Jeffrey A. Gibbons

Event Self-Importance, Event Rehearsal, and the Fading Affect Bias in Autobiographical Memory

Prior research suggests that the negative affect associated with autobiographical memories fades faster across time than the positive affect associated with such memories (i.e., the fading affect bias, FAB). Data described in the present article reveal several moderators of this bias. The FAB is small when events are perceived to be self-important, psychologically open, or self-caused; it is large when events are perceived to be atypical of a persons life. The data also suggest that the FAB is especially large when events are rehearsed in the course of conveying events to others, or when events are being privately savored or solved; this effect does not emerge for various other forms of private rehearsal. Theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation

Opinion poll research suggests that a significant number of Westerners hold negative and fearful perceptions toward Muslims and their religion. Although evidence of Islamophobia has been documented in a number of poll studies, no psychometrically based, multifaceted measure that focuses exclusively on fear related attitudes and is not confounded with a particular group currently exists in the scientific literature. The authors of this study describe the development and psychometric properties of the Islamophobia Scale, which measures cognitive and affective-behavioral facets of fear-related attitudes toward the religion of Islam and Muslims. The results of the study demonstrate a measure of Islamophobia that yielded acceptable psychometric properties of reliability and validity.

The Effect of Social Disclosure on the Intensity of Affect Provoked by Autobiographical Memories

Affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster over time than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories (the fading affect bias). Data described in the present article suggest that this bias is observed when people use their own words to describe both the emotions that they originally felt in response to events in their lives and the emotions that they feel when they recall those events. The data also suggest that the fading affect bias is not a consequence of distortion in memory for the emotions experienced at event occurrence, but instead reflects current affective responses to memories for those events. Moreover, this bias has a social component. Frequently disclosed memories evince a stronger fading affect bias than less frequently disclosed memories. Memories disclosed to many types of people evince a stronger fading affect bias than memories disclosed to few types of people. Finally, the relation between social disclosure and fading affect appears to be causal: the results of an experiment demonstrate that social disclosure decreases the fading of pleasant affect and increases the fading of unpleasant affect associated with autobiographical memories.

Why people rehearse their memories: frequency of use and relations to the intensity of emotions associated with autobiographical memories.

People may choose to rehearse their autobiographical memories in silence or to disclose their memories with other people. This paper focuses on five types of memory rehearsal: involuntary rehearsal, rehearsal to maintain an event memory, rehearsal to re-experience the emotion of an event, rehearsal to understand an event, or rehearsal for social communication. A total of 337 participants recalled event memories, provided estimates of how often each event was rehearsed and for what reason, and rated the affective characteristics of the events. Rehearsal frequency was highest for social communication and lowest for rehearsals aimed at understanding events. For many rehearsal types, rehearsal was more frequent for positive than negative events. Frequently rehearsed events tended to show less affective fading. The pattern changed when events were socially rehearsed. For positive events, increased social rehearsal was related to a reduction in affective fading. For negative events, increased social rehearsal was associated with increased affective fading.

When religion makes grief worse: negative religious coping as associated with maladaptive emotional responding patterns

Past research has demonstrated negative religious copings relation to dysfunctional moods during bereavement, but no study has examined negative religious copings influence on emotion processes tied to loss. A total of 99 college students who had experienced a loss provided demographics and measures of social desirability, religiousness, spirituality, neuroticism, and two forms of religious coping. Participants also completed a Loss Interview (LI) that was designed to elicit grief by discussing memories of the deceased. Participants were also asked to evaluate their emotional state before the L1, immediately following the LI, one minute and five minutes after the LI. As hypothesised, negative religious coping predicted dysregulation of grief in the form of heightened reactivity and prolonged recovery. These results are the first ones to relate negative religious coping to maladaptive emotion patterns as well as identify specific aspects of religious coping relevant to dysfunction.

The fading affect bias across alcohol consumption frequency for alcohol-related and non-alcohol-related events

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is the tendency for unpleasant emotions to fade more over time than pleasant emotions (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). The FAB is negatively related to dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), which led researchers to suggest that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism that improves the overall positivity of life (Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003). The FAB may also reinforce certain maladaptive behaviors, such as drinking alcohol, as the unpleasant emotions associated with those behaviors quickly fade from memory, and increase the likelihood of those behaviors in the future. If the FAB increases the likelihood of maladaptive alcohol consumption, the FAB should be greatest for ordinary events at low alcohol consumption levels, whereas the FAB should be greatest for alcohol events at high alcohol consumption levels. The results of two studies provided support for the hypotheses. The implications are discussed.

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 research on fading emotions has shown that unpleasant emotions fade more over time than pleasant emotions, which is a phenomenon referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB). Based on the negative relation between the FAB and dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), some researchers have argued that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism (Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003). As religious variables are related to positive emotions and emotional coping (e.g., Cohen, 2002; Pargament, Smith, Koenig, & Perez, 1998), we examined the FAB as a healthy coping mechanism at the general and specific levels of analysis in the context of religion. General healthy coping was supported by (1) FAB effects across both religious events (REs) and non-religious events (NREs) and (2) a positive relation for spirituality and the FAB. However, specific healthy coping was not supported by a small FAB for (1) REs at high levels of positive religious coping (PRC) for NREs, (2) NREs at low levels of PRC for NREs, and (3) purely REs relative to REs involving spirituality. Other implications are discussed.

Sympathetic Reactions to the Bait Dog in a Film of Dog Fighting: The Influence of Personality and Gender

Media sources brought international attention to dog fighting during the Michael Vick case. Although a significant number of people who watched footage of the abused dogs used in the Vick case may have felt sympathy for them, the characteristics associated with those types of individuals are not known. The current study examined personality and gender as predictors of sympathetic reactions to the mistreatment of a bait dog depicted in a film clip. The results supported the predictions that animal-oriented sympathy, trait sympathy, agreeableness, and gender would predict sympathetic reactions to the bait dog. The analyses showed that trait sympathy could not explain unique variance beyond animal-oriented sympathy, but that agreeableness fully mediated the relation between gender and sympathetic reactions to the bait dog. Unexpectedly, emotional stability was also a unique predictor. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed.

Influence of recall procedures on the modality effect with numbers and enumerated stimuli.

Experiment 1 extended J. S. Nairne and W. L. McNabbs (1985) counting procedure for presenting numerical stimuli to examine the modality effect. The present authors presented participants with dots and beeps and instructed participants to count the items to derive to-be-remembered numbers. In addition, the authors presented numbers as visual and auditory symbols, and participants recalled items by using free-serial written recall. Experiment 1 demonstrated primacy effects, recency effects, and modality effects for visual and auditory symbols and for counts of dots and beeps. Experiment 2 replicated the procedure in Experiment 1 using strict-serial written recall instead of free-serial written recall. The authors demonstrated primacy and recency effects across all 4 presentation conditions and found a modality effect for numbers that the authors presented as symbols. However, the authors found no modality effect when they presented numbers as counts of beeps and dots. The authors discuss the implications of the results in terms of methods for testing modality effects.

Memory Misattributions for Characters in a Television News Story

Commercial television news stories often employ complex story lines involving complicated relationships among characters. The confusion is often so great that people who appear in these news stories are unintentionally defamed because some viewers come a way having misattributed illegal actions to the wrong person. Human information processes might be motivating these misattributions. Grimes and Drechsel (1996) documented these misattributions, but they did not address methods to sup- press the phenomenon. We replicated the Grimes and Drechsel study, but we used additional controls. We also extended the procedure by suggesting a pre-exposure technique that news stations can use to ameliorate memory errors.