Does a person selectively recall the good or the bad from their personal past? It depends on the recall target and the person’s favourability of self-views

Fading Affect Bias in Intergroup Relations

Abstract. Negative affect associated with autobiographical events fades faster over time than positive affect. This Fading Affect Bias (FAB) has been established in the individual and interpersonal domains. Two studies tested the FAB in intergroup relations with Muslims ( N= 76 White British non-Muslim) and opposite gender ( N = 242 women and men) as target outgroups. The results indicated that the FAB exists in an intergroup context, for both ingroup and outgroup memories. Mediation analyses showed that intergroup contact is related to a lower fading of positive affect associated with the outgroup memory, through greater memory strength and a more positive outgroup member evaluation. The findings are important for understanding affect associated with intergroup memories and the buffering effect of positive contact.

In Human Memory, Good Can Be Stronger Than Bad

Some researchers assert that the psychological impact of negative information is more powerful than that of positive information. This assertion is qualified in the domain of human memory, in which (a) positive content is often favored (in the strength of memories for real stimuli or events and in false-memory generation) over negative content and (b) the affect prompted by memories of positive events is more temporally persistent than the affect prompted by memories of negative events. We suggest that both of these phenomena reflect the actions of self-motives (i.e., self-protection and self-enhancement), which instigate self-regulatory activity and self-relevant processes.

Self-Serving Bias in Memories

Abstract. Protecting one’s positive self-image from damage is a fundamental need of human beings. Forgetting is an effective strategy in this respect. Individuals show inferior recall of negative feedback about themselves but unimpaired recognition of self-related negative feedback. This discrepancy may imply that individuals retain negative information but forget that the information is associated with the self. In two experiments, participants judged whether two-character trait adjectives (positive or negative) described themselves or others. Subsequently, they completed old-new judgments (Experiment 2) and attribution tasks (Experiments 1 and 2). Neither old-new recognition nor source guessing bias was influenced by word valence. Participants’ source memory was worse in the negative self-referenced word processing condition than in the other conditions. These results suggest there is a self-serving bias in memory for the connection between valence information and the self.