Positivity bias in past and future episodic thinking: Relationship with anxiety, depression, and retrieval-induced forgetting

Marsh, Laura; Edginton, Trudi; Loveday, Catherine

doi:10.1177/1747021818758620

Cited by 48 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 163 publications

(258 reference statements)

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“…We also did not find a significant correlation between the duration of time that participants had had diagnoses of schizophrenia and future thinking. The absence of an association between overall future event generation and depressive symptoms in our regression analyses contrasts with studies with non‐clinical (Marsh, Edginton, Conway, & Loveday, ) and depressed and anxious (Macleod & Byrne, ; Sarkohi et al ., ) participants, but is in agreement with the findings of another study with participants who had experienced a single psychotic episode (Goodby & MacLeod, ). Our within‐group correlation analysis amongst schizophrenia participants also supported the findings of Goodby and MacLeod () as there were no significant correlations between positive or negative future thinking and depressions symptoms.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 91%

Differential associations between impaired autobiographical memory recall and future thinking in people with and without schizophrenia

Barry

Hallford

Rey³

et al. 2019

British J Clinic Psychol

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Objectives. The ability to think about future events serves a range of important functions. People with schizophrenia show impairments in future thinking. However, whether these impairments are specific to positive or negative events and to what extent they are associated with impairments in verbal fluency and autobiographical memory remains poorly understood.Methods. People with schizophrenia (n = 93) and people without psychiatric diagnoses (n = 111) were asked to generate future events and retrieve past autobiographical events and they also completed a test of verbal fluency. Participants also completed questionnaire measures of the positive and negative dimensions of schizophrenia and depression symptoms.Results. People with schizophrenia generated significantly fewer positive and negative future events than controls. In a linear regression, the interaction between diagnosis and autobiographical memory retrieval explained a significant amount of variance in the number of future events that participants generated even when accounting for symptoms and verbal fluency. Past and future thinking abilities were correlated in controls but not in people with schizophrenia.Conclusions. People with schizophrenia may not rely on autobiographical content to imagine the future and may rely instead on semantic processes. Interventions that improve past and future thinking amongst people with schizophrenia are warranted. Practitioner pointsCompared to control participants, people with schizophrenia have marked difficulty generating possible, positive and negative, future events.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 91%

Differential associations between impaired autobiographical memory recall and future thinking in people with and without schizophrenia

Barry

Hallford

Rey³

et al. 2019

British J Clinic Psychol

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“…Many aspects of the COVID-19 epidemic crisis are beyond the control of professionals, with a high level of uncertainty, so this strategy seems particularly well suited. Indeed, while the caregiver cannot change the situation, they can change their interpretation/representation by focusing on positive cognition that promotes positive mental states [41][42][43]. Targeted strategies focusing on positive thinking, notably in terms of positive leadership approaches by department chiefs and nursing managers, could help to mitigate the stress perceived by frontline healthcare workers in the epidemic context [44].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental health and stress among ICU healthcare professionals in France according to intensity of the COVID-19 epidemic

Laurent

Fournier

Lheureux

et al. 2021

Ann. Intensive Care

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Background We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on mental health of professionals working in the intensive care unit (ICU) according to the intensity of the epidemic in France. Methods This cross-sectional survey was conducted in 77 French hospitals from April 22 to May 13 2020. All ICU frontline healthcare workers were eligible. The primary endpoint was the mental health, assessed using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Sources of stress during the crisis were assessed using the Perceived Stressors in Intensive Care Units (PS-ICU) scale. Epidemic intensity was defined as high or low for each region based on publicly available data from Santé Publique France. Effects were assessed using linear mixed models, moderation and mediation analyses. Results In total, 2643 health professionals participated; 64.36% in high-intensity zones. Professionals in areas with greater epidemic intensity were at higher risk of mental health issues (p < 0.001), and higher levels of overall perceived stress (p < 0.001), compared to low-intensity zones. Factors associated with higher overall perceived stress were female sex (B = 0.13; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.08–0.17), having a relative at risk of COVID-19 (B = 0.14; 95%-CI = 0.09–0.18) and working in high-intensity zones (B = 0.11; 95%-CI = 0.02–0.20). Perceived stress mediated the impact of the crisis context on mental health (B = 0.23, 95%-CI = 0.05, 0.41) and the impact of stress on mental health was moderated by positive thinking, b = − 0.32, 95% CI = − 0.54, − 0.11. Conclusion COVID-19 negatively impacted the mental health of ICU professionals. Professionals working in zones where the epidemic was of high intensity were significantly more affected, with higher levels of perceived stress. This study is supported by a grant from the French Ministry of Health (PHRC-COVID 2020).

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“…The SST posits that older adults deploy cognitive control mechanisms to suppress negative stimuli and to seek out positive, emotionally rewarding information. Although at the cognitive level, older people generally show deficits in resource availability, they use their resources to enhance emotion regulation, perhaps using their limited resources to block or inhibit negative thoughts and activate positive ones ( Giebl et al, 2016 ; García-Bajos and Migueles, 2017 ; García-Bajos et al, 2017 ; Marsh et al, 2019 ). Although not as accentuated as in older people, the fact that middle-aged participants also show the positivity effect suggests that the effect is not due to a malfunction of the amygdala that reduces neural and affective responses to negative stimuli ( Reed and Carstensen, 2012 ) or to the fact that the processing of negative content is more complex and cognitively more demanding ( Labouvie-Vief et al, 2010 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other theories underscore older people’s difficulty to recreate and imagine the future and argue that generating and processing positive future events requires less cognitive effort and less time than negative events ( Newby-Clark and Ross, 2003 ; Schacter et al, 2008 ; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010 ), mainly because negative content is more complex to process than positive content ( Labouvie-Vief et al, 2010 ). Finally, it is also proposed that older people focus on emotion regulation by implementing their cognitive control resources, such as activating inhibitory resource to block access to negative information ( García-Bajos and Migueles, 2017 ; Giebl et al, 2016 ; Marsh et al, 2019 ). That is, cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to the positivity effect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

2021

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This study aimed to determine whether the observed tendency to remember more positive than negative past events (positivity phenomena) also appears when recalling hypothetical events about the future. In this study, young, middle-aged, and older adults were presented with 28 statements about the future associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, half positive and half negative. In addition, half of these statements were endowed with personal implications while the other half had a more social connotations. Participants rated their agreement/disagreement with each statement and, after a distraction task, they recalled as many statements as possible. There was no difference in the agreement ratings between the three age groups, but the participants agreed with positive statements more than with negative ones and they identified more with statements of social content than of personal content. The younger and older individuals recalled more statements than the middle-aged people. More importantly, older participants recalled more positive than negative statements (positivity effect), and showed a greater tendency to turn negative statements into more positive or neutral ones (positivity bias). These findings showed that the positivity effect occurs in even such complex and situations as the present pandemic, especially in older adults. The results are discussed by reference to the notion of commission errors and false memories resulting from the activation of cognitive biases.

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Positivity bias in past and future episodic thinking: Relationship with anxiety, depression, and retrieval-induced forgetting

Cited by 48 publications

References 163 publications

Differential associations between impaired autobiographical memory recall and future thinking in people with and without schizophrenia

Differential associations between impaired autobiographical memory recall and future thinking in people with and without schizophrenia

Mental health and stress among ICU healthcare professionals in France according to intensity of the COVID-19 epidemic

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

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