Beliefs, narratives and experiences : social contagion of memories
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper deals with the socio-cognitive factors of formation and transmission of personal experience narratives about supernatural agents. Using examples of traditional supernatural beliefs known from Slovak rural environment, author tries to explain how narratives and beliefs spread in particular society can be incorporated into someone's autobiographical memories. Human memory is not a passive storage and recall device for static memories, but a dynamic process of repeated construction and reconstruction of memories, which is liable to external influence. So called false memories are a by-product of normal memory reconstruction. The author claims, that this frequently occurring memory phenomenon plays a role in cultural transmission, in this case, in transmission of narrative folklore concerning supernatural beliefs. Ethnographical data suggest that the tendency to incorporate narrative elements from social environment into personal experience memories depends (1) on the social context of the information incorporated into one’s own autobiographical memories, and (2) on the emotional arousal associated with the representation of the particular experience. |
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