Life is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep it that Way!

TLDR

People’s recollections of the past are often positively biased, largely because of perceptual biases in event appraisal and the fading affect bias where negative affect fades faster than positive. The authors review multiple studies and conduct comparative analyses showing that people tend to perceive life events as more pleasant than unpleasant, and that mild depression (dysphoria) disrupts this bias. The evidence indicates that autobiographical memory is an exception to the claim that negative experiences outweigh positive ones.

Abstract

People's recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in people's 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.