Autobiographical memory: unpleasantness fades faster than pleasantness over time

Abstract

We examined the effects of retention intervals on the recollection of the emotional content of events. Memory for personal events was tested for three retention intervals: 3 months, 1 year, and 4.5 years. Participants made pleasantness ratings both at the time of recording the event and during testing of the events. Analyses of the data show that judgments of pleasantness or unpleasantness of an event became less extreme as retention interval increased. This effect was larger for unpleasant events than for pleasant events. Subsequent memory ratings of pleasant and unpleasant events showed a modest effect of pleasantness with pleasant events remembered slightly better than unpleasant events. The theoretical implications of these data are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A pancultural perspective on the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory

“…He found that the affect for unpleasant events faded more than the affect for pleasant events. Nearly three decades later, Walker et al (1997) examined the fading of emotions over time, including a group for a three-month retention interval (43 participants), a group for a one-year interval (6 participants), and one participant at a 4.5-year interval. By 6 This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Memory, epub ahead of print published online:14th February 2014, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09658211.2014 recording events on the day that the events occurred, the researchers ensured that the data would not be confounded by an event selection bias.…”

“…First, the FAB has been documented by numerous researchers, and via numerous methodologies, which have tested many parameters of the phenomenon (Gibbons et al, 2011;Holmes, 1970;Ritchie et al, 2006Ritchie et al, , 2009Walker et al, 1997). Regardless of design or measurement nuances, the data clearly identified the source of the FAB to be in ratings of current affect, not the ratings of initial affect (Landau & Gunter, 2009).…”

“…Nonetheless, the majority of the early research on the FAB involved North American samples of university students, particularly those from the United States (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). There remains the possibility that the FAB represents a cultural phenomenon, such that it may only be present in the relatively homogeneous samples thus far examined, within the U.S. To our knowledge, no prior work has provided data that enable us to compare the FAB cross-culturally' thus, the possibility of a culture-specific effect remains open.…”

The Fading Affect Bias shows healthy coping at the general level, but not the specific level for religious variables across religious and non-religious events

“…The literature on fading emotions shows that unpleasant emotions fade more quickly than pleasant emotions over time (Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Walker, 2004;Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003;Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). This differential fading of unpleasant and pleasant affect was coined the Fading Affect Bias or FAB by Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, et al (2003).…”

“…These results replicated previous results on the FAB (e.g., Walker et al, 1997), and they extended the FAB to REs and NREs. In addition, the FAB was positively related to spirituality, which is positively related to positive mental health outcomes (Cohen, 2002;Ellison & Fan, 2007;Kim et al, 2004;Underwood & Teresi, 2002).…”