Fading of Affect Associated with Negative Child‐Related Memories Varies by Parental Child Abuse Potential

Abstract

Positive memories tend to hold their affective intensity across time better than negative memories, a phenomenon referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). An initial study explored this bias in the context of parents' affective responses to memories involving their children. Specifically, parents (N = 90 for Study 1) were asked to recall three positive events and three negative events involving their children. Next, parents rated how positively or negatively they felt when each event occurred and at recall. Results revealed that parents at high risk of physical child abuse showed a smaller FAB than low-risk parents. The smaller FAB effect observed among high-risk parents occurred largely because affect associated with negative child-related events faded minimally over time. This risk moderation effect did not emerge in a second study in which parents (N = 90 for Study 2) recalled general events that were not limited to events involving children.

Does the Fading Affect Bias Vary by Memory Type and a Parent’s Risk of Physically Abusing a Child? A Replication and Extension

“…However, the recall instructions for this general event condition did not include the restriction that the events needed to be child-related. As such, the instructions for this questionnaire duplicated those used in Skowronski et al's (2016) Study 2. As with the child-related memories, after each event was recorded, parents used the same affect rating scale described above to record how each general event made them feel at the time of occurrence and how each general event made them feel when recalled.…”

“…As such, these difficulties should apply to affective responses to all memories. The Skowronski et al (2016) data are inconsistent with this assertion: In their studies, high CPA risk was linked to a diminishment of FAB effects in memories about others (i.e., a child), but was not linked to alteration of FAB effects prompted by general personal memories. This finding is important because it suggests that sustained high negativity in affect is not a consistent response across all kinds of memories recalled by high CPA risk parents.…”

“…Second, given the personal memory focus of almost all FAB studies, most FAB studies incorporating individual difference variables have focused on how such variables moderate the FAB for personal event memories (e.g., Muir et al, 2017;Walker et al, 2020). In contrast, the Skowronski et al (2016) result suggests that individual difference-driven FAB moderation effects may also occur in affective responses to memories about others.…”

Conservatism positively predicted fading affect bias in the 2016USpresidential election at low, but not high, levels of negative affect

“…The literature supports the notion that the FAB is a healthy coping process/reaction leading to a positivity bias because it is negatively related to unhealthy outcome variables and it is positively related to healthy outcome variables. Specifically, the FAB is negatively related to alcohol consumption (Gibbons et al, 2013), dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), dispositional mood (Ritchie, Skowronski, Harnett, Wells, & Walker, 2009), state anxiety (Gibbons et al, 2017), trait anxiety (Walker, Yancu, & Skowronski, 2014), narcissism (Ritchie, Walker, et al, 2014), as well as parental abuse (Skowronski et al, 2016) and eating disorders (Ritchie, Kitsch, Dromey, & Skowronski, 2018). Conversely, the FAB is positively related to positive religious coping (Gibbons et al, 2015), death accepting attitudes (Gibbons et al, 2016), and self‐esteem (Gibbons et al, 2017).…”

Exploring Positive Classical Conditioning Procedure Effects on Evaluations of Children, Thoughts About Children, and Behaviors Toward Children: Two Experiments

“…The Social Information Processing (SIP) model (Milner, 2000) of child physical abuse (CPA) posits that parents who are at a high risk of physically abusing their children, and who may become actual abusers, hold negative child-related schemata. These schemata can include many kinds of child-related content (see Skowronski et al., 2016) including: (a) negative child-related attitudes, (b) beliefs that children are inherently bad, (c) beliefs advocating the use of corporal punishment, and (d) beliefs that children perform bad behaviors to annoy parents. These negative child-related schemata are hypothesized to influence parental SIP during parent–child interactions.…”