Autobiographical memories are shared in online platforms for self, social, directive, and therapeutic reasons. Research is only beginning to explore whether there is cultural variation, commonly focusing on European-American and Asian cultural groups. The current project extends our understanding to Latine adults, and explores whether values - self, ethnic, or cultural - predict reasons for online memory sharing. It was found that Asian and Latine groups were more likely to share autobiographical stories online for directive reasons compared to European-Americans, and Asian more likely to share for therapeutic reasons. Self-construal values (independent, interdependent), and having a clearer sense of self, versus sense of ethnic identity or culture values, best predicted the reasons why memories were shared online, particularly for Latine groups. The consideration of a variety of cultural groups in research about online autobiographical memory sharing and the importance of the values the self holds in this process are discussed.

Social media transformed sharing memories into a public dialogue with an absent virtual audience. Although sharing memories online facilitates remembering (Wang et al., 2017), it is understudied why individuals share memories online and if this form of social yet virtual sharing relates to well-being. We investigated these questions in a student and a large community sample in the United Arab Emirates where internet and social media are used extensively (Al-Jenaibi, 2011). Results show that people with greater interdependent cultural orientation share their memories more for self, social, directive, and therapeutic purposes, but that only social and directive purposes contribute to satisfaction with life.

Autobiographical remembering can be intentional in the sense that individuals decide to think about past events. On social media, however, remembering is often triggered by the platform (“Look what you posted five years ago!”). To investigate the factors affecting the perception of triggered remembering, participants were asked to review their first Instagram post from 2019. Participants provided information about the post, the emotions that they experienced when reviewing their post, the phenomenological characteristics of the memory, and their purposes of online memory sharing. The study helps to understand when and for whom triggered remembering can be a positive experience.

The selective nature of sharing one’s personal life may reinforce the memories and details of the shared experiences while simultaneously inducing the forgetting of related, unshared memories/experiences. This is a well-established cognitive phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF, Anderson et al., 1994). To examine this phenomenon in the context of social media, two experiments were conducted using an adapted version of the RIF paradigm in which participants either shared experimenter-contrived (Study 1) or personal photographs (Study 2) on social media platforms. The results suggest that selectively sharing experiences on social media may specifically enhance the recollection of details associated with the shared experiences.