Voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories: More similar than different?

In everyday life, memories of one's personal past (autobiographical memories; AMs) are typically retrieved either voluntarily or involuntarily. Here, we examined similarities and differences between voluntary and involuntary AMs (N = 4,801). Results indicated that recurrent IAMs were largely distinguished by higher emotionality/importance and lower vividness than voluntary AMs, though both types of memory overlapped considerably with regard to memory properties. Importantly, the emotionality of recurrent IAMs predicted symptoms of mental health disorders significantly better than voluntary AMs. Our work supports modeling recurrent IAMs as general cognitive phenomena with unique links to mental health.