By Alexis Doyle, Staff Writer
On Friday, Oct. 13, the Psychology Department hosted their keynote speaker for the annual psychology homecoming colloquium. The speaker was Gettysburg alum and Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology Julia Superka.
Superka discussed the connections between Future Self Continuity, the perceived connection between who we are in the future and who we are now or were in the past. She also discussed topics such as trauma exposure and mental illnesses.
The lecture started with Superka discussing the different interpretations of self-identity and memory. She briefly covered many renowned psychologists and their explanations of the concept, stating that there are many ways one can view identity and memory.
She proceeded to discuss autobiographical memory, or the episodic recollections pertaining to the self. Superka accredited autobiographical memory with high significance, stating that it is important for maintaining and changing the self. There are four main functions of autobiographical memory: self-representation, directive, social, and adaptive functions.
Superka then defined self-continuity, the ability to think about one’s self in the past, present and future and feel connected to all versions of one’s self. She attributed self-continuity to making up some defining personality traits and psychological functions and stated that it comes from cognitive processes.
Future self-continuity, as Superka said, is the degree to which a person feels their present self is connected to their future self. An individual with high future self-continuity views their future self as a natural extension of their current self and exhibits healthier behaviors, more financial accumulation, and higher ethicality. An individual with low future self-continuity makes less ethical decisions and predicts higher rates of depression in individuals.
Superka then presented research accumulated by her and her team by sending out a survey to people during the COVID-19 quarantine of April 2020. The demographic consisted of 178 individuals, mostly women, located primarily on the east and west coasts. The research examined the relationship between future self-continuity and clinical symptoms, including depression, anxiety, grief and trauma.
The research showed that low future self-continuity is associated with higher rates of depression, generalized anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma, grief and financial worries.
Superka concluded her presentation by highlighting the importance of future self-continuity, stating that it could be an important target for therapeutic work in reducing mental health symptoms. She also stated that the research was implicative of a broader-scale finding, that a global pandemic impacts the trajectory of trauma responses and how to maintain a strong sense of self-continuity through trauma. Superka also emphasized the social contexts that are associated with everyday lives, and how future self-continuity can be altered depending on the context surrounding an individual.
