In this podcast episode, I interview Sezin Öner about her paper published in Memory & Cognition. The paper reports research conducted collaboratively with 30 researchers from 15 countries around the world. Participants in those countries reported unusual national and global events during the first signs of the pandemic and what may occur in the future. The authors considered the severity of each nation’s pandemic and the stringency of each nation’s responses. What did they find? Listen to find out.
Transcripts
Caballero: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. Now, here’s your host, Laura Mickes.
Mickes: In the upcoming interview, I speak with Sezin Öner (pictured below) about her paper published in the Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition. The paper is called “Collective remembering and future forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic: How the impact of COVID 19 affected the themes and phenomenology of global and national memories across 15 countries.” The title is nearly as long as the author list of this paper [ba dum tss!].
Before listening to the interview, think about where you were when you first learned about the spread of an infectious disease in Wuhan. Think about how it affected you and how vivid your memory is. These are some of the questions asked by Sezin and her colleagues to people in 15 countries about COVID and more.
Here it goes.
Thanks for chatting with me about your recent paper published in Memory & Cognition. I am talking to Sezin Öner, did I say that right?
Öner: My name is Sezin Öner. You have pretty much closed to it. Thank you, Laura.
Mickes: Thank you. This paper that you published, you published with a lot of other authors, and I would ask you to name them, but I can’t even count them. How many authors were there? [See the end of the post for the list of the 30 authors.]
Öner: To be honest, I don’t know the exact number, but there are like 15 countries and in each country, at least approximately there are two people. I think some countries there are more than two people involved. So I’m kind of worried to be talking on behalf of a great team of researchers and I’m really happy to work with them. And really anyone of us could be talking here. I’m very lucky to be here talking about our research. Thank you.
Mickes: I’m sure your team will be happy that you’re speaking on their behalf.
It’s such a huge team effort, and I’m always impressed with researchers who mobilize really quickly. And this is an example, what you did was an example of mobilizing really quickly. Other examples are the papers that documented flashbulb memories.
Researchers collected data right after these events. The ones that come to mind are the OJ Simpson acquittal outcome,
Öner: mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: and the 9/11 attacks. There were some really good papers that came out of that. Those were examples of researchers mobilizing. And you guys did it too – during a pandemic, no less!
It’s common for say physicists and accelerator, particle physicists, and geneticists to work together in these extensive collaborations, but it’s not often that cognitive psychologists do. So before we get into the research particulars, do you mind telling me how it came about?
Öner: Yeah, actually it was a very informal call over the Facebook. There is an autobiographical memory research group, and I had a call and some people Scott Cole from UK and Christine from Poland responded, and we came together with the Turkish team, and with Steve, from Malaysia. And there was a very small core group then, each of us called other people, told about our research. And in a week, it’s made up to 15 countries.
Mickes: You have researchers from 15 countries. Is that what I heard?
Öner: Yeah, mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: OK. That’s how it grew. It seems like it was a natural and easy thing to do.
Öner: It was a really informal thing over the Facebook. Let’s do it. And since the pandemic was going on and everything was uncertain at the time, we were really trying to find our way to do the best possible research at this time. We were thinking who could be other collaborators? What is the situation in other countries as well? Each of us thought about other researchers in different countries and sent emails and we came together.
Mickes: That seems natural, but what about doing the project and writing it? You’re first author, So I imagine you did the lion’s share of the work or did you have to herd the cats?
Was it hard to manage projects?
Öner: Definitely. It was very hard to manage. I have to say the Turkish team I was working with mostly Masters and PhD students and they really helped me a lot to organize all the work, organize all the survey, communicated with the rest of the team. Arranging a meeting was really difficult because people are living in different time zones and people joined at midnight and was very early for some countries.
I don’t remember a single meeting that included every collaborator.
IRB regulations are different in each country. Since the pandemic is a very sensitive issue. The country is very cautious about it. And IRB regulations became even more strict and trying to sort of equalize the research condition across countries was difficult.
No need to say that the other most difficult issue is the context of the pandemic was different in each country. Like, the pandemic came so severe in some countries, maybe in the midst of the research, but for some countries, for example, China, when we started data collection, things were pretty clear in China and they managed the pandemic very well. The number of cases were low and so on, but it started in China. So the timing of data collection was different in each country, a limitation, but we made use of it. And we considered the differences in severity or stringency in each country and included this as a research variable too.
Mickes: That’s what struck me when I read it. I don’t think I would’ve thought to account for the stringency,
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re moving toward working in bigger groups and we should to do what we need to do.
And so I think it’s …
Öner: yea.
Mickes: …informative for you to tell us what it’s like to work in such a large group. So a couple more questions. What were the upsides of working in such a large group? You already talked about the downsides.
Öner: The very first thing that came to my mind was the downside. Cause it was really difficult. I felt really responsible and so on, but I learned a lot. I am a early career researcher and I haven’t worked in such a large group before as a like regular researcher. So I don’t know how things are managed. So I was trying to talk with other people who has been in large group and ask about what they did before, because I was trying to sort of make my way and try to structure things. And really, I learned a lot. How to be very clear in setting the deadline, organizing stuff and so on. It was not something that I was very good at before. So I think I got better throughout this project.
Another important thing that I find real valuable is that I got to know many people. I know these researchers from like conferences from papers and really working with them was a great opportunity – discussing them, interacting with them in a sort of more interactive way; it was really great. And I hope there will be further collaborations out of this project as well.
Mickes: You did get a crash course in managing a large group at such an early career stage. It’s impressive.
If you were to give anyone who is going to embark on a large collaboration, a piece of advice, what do you think? What advice would you give them?
Öner: It’s really fascinating, very exciting to be part of this like team of researchers, but you have to be very structured, very organized, like, maybe using other, maybe digital resource. I don’t know, like many other tools that could support you to maintain the organization.
And you have to be very clear about who will be the author. What is the order of authorship? Who will gain the authorship? These are really important issues, very sensitive issues. The rules needs to be set from very early on and you have to ensure that all people agree, those rules and very clear about those rules. Probably that will be my only suggestion.
Mickes: Right. I think that’s a really important piece of advice. People probably want us to get to the research. So let’s do that. I study human memory of individuals, not of groups of individuals. So I find this research really fascinating and it has to do with individual memory, but also collective memory. Will you please tell us why you did the research?
Öner: Okay. Why we did this research compared to personal memories that has been relatively less research on collective memories and the available evidence focuses on rather single events, let’s say the 9/11 or fall of Berlin wall or like most single events at the home nations remember those events. But COVID 19 pandemics, especially important in the sense that it is a collective event at different levels. What I mean is that it is a global event that influence all nations, like the people in the world, all of us face with the same track and more or less the countries utilize similar regulations. Okay. It’s an event of the globe, but also pandemic is an event of the nation because there were also differences in the way pandemic was experienced in each country. For example, the first case appeared in China was when China first experienced the virus.
There was much uncertainty to compared to let’s say, European countries or United States, which could benefit from what China has done so far. Or the severity of the pandemic, the either like number of cases, different across countries. Or for example, in New Zealand, they just closed the country. The number of cases were very low and the way New Zealand experienced the pandemic was rather different than other European countries or United States goes by. So there is still country-wise differences. Also, we didn’t focus on in this paper, but we focused on individual-level variables. We asked about how people were affected psychologically, economically, And so on. And we also focused on the personal experiences of the individual for the collective event of the pandemic.
Mickes: Like you said, this is a way that you can look at memory from all kinds of different levels from individual on up to global. And you said that you did ask individual questions, but it’s not in this paper. So you have some more work coming out.
Okay. Back to this paper, did you have any hypotheses or predictions or you were just gonna find out how people were thinking about the pandemic and how that varied across nations?
Öner: That’s a really good question because our only clear hypothesis was that the reported events will be mostly related to the pandemic, but we didn’t have very straightforward hypothesis about what kind of events people will report or how the themes will differ across countries or across individuals. The only issue like we focused on what could influence the country country-wise difference, if any, that could be like the severity, the number of cases in each country and the stringency, the governmental regulations, because these are the two major parameters that define the context of the pandemic in each country. Okay. The country is different or individuals in those countries differ across many measures. But if we are focusing on COVID-related events, COVID-related contextual factors would probably shape the recall. So we expected that stringency and severity measures would influence what people recalled and how people recalled those events. But other than that, yeah, we didn’t have any hypothesis.
Mickes: Got it. You had those ideas that severity and stringency may impact on recall. How did you test it? What did the participants do?
Öner: First of all, we have more than 4,000 participants, across 15 countries. People first reported three remarkable events since, uh, the outbreak of the virus in China. Then these constituted three global past events. Then they reported three remarkable events since the outbreak of the virus in their own country. And these consider the three national past events. After reporting the past events, they proceeded to the future events and they then reported three future events that they expected to occur in the globe, in the world.
Mickes: And then they moved on …
Öner: To reporting national future events, what they expect for their country. And again, they reported three events more after indicating the events. They dated the events and they reported the valence and vividness measures for each events reported.
Mickes: You asked how meaningful it is and how vivid these memories are for you.
Öner: Yeah.
Mickes: You asked about future events and that’s what you were talking about in terms of, uh, memory timeline. Not the Psychonomic Society crowd, but people are often confused about what this future memory means. Is there anything you can tell those people?
Öner: It has been considered that future thinking is supported by the memory system, because in order to simulate a future, you have to use what you remember from the past. You have to use your mental representations or you have to consider what are your goals, what kind of a person you are or what kind of a community you are. And based on what you remember from the past, you’re going to simulate the future.
Mickes: Moving on to your findings, looked at things separately in terms of national events or global events. And then how many events they remembered, what did you find? How did you even do that analysis?
Öner: [laughs] Actually, it was really, I have to say difficult because people reported three events for each category and there are more than 4,000 people. We coded each event in terms of several things. So we coded each reported event of both past events and global events. First, we coded them in terms of whether they’re COVID related or COVID unrelated. And in the paper we’ve focused on the COVID-related events. And those events were categorized into, as I remember, like 20 themes that involves like lockdowns, deaths, infections, economy, and so on. We coded the events in terms of their main themes, and focused on the COVID-related events. We first looked into which themes appeared most. And then we compared countries depending on severity and stringency to examine which themes appeared more in high severe countries and-or stringent countries and so on.
Mickes: Oh, okay. So what themes did emerge as appearing most?
Öner: Since we were living in the pandemic, almost 85% of events were COVID-related and we confirmed our hypothesis, in that sense. And when we first compared the event representations of global and national events, we found that all the events were associated with the spread of the disease across international borders. That the, these were more frequent in past global events or the themes that are related to more local concerns or more intercultural relevance. For example, like hygiene, social distancing, or mass closures, those themes appear more distinctively in national events.
Öner: And in the next step, we looked into the effect of pandemic severity and the governmental stringency, and to briefly summarize in high severity and low stringency countries, because those measures were, uh, in a sort of negative correlation, highly severe countries were also using low negative stringency measures. So in high severity and low stringency countries, individuals reported more events that are related to the lockdown and debt than compared to countries where the severity was low and stringency was high. For national events, in addition to those infections, high severity countries tend to report more hygiene and social distancing related issues. And it’s not surprising because the reported themes are in line with the dominance goals in the globe, and in particular nations.
Mickes: And what about the future events?
Öner: With respect to future events, I can say that there has been much more consistency in the themes appearing. I mean, we didn’t directly compare past and future, but fear event themes appear with respect to future simulations. Probably that’s because future is uncertain, so people are maybe relying on more general schemas. I don’t know I, that was a speculation, but anyway, I can say that the impact of the pandemic on the future economy was the most common event theme appearing in both global and national events.
Mickes: Yeah.
Öner: … Like past events, then the pandemic is more salient. I mean, high severity and low stringency countries. People reported more economy-related events for both global and nation events. Okay. Economy is an issue for all countries…
Mickes: Yeah.
Öner: But when the pandemic severity is high when is high, economy is, probably the countries are more affected, so they’re more concerned, more worried about economy-related issues for their futures.
Mickes: Yeah, I suppose that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Now that the data’s in my face.
You also measured the positivity bias and maybe people don’t know what the positivity bias is. I think it shows up in some autobiographical memory research.
Mickes: Can you briefly describe that? And then what you found in relation to the positivity bias?
Öner: Previous research has shown that for personal events, when people are asked to recall past events from their lives and imagine events, uh, for their future, people tend to report more past positive events for their future. And I think that’s functional irrespective of how negative your past is. You tend to simulate a positive future and it maybe provides you hope and so on, sort of connects you to your life. So it’s functional. And that is a, a very solid evidence in the literature.
But with respect to the collective future thinking, as I said, there is less evidence in that sense. And then we examined this, when we examined the valance of reported events, Future events were perceived less negative compared to positive events. And I think the, uh, interesting part for me is that that difference was more salient for national events compared to global events. I mean, when thinking about your nation, your country, individuals tend to simulate a more positive future and okay, the world could be getting better.
Of course things will be normal, but we will be, we will be, we will return to normal maybe sooner, or I don’t know, like, or things will be better in my country, irrespective of what country that you are living in. You tend to simulate a more positive future and probably that similar to the personal events that shows the regulatory function of maybe memories.
And also that could be linked with some social, psychological concepts, like collective narcissism or so on. I, I don’t want to go into that much detail because I’m not an expert on that, but for our group, we tend to simulate a more positive future. And I think that’s an interesting aspect.
Mickes: Yeah. I agree with you. It’s really interesting. So more positive for your nation, not globe.
Öner: mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Mickes: Now you’ve got this essential data that’s available online, so anyone can analyze it if they want to?
Öner: The data is not online. I mean, it’s not shared because due to the IRB regulation of each country for some countries, the pandemic-related data is considered very sensitive and,
Mickes: And people can get the data if they want,
Öner: If they email us, they definitely, they can get the data, but we cannot put the data online.
Mickes: Right. My point I’m trying to make is that you have a record now of past and future thinking about collective events.
Öner: Oh yes.
Mickes: And what’s really exciting, I think is that you can measure it as it evolves over time. Do you have any interest in doing that or plans with this team to look at that, you know, maybe in a year, two years, 10 years down the road. Do you have plan for that?
Öner: Yeah. This a real large-scale project. And as I mentioned in the beginning, we asked many memory-related questions. Uh, we asked about the flashbulb memories, how detailed people remember when they first about outbreak, we have open-end answers that is already been coded. And that is a paper on the way in preparation, we asked about involuntary memories, involuntary memories and involuntary future thinking. And the paper is under the review. And we are examining how individual-level and contextual factors of the pandemic, uh, shapes involuntary post and future thinking that’s a paper on the way. So probably there will be other top projects that will be coming out of this data.
Öner: And also, next week we are starting the follow-up of this project and we will go to our participants and okay. We were together two years before and we ask you what you remember now, please tell us more. And we will be doing the follow-up up to two years of the pandemic.
Mickes: Okay. I’m, I’m very excited about that. All of,
Öner: Yeah, me too.
Mickes: I’m really gonna have to keep an eye out for that and your other papers. So I think this is really interesting research you’ve done.
I think that’s all the questions that I have. You’ve covered what you’re doing in the future, the follow-ups – you’re already on it. And, um, is there anything you want to talk about that I haven’t asked or that we haven’t covered?
Öner: I want to tell this once more, I thank all the people who are involved in the project, all their effort. It was a really huge team effort and that’s really valuable for us.
Mickes: That’s really kind. Thank you so much for talking to me about all this research. I really appreciate it.
Öner: Thank you, Laura, for having me here.
Caballero: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition as Psychonomic Society podcast. If you would like to share your feedback on this episode, we hope you get in touch. You can find us online @www.psychonomic.org or on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Öner, S. et al. (2022). Collective remembering and future forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic: How the impact of COVID-19 affected the themes and phenomenology of global and national memories across 15 countries. Memory & Cognition. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-022-01329-8
Authors of the featured article
https://memoryemotionlab.khas.edu.tr/
www.kuram.ku.edu.tr & https://culcogcornell.org/people
http://www.memorylab.phils.uj.edu.pl/about
https://www.nottingham.edu.my/Psychology/People/steve.janssen
https://psych.indiana.edu/directory/faculty/uner-oyku.html
- Antonietta Curci
- Tiziana Lanciano
- Lucrèce Heux
- Veronika Nourkova
- Zheng Jin
https://lbcs.zznu.edu.cn/17.
https://www.garrylab.com/
https://www.garrylab.com/
https://www.szpunarmemorylab.com
https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/fb1/institute/psychologie/mitglieder/professor-innen/christina-bermeitinger/
- Steven Dessenberger
- Jose Antonio Matias-Garcia
- María Lojo
- Rosario Cubero-Pérez
- Miguel Jesús Bascón Díaz
- Andrés Santamaría
LAH – Laboratorio de Actividad Humana – Universidad Sevilla (us.es)
- Ryan Hackländer
https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/fb1/institute/psychologie/mitglieder/wissenschaftliches-personal/ryan-hacklaender/
