Retention and transformation of internal experiences in autobiographical memory narratives

Why Our Private Feelings in Memories Matter

When you tell a story about your life, you usually don’t just list what happened—you also talk about how you felt and what you were thinking. These inner reactions help explain why an event mattered to you. Yet most memory research has focused on the visible parts of events, like who was there and what they did. This study asked how well our private thoughts and feelings are preserved when we retell real-life experiences, and whether keeping these inner details shapes how important our memories feel to us.

Looking at Life Stories in the Real World

To explore this question, researchers turned to a large collection of first-person stories called the Hippocorpus dataset, gathered from hundreds of adults online. Each person wrote about a specific, memorable event from the last few months—such as a family gathering or a stressful day—and then, weeks later, wrote about the same event again, using a short summary as a cue. The team broke each story into tiny units of meaning, like individual clauses, and labeled each as either an outward fact (what could be seen or heard) or an inward experience (a thought, feeling, or intention). They then matched these units across the two tellings to see which details were repeated, dropped, or newly added.

What Stays and What Fades

The outward parts of events—actions, settings, and other observable facts—dominated people’s stories and were more likely to be repeated in the second telling. Inner experiences were less common to begin with and more likely to disappear over time. Even when people did mention the same feeling or thought again, its wording and nuance tended to shift more than for external details, suggesting that inner experiences are especially vulnerable to being reshaped. At the same time, many new details appeared in second tellings, showing that remembering is not just about losing information but also about reconstructing and expanding the story.

Why Some Feelings Stick

The researchers then asked what makes a specific inner experience more likely to be remembered. Using computer-based language tools, they estimated how emotional each detail was and how strongly it was linked in meaning to nearby external details in the story. They found that inner experiences described with stronger emotion—and those that fit tightly with what was happening in the outside world—were more likely to be retained. In other words, a vivid feeling that is clearly tied to a concrete part of the event stands a better chance of surviving in later retellings. For outward facts, richness of description and strong connections to surrounding details also helped, but emotion mattered less than for inner experiences.

Memories, Meaning, and Personal Importance

Beyond what people could recall, the study examined how they judged the significance of each event. Participants rated how important or impactful the memory felt after each telling. Events that contained a higher share of inner thoughts and feelings tended to be rated as more important, whereas those dominated by outward facts were seen as less significant. Although importance ratings generally declined between the first and second telling, memories in which inner experiences were retold in a precise, consistent way showed a smaller drop, and sometimes even a rise, in perceived importance. Keeping the emotional and mental “inner core” of an event stable over time seemed to help preserve its meaning.

Fragile Yet Powerful Inner Stories

This work suggests that our private thoughts and feelings are among the most delicate parts of memory, yet they play an outsized role in how we understand our lives. Inner experiences are easily forgotten or reshaped, but when they are intense and firmly anchored to what happened, they are more likely to survive repeated storytelling. In turn, memories rich in these inner details feel more personally important, and stable retellings of our feelings can help sustain that sense of importance over time. By showing how inner life weaves into autobiographical stories, the study highlights how memory does more than store facts—it helps us make sense of who we are.

Citation: Su, H., Zhang, M., Knight, C. et al. Retention and transformation of internal experiences in autobiographical memory narratives. Commun Psychol 4, 56 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00425-8

Keywords: autobiographical memory, emotions in memory, personal narratives, thoughts and feelings, memory importance