Having some involvement in an event, rather than passively witnessing the event, turns out to have a large eff ect on memory. In part, this is because involvement in the event leads to the idea that the event is relevant to you and who you are, and, in general, information relevant to the self is better remembered than information that’s not self-relevant. This self-reference effect emerges in many forms, including an advantage in remembering things you have said as opposed to things others have said, better memory for adjectives that apply to you relative to adjectives that do not, better memory for names of places you have visited relative to names of places you have never been, and so on. Your "memory" for your own life is likely to be a mix of genuine recall and some amount of schema-based reconstruction. These reconstructions are likely to be accurate in most cases, because your self-schema does reflect your usual or normal behavior. Even so, this schema-based construction is open to error. Most of us would prefer to have a positive view of ourselves, including a positive view of how we have acted in the past. This, too, can shpae memory.