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. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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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.

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) refers to the negative affect associated with autobiographical events fading faster than the positive affect associated with such events, a reliable and valid valence effect established by researchers in the U.S.A. The present study examined the idea that the FAB is a ubiquitous emotion regulating phenomenon in autobiographical memory that is present in people from a variety of cultures. We tested for evidence of the FAB by sampling more than 2,400 autobiographical event descriptions from 562 participants in 10 cultures around the world. Using variations on a common method, each sample evidenced a FAB: Positive affect faded slower than negative affect did. Results suggest that in tandem with local norms and customs, the FAB may foster recovery from negative life events and promote the retention of the positive emotions, within and outside of the U.S.A. We discuss these findings in the context of Keltner and Haidt's (1999) levels of analysis theory of emotion and culture. Memory, epub ahead of print published online:14th February 2014, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09658211.2014 3 This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in A Pancultural Perspective on the Fading Affect Bias in Autobiographical MemoryThe human experience is replete with personal, emotional events. The emotions associated with life events can be positive or negative, fleeting or long lasting, disruptive or soothing. Emotions are constructed, in part, by biological and social mechanisms that moderate the affective experience and its expression. Much of the research on emotions has focused on immediate consequences for thought and behavior (Barrett, Niedenthal, & Winkielman, 2005;Damasio, 2003;Forgas, 2000). However, a growing body of research has begun to examine the fate of personal events' emotions over time ). This research suggests that many emotions evidence an overall pattern of affective fading. For many events, their associated emotions become less intense with the passage of time, some gradually, others abruptly (Gibbons, Lee, & Walker, 2011;Ritchie & Batteson, 2013). Importantly, this tendency for affective fading is biased such that negative emotions, on average, fade significantly faster than do positive emotions. This pattern of affect change is the Fading Affect Bias (FAB).The evidence for such a differential fading of positive and negative affect is robust and shows demonstratively that many adults evidence a FAB. Nonetheless, the majority of the early research on the FAB involved North American samples of university students, particularly those from the United States (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). There remains the possibility that the FAB represents a cultural phenomenon, such that it may only be present in the relatively homogeneous samples thus far examined, within the U.S. To our knowledge, no prior work has provided data that enable us to compare the FAB cross-culturally' thus, the possibility of a culture-specific effect remains open. F...