KHAS Psychology Department Colloquium Series – Dr. Lecturer Burcu Kaya Kızılöz

The new guest of the event series organized by Kadir Has University Psychology Department will be Dr. Lecturer Burcu Kaya Kızılöz from Eastern Mediterranean University.

You can listen to Dr. Kaya Kızılöz’s talk titled “Memories of the ‘Othered’: Autobiographical Memories of Underrepresented Groups” on Thursday, December 21st between 13:30-15:00 on B-409.

Summary: This talk aims to provide summarize two studies on autobiographical memories of people who are rarely investigated in the field. The first study examines the coming out memories and how these memories affect the well-being and psychological of health of gay and bisexual men. We asked 109 participants their most negative and positive coming out experiences and to fill out Centrality of Event, LGB identity, well-being, and depression scales. We found that only valence of negative memories was related to well-being scores, whereas valence of negative memories and a negative LGB identity was predictive of higher depressive symptomatology. These findings suggest that the way we remember our memories and how they are integrated to our identities affect our well-being and mental health.

In the second study we examined the life stories (LS) of inmates since imprisonment is considered as a traumatic experience (Armour, 2012) leading to changes in memory and LS. We examined past and future LSs of inmates (N = 95) and community members (N = 136) and found that there were significant main effects of imprisonment on the age of memory, valence, specificity and impact of LS events. Taken together, our study revealed that imprisonment is an anchoring event influencing how individuals remember and imagine LS events.