Abstract: Autobiographical memory (AM) is the memory of an individual’s past life events. It is the foundation of the formation, development and change of one’s self system and is important for maintaining an individual’s self-identity and sense of continuity. The formation of a specific AM is a process of construction. Attachment may affect the process of AM through conceptual self system and working-self goal system. Current research about attachment and AM focuses on the relationships between the characteristics of attachment, which include the characteristics of individual attachment and parental attachment, and the objective, phenomenological, narrative and reconstructive characteristics of AM. The future research should focus on the mental and neural mechanisms of how attachment affects the process of AM and consider the relationships between the characteristics of parental attachment and the process of filial AM in different social and cultural contexts and at different developmental stages. There is also a need to control confounding variables more strictly and use research methods with high scientific rigor, such as priming paradigm, resting-state functional connectivity method, and SenseCam methodology.

Key words: attachment, autobiographical memory, self-memory system, narrative