Charles P. Thompson

Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way!

Peoples recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in peoples perceptions of events. The authors review the results of several studies and present several new comparative analyses of these studies, all of which indicate that people perceive events in their lives to more often be pleasant than unpleasant. A 2nd cause is the fading affect bias: The affect associated with unpleasant events fades faster than the affect associated with pleasant events. The authors review the results of several studies documenting this bias and present evidence indicating that dysphoria (mild depression) disrupts such bias. Taken together, this evidence suggests that autobiographical memory represents an important exception to the theoretical claim that bad is stronger than good.

Autobiographical memory: unpleasantness fades faster than pleasantness over time

Kansas State University, USASUMMARYWe examined the effects of retention intervals on the recollection of the emotional content ofevents. 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 eventand during testing of the events. Analyses of the data show that judgments of pleasantness orunpleasantness of an event became less extreme as retention interval increased. This effect waslarger for unpleasant events than for pleasant events. Subsequent memory ratings of pleasantand unpleasant events showed a modest effect of pleasantness with pleasant eventsremembered slightly better than unpleasant events. The theoretical implications of thesedata are discussed. & 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 11: 399–413 (1997)No. of Figures: 1 No. of Tables: 2 No. of References: 23

Social memory in everyday life: Recall of self-events and other-events.

A self- and other-diary method was used to investigate the factors affecting memory for different aspects of real-world events

Memory for unique personal events: The roommate study

Memory for naturally occurring episodic events was measured along with memory for the date of occurrence of those events. The effect of rehearsal was also measured. Participants in the experiment recorded unique personal events for themselves and their roommates for a semester (data were collected for approximately 14 weeks). They also rated the memorability of the events at the time the events were recorded. The roommates were unaware that they were to be tested on the events until approximately I week before the memory test. Accuracy in dating events decreased at the rate of roughly 1 day every week of the retention interval. Events rated as memorable were encoded better than events rated as unmemorable but were forgotten at the same rate. Increasing rehearsal decreased the rate of forgetting the events. Although the recorders selected the events to be recorded and knew they were to be tested on those events, they did not differ from their roommates on any of the memory measures

The role of language familiarity in voice identification

Four experiments examined the effects of language characteristics on voice identification. In Experiment 1, monolingual English listeners identified bilinguals’ voices much betterwhenthey spoke English than whenthey spoke German. The opposite outcome-was-found in Experiment 2, in which the listeners were monolingual in German. In Experiment 3, monolingual English listeners also showed better voice identification when bilinguals spoke a familiar language (English) than whenthey spoke an unfamiliar one (Spanish). However, English-Spanish bilinguals hearing the same voices showed a different pattern, with the English-Spanish difference being statistically eliminated. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstratedthat, for English-dominant listeners, voice recognition deteriorates systematically as the passage being spoken is made less similar to English by rearranging words, rearranging syllables, and reversing normal text. Takentogether, the four experiments confirm that language familiarity playsan important role in voice identification.

Telescoping in dating naturally occurring events

Telescoping effects in date estimation were examined in four diary studies. The data show that substantial telescoping can begin as soon as 8 weeks after an event occurs. These studies also found a slight, but typically nonreliable, tendency to make time expansion errors for recent events. Analyses of these data showed that telescoping cannot be attributed to the clarity-of-memory hypothesis proposed by Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell (1987) or to an artifact produced by guessing. An implicit strategy involving estimation of the number of intervening events was proposed to account for the results.

Encoding specificity: Retrieval asymmetry in the recognition failure paradigm.

The paradigm producing recognition failure of recallable words was investigated in a series of three experiments. Results indicate that retrieval asymmetry: (a) exists in the recognition failure paradigm directly following list study, (b) increases significantly following a free-association task aimed at generation of the target words from the study list, and (c) can be used as a reasonably good predictor of the magnitude of recognition failure. Retrieval asymmetry and recognition failure are reliably related even when adjusted for the level of recognition probability, which has previously been shown by Tulving and Wiseman to be a good predictor of recognition failure.

The use of partial temporal information in dating personal events

The use of different types of partial temporal information is shown to affect dating accuracy and the distribution of errors in event dating. Several different types of partial temporal information are discussed, but three are highlighted by the data. Specifically, subjects’ dating error patterns suggest that they (1) use different types of within-week information, (2) use recalled event sequences, and (3) use boundary landmarks to report the dates of events. In general, these data suggest that although precise temporal information is sometimes represented in the memory trace for an event, more often the date-related information is inferred from other aspects of memory.

The within-list distributed practice effect: Tests of the varied context and varied encoding hypotheses.

The present studies provided separate tests of the varied context and varied encoding hypotheses of the MP-DP effect. The investigation of varied encoding used an incidental learning procedure in which the nature of the orienting task was manipulated such that the subject attended to different attributes of words (varied encoding) or only one attribute (same encoding). While the prediction that the recall of MP-DP items should be comparable under comparable levels of encoding was not supported, differences were obtained in recall of items under same and variable orienting task conditions. An MP-DP effect was obtained under the incidental learning procedure. Tests of varied context involved the presentation of target items in list contexts which were the same or different from list contexts on previous occurrences of the item. The prediction that recall of items surrounded by different context should exceed that of items surrounded by the same context was not supported.

Memory for unique personal events: Effects of pleasantness

College students recorded unique personal events for a 3-month period. At the time of recording, they rated the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the event. Subsequent memory ratings showed no effect of type of affect (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant events) but a strong influence of intensity of affect. In contrast, the data for estimating the date of occurrence of events showed an effect of type of affect, with pleasant events estimated more accurately than unpleasant events. A detailed analysis of the data indicated that the effect could not be attributed to the predictability of pleasant events. A “red-letter day” effect was proposed as an explanation for the estimation data.