frequency. Following basic research steps, we will seek to extend our insights to psychopathology, well-being and life change: In this context, we will investigate retrospective self-representations in two clinically relevant populations. This will include people with a traumatic history and with or without posttraumatic stress disorder. In addition, we will investigate the retrospective self in transgender people, first by conducting a cross-sectional online study using a large sample. We will further conduct a longitudinal cohort study, following a group of transgender people for a duration of two years as they undergo hormonal gender transition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants