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

Abstract

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.

Effects of COVID‐19 on sensory and cognitive perception of mild and severe diagnosed and recovered patients versus healthy consumers

“…These results are consistent with the research by Gómez‐Corona et al ( 2021 ) who reported that the fear of consumers during the COVID‐19 pandemic are related to social, emotional, food supply, government, basic needs, food delivery, overeating, immunity, and family conflicts. The limitations of the present investigation lie mainly in the comparison of the words of emotions and memories against the results of other investigations where instruments from the health area or open text surveys are applied (Aizpurua et al, 2021 ; Johnson et al, 2020 ; Schelhorn et al, 2022 ; Zhao et al, 2021 ). However, these results give a guideline for the use of vocabularies of emotions and memories generated by the sensory field for their application within the health area in order to study cognitive changes in people with different diseases.…”

“…This result can be attributed to the consumers recent COVID‐19 process, although the temporality (times higher than 30 days) of the elicited emotions and memories due to a COVID‐19 traumatic event is unknown. These results could also be an effect of regulation of the mood of people who suffered from the COVID‐19 disease (Aizpurua, Migueles, & Aranberri, 2021 ). According to Johnson, Saletti‐Cuesta, and Tumas ( 2020 ), positivity during the COVID‐19 pandemic may be a tendency to value social ties that are the cause of the demand for empathy and awareness to maintain health measures, especially the isolation that generates greater responsibility on the part of the population.…”

“…This result can be compared with the findings of Johnson et al ( 2020 ), Li et al ( 2020 ), and Schelhorn et al ( 2022 ) who determined the emotional impact when COVID‐19 was declared a pandemic and reported that people evoked negative emotions such as frustration, anguish, boredom, feelings of isolation, anxiety, depression, and indignation. The use of positive memories by consumers of the PCOVID19‐mild and PCOVID19‐severe panels may be due to the fact that memory uses adaptive cognitive processes for the reconstruction of reality, based on pre‐existing knowledge, beliefs, expectations, and desires that can generate distortions such as positivity bias that help improve mood and minimize emotional disorders (Aizpurua et al, 2021 ). For example, the selection of the family and friendship memory could be due to the fact that during confinement and suffering from COVID‐19, people strengthen interpersonal ties by generating support with their family and friends to carry out physical activities (i.e., Sport) and disease prevention activities (Li et al, 2020 ).…”

“…This result can be attributed to the consumers recent COVID-19 process, although the temporality (times higher than 30 days) of the elicited emotions and memories due to a COVID-19 traumatic event is unknown. These results could also be an effect of regulation of the mood of people who suffered from the COVID-19 disease (Aizpurua, Migueles, & Aranberri, 2021).…”

The Mediating Role of Religious Beliefs in the Relationship between Well-Being and Fear of COVID-19

“…Regarding emotional regulation, the literature showed that older people's emotional experiences were more stable, positive, and a greater sense of well-being than younger people (Burr et al, 2021;Stone et al, 2010). According to Aizpurua et al (2021), older people have more pronounced adaptation mechanisms to adversity, stress, and emotionally negative events than younger ones. For instance, Carstensen et al (2020) found that older people had higher emotional well-being than younger people in the pandemic.…”