Measuring European selves: A cross-cultural investigation of self-descriptions and autobiographical memories in post-Communist Europe and Scandinavia

Taking the perspective of cross-cultural psychology, the current thesis sets out to investigate self in a European context. For this purpose, the thesis first thoroughly reviews the most prominent conceptualizations of self in cross-cultural psychology, specifically focusing on disentangling the term interdependence. Thereafter, the thesis critically examines the most common measures of self and appropriates some of these measures for use in the current empirical study. More concretely, the current study compares self-descriptions and autobiographical memories of individuals from post-Communist Europe and Scandinavia. The study’s results exemplify participants’ interdependence, whether in the form of their relational and group self-descriptions or their autobiographical memories recalled to different interpersonal cue words. On the whole, the current thesis contributes with novel data to the field of cross-cultural psychology, specifically highlighting the utility of autobiographical memories as measures of self.