Resilience buffers the impact of trauma on autobiographical memory: a text analysis of daily autobiographical narratives.

Abstract

Autobiographical memory plays a central role in behaviour regulation, social connection, and self-continuity, but may become emotionally biased after traumatic experiences. Resilience, defined as the capacity to adapt effectively to stress and adversity, is widely linked to psychological recovery. However, few studies have examined whether resilience can buffer emotional biases in daily autobiographical memory, particularly among trauma-exposed individuals. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine this relationship using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Seventy-nine participants (mean age = 22.26, 68.4% women) completed the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and reported autobiographical memories five times daily for seven consecutive days. Emotional valence features were extracted using natural language processing (NLP), including lexical-level features (e.g., negative term frequency) and sentence-level semantic features (e.g., positive sentence ratio). Multilevel modelling showed that while resilience was not associated with lexical-level features, it significantly predicted more positive and fewer negative emotional expressions at the semantic level. Moreover, negative memory entries tended to be followed by similarly negative content in subsequent entries, whereas positive entries did not exhibit such continuity. These results suggest that resilience may serve as a protective factor against the emotional effects of trauma in daily memory recall, offering potential insights for clinical intervention.