AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY DEFICITS IN ALCOHOL-DEPENDENT PATIENTS
WITH SHORT- AND LONG-TERM ABSTINENCE 2
Autobiographical Memory Deficits in Alcohol-Dependent Patients with Short- and Long-
Term Abstinence
Autobiographical memories are memories associated with functions such as reception of
life experience that allow people to memorize their senses. Alcoholism trigger various thought
and perceptions regarding personal experiences. However, alcoholism is associated with
Autobiographical impairments, which leads to semantic autobiographical memory (SAM) or
episodic biographical memory (EAM) after series of attempted abstinence (Kopelman, Wilson &
Baddeley, 1990).
Different research show that memory deficiency, which includes difficulty in recapturing
or memorizing past events, presents a Person with the inability to allow the a person's mental
ability to return back to past experiences with regard to personal activities. Therefore, the ability
to have Sense of memory of past life events differs from memories of recent activities in several
ways because of the variations in time frame, which is crucial for one's goals and emotional
prominence (Oscar-Berman, Marinkovic, 2003). Autobiological Memory help individual to
create a sense of belonging and progress over time. Detoxified alcoholics recalls fewer events of
past events from their teenage years. Frontal lobe impairment as a result of alcoholism leads to
lack of specific recall.
Alcohol affects AM components such as semantic and episodic memories. The episodic
memory is responsible for the recovery of factual context and context such as place and time an
event occurred, while semantic is concerned with the autobiographical truth about self-
knowledge (Oscar-Berman, & Marinkovic, 2003). Both long and short-term alcoholism leads to
lower scores of episodic and semantic, but early childhood events in semantic are not change.
Delay in episodic memory recovery is due to the corresponding medium of abstinence.
