Are Wives' Memories for Events in Relationships more Vivid than their Husbands' Memories?

Abstract

Gender differences in socialization and marital roles may lead wives to attend more closely to relationship interactions than their spouses do; wives may also assign greater importance to such interactions and deliberate more about them. As a result, wives would possess more vivid memories than their husbands have for events in their relationship. Spouses tape-recorded descriptions of their first date together, a shared vacation and an argument between the two of them. They subsequently assessed the clarity of their own recall of each event. Women reported more vivid memories than did their husbands. Women also attributed greater personal importance to the events, reported reminiscing about them more often and expressed more affect in their event descriptions than did their husbands. The best predictors of spouses' clarity ratings were frequency of reminiscing about the event and, for the argument, outcome of the dispute. After reading typed transcripts of spouses' descriptions of each event, observers completed the same clarity of recall questions as the couples. Observers judged the women's recall to be more vivid. The best predictor of observers' clarity judgments was the number of affective statements in a description. The results were discussed in terms of their implications for social memory and marital relations.