Age-Based Positivity Effects in Imagining and Recalling Future Positive and Negative Autobiographical Events

Abstract

Thoughts about the future reflect personal goals, and projections into the future enrich our emotional life. Researchers have taken an interest in determining whether the tendency to remember more positive than negative emotional events observed when recalling past events also appears when remembering imagined future events. The objective of this study was to examine the age-based positivity effect of recall for future positive and negative autobiographical events in young and older adults. Representative future events were first established to develop the cues used to prompt personal future events. In the production task, the participants were presented with eight positive and eight negative random future events of young or older adults as a model and the corresponding cues to generate their own positive and negative future autobiographical events. In the recall task, the participants recovered as many experiences as they could of the model and the positive and negative events produced by themselves. The participants correctly recalled more positive than negative events and committed more errors for negative than positive events, showing a clear tendency in both young and older adults to recall future imagined events as positive. Regarding age, the young adults recalled more events than the older participants whilst the older participants in particular showed better recall of their own imagined future events than the model’s events, and committed more errors when recalling the model’s events than their own imagined events. Regarding the positivity effect in incorrect recall, more than half of the errors were valence changes, most of these being from negative to positive events, and these valence changes were more pronounced in the older than in the younger adults. In general, there were fewer differences between young and older adults in the recall of positive events in comparison with negative events. Our findings suggest that people are well disposed toward recalling positive imagined future events and preserve a positive emotional state, suppressing negative memories.

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

“…Thus, positivity effect means that, compared to young people, older people react less to negative situations and preferentially attend to and recall emotionally meaningful and positive stimuli ( Reed et al, 2014 ). This positivity effect has been observed with a multitude of materials such as scenes, drawings, and faces (e.g., Charles et al, 2003 ; Mather and Carstensen, 2005 ; Reed et al, 2014 ; Mammarella et al, 2016 ), words ( Kensinger, 2008 ; Hamilton and Allard, 2020 ), or autobiographical experiences of the past and recreations of the future ( Berntsen and Jacobsen, 2008 ; Gallo et al, 2011 ; Cole et al, 2016 ; García-Bajos et al, 2017 ). Older people not only show a greater preference for the positive than young people, but they also generate false memories or transform and modify negative content to make it more positive and, thus, achieve greater consistency with their emotional goals and motivations, and higher emotion regulation and well-being ( Charles et al, 2003 ; Carstensen et al, 2020 ; Zaragoza Scherman et al, 2020 ).…”

“…However, there are important differences between thinking about the past and imagining the future. Although both situations involve the recreation and enjoyment of pleasant thoughts and the uncomfortable anticipation of fears and concerns, it has been observed that thoughts about future experiences are more positive than past events ( Berntsen and Rubin, 2002 ; Berntsen and Jacobsen, 2008 ; García-Bajos et al, 2017 ; Zaragoza Scherman et al, 2020 ). Interestingly, according to aging literature, older people tend to remember their past more positively ( Kennedy et al, 2004 ; Schryer and Ross, 2014 ) and to perceive their future as more idyllic and positive compared to young people (e.g., Berntsen and Rubin, 2002 ; Burr et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The central concept of this research is individuals’ positivity or our preference for positive information as opposed to negative information when performing attention and memory tasks; this preference is enhanced in older adults, a phenomenon known as the positivity effect ( Charles et al, 2003 ; Carstensen and Mikels, 2005 ; Mather and Carstensen, 2005 ; Reed and Carstensen, 2012 ; Schryer and Ross, 2014 ; García-Bajos et al, 2017 ). Thus, positivity effect means that, compared to young people, older people react less to negative situations and preferentially attend to and recall emotionally meaningful and positive stimuli ( Reed et al, 2014 ).…”

Memory of Medical Scenarios for End-of-Life Support Preferences

“…The ideas put forward by the participants also support the notion that people may be motivated to stop the retrieval of memories that generate fear, concern or sadness, a blockage that shows the defensive capacity of the self to prevent thoughts that break down personal balance (Conway et al, 2004). Consistent with this idea, inhibitory processes can modulate the accessibility of negative thoughts and episodes and may help keep negative memories from coming to mind (García-Bajos et al, 2017).…”

“…In any event, medical content generally involves disturbing or negative information that we do not want to remember. Recent research shows that we tend to block or forget negative events (García-Bajos & Migueles, 2017; García-Bajos, Migueles, & Aizpurua, 2017; Szpunar, Addis, & Schacter, 2012).…”