A cross-cultural investigation of the reminiscence bumps for important personal events and word-cued autobiographical memories

The current study examines cross-cultural differences in the reminiscence bump between samples of 119 African American and 106 European American adults aged 40 and up. Participants reported 10 word-cued and 10 important autobiographical memories. For each, participants provided a description, the age at occurrence, and a rating of emotional valence. In total, 4225 autobiographical memories were reported. Like previous findings, results showed that the reminiscence bumps of both groups occurred earlier for word-cued than important memories and that they occurred for positive but not negative events. Small cross-cultural differences were observed in the shapes of the distributions and the proportions of memories within the reminiscence bumps for word-cued, important, positive, and negative memories, and all memories combined. The findings support the cross-cultural stability of effects associated with the reminiscence bump, while simultaneously demonstrating smaller cross-cultural differences in the lifespan distributions within those broader patterns.