The Effect of Social Disclosure on the Intensity of Affect Provoked by Autobiographical Memories (original) (raw)
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The intensity of negative emotions associated with event memories fades to a greater extent over time than positive emotions (fading affect bias or FAB). In this study, we examine how the presence and behaviour of a listener during social disclosure influences the FAB and the linguistic characteristics of event narratives. Participants recalled pleasant and unpleasant events and rated each event for its emotional intensity. Recalled events were then allocated to one of three experimental conditions: no disclosure, private verbal disclosure without a listener or social disclosure to another participant whose behaviour was experimentally manipulated. Participants again rated the emotional intensity of the events immediately after these manipulations and after a one-week delay. Verbal disclosure alone was not sufficient to enhance the FAB. However, social disclosure increased positive emotional intensity, regardless of the behaviour of the listener. Whilst talking to an interactive listener led unpleasant event memories to decrease in emotional intensity, talking to a non-responsive listener increased their negative emotional intensity. Further, listener behaviour influenced the extent of emotional expression in written event narratives. This study provides original evidence that listener behaviour during social disclosure is an important factor in the effects of social disclosure in the FAB.
The fading affect bias (FAB) is a phenomenon of autobiographical memory whereby negative emotions associated with event memories fade in intensity over time more than positive emotions. Social disclosure enhances the FAB and listener responsiveness during social disclosure is an important facet, however, little is known about the nature of listener verbal responses that facilitate an enhanced FAB. In this study, we used discourse analysis to explore listener verbal responses and conversational patterns associated with an enhanced FAB after social disclosure: backchanneling, in which the listener shows they are paying attention to the story underway; displays of understanding whereby the listener shows awareness of the speaker’s emotional state; and positive facilitation, characterized by mutual development of positive interpretations of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. We suggest that such listener responses are similar to those described in the verbal person-centered framework, and the emotional benefits of social disclosure are in part collaboratively created by conversationalists.
Journal of Language & Social Psychology, 2019
The fading affect bias (FAB) is a phenomenon of autobiographical memory whereby negative emotions associated with event memories fade in intensity over time more than positive emotions. Social disclosure enhances the FAB and listener responsiveness during social disclosure is an important facet, however, little is known about the nature of listener verbal responses that facilitate an enhanced FAB. In this study, we used discourse analysis to explore listener verbal responses and conversational patterns associated with an enhanced FAB after social disclosure: backchanneling, in which the listener shows they are paying attention to the story underway; displays of understanding whereby the listener shows awareness of the speaker’s emotional state; and positive facilitation, characterized by mutual development of positive interpretations of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. We suggest that such listener responses are similar to those described in the verbal person-centered framework, and the emotional benefits of social disclosure are in part collaboratively created by conversationalists.
Event self-importance, event rehearsal, and the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory
Self and Identity, 2006
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 selfimportant, psychologically open, or self-caused; it is large when events are perceived to be atypical of a person's 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.
People build their sense of self, in part, through their memories of their personal past. What is striking about these personal memories is that, in many instances, they are inaccurate, yet confidently held. Most researchers assume that confidence ratings are based, in large part, on the memory's mnemonic features. That is, the more vivid or detailed the memory, the higher the confidence people have in its accuracy. However, we explore a heretofore underappreciated source on which confidence ratings may be based: the accessibility of memories as a result of selective retrieval. To explore this possibility, we use Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork's retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm with emotional (positive and negative) autobiographical memories. We found the standard RIF effect for memory recall across emotional valence. That is, selective retrieval of emotional autobiographical memories induced forgetting of related, but not retrieved emotional autobiographical memories compared to the baseline. More interestingly, we found that the confidence ratings for positive memories mirrored the RIF pattern: decreased confidence for related, unpracticed autobiographical memories relative to the baseline. For negative memories, we found the opposite pattern: increased confidence for both practiced autobiographical memories and related, unpracticed autobiographical memories. We discuss these results in terms of accessibility, the diverging mnemonic consequences of selectively retrieving positive and negative autobiographical memories and personal identity.
On the emotions that accompany autobiographical memories: Dysphoria disrupts the fading affect bias
Cognition & Emotion, 2003
Participants in two studies recalled autobiographical events and reported both the affect experienced at event occurrence and the affect associated with event recollection. The intensity of affect associated with a recalled event generally decreased, but the affective fading was greater for negative events than for positive events. The magnitude of this fading affect bias also varied with participants' dysphoria levels: Dysphorics showed a smaller fading affect bias than nondysphorics. Additional analyses suggested that the fading affect bias is not a product of: (1) distorted retrospective memory for the affect originally accompanying events; (2) differences in the initial affect intensity of positive and negative events; or (3) differences in the ages of positive and negative events. Other variables that might be related to the fading affect bias are discussed.
Emotion and autobiographical memory
Physics of Life Reviews, 2010
Autobiographical memory encompasses our recollections of specific, personal events. In this article, we review the interactions between emotion and autobiographical memory, focusing on two broad ways in which these interactions occur. First, the emotional content of an experience can influence the way in which the event is remembered. Second, emotions and emotional goals experienced at the time of autobiographical retrieval can influence the information recalled. We discuss the behavioral manifestations of each of these types of interactions and describe the neural mechanisms that may support those interactions. We discuss how findings from the clinical literature (e.g., regarding depression) and the social psychology literature (e.g., on emotion regulation) might inform future investigations of the interplay between the emotions experienced at the time of retrieval and the memories recalled, and we present ideas for future research in this domain.
Autobiographical memory: unpleasantness fades faster than pleasantness over time
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1997
We examined the effects of retention intervals on the recollection of the emotional content of events. 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 event and during testing of the events. Analyses of the data show that judgments of pleasantness or unpleasantness of an event became less extreme as retention interval increased. This effect was larger for unpleasant events than for pleasant events. Subsequent memory ratings of pleasant and unpleasant events showed a modest effect of pleasantness with pleasant events remembered slightly better than unpleasant events. The theoretical implications of these data are discussed.