Overestimating the intensity of negative feelings in autobiographical memory: evidence from the 9/11 attack and Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

When recalling autobiographical events, people retrieve not only the event details, but also the feelings they experienced. Past work with different measures of memories for feelings remain inconclusive, suggesting that people are either highly consistent or inconsistent with remembering feelings. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of previous feelings associated with consequential and negatively valenced emotional events, i.e., the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and Covid-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing the initial and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we found that people systematically recall more intense negative feelings than they initially reported – overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experience. The Covid-19 dataset further showed that people whose emotional well-being improved more demonstrate smaller biases in remembered feelings. Across both datasets, the remembered intensity of feelings correlated with initial feelings and were also influenced by current feelings, although the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the Covid-19 dataset than the 9/11 dataset. Our results suggest that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of experienced negative emotional experience with the degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.

2020 feels slow, long, and far away: Time distortion due to the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…The role of the elicited emotions during a to-be-remembered collective event on subjective time deserves special attention, as it seems to be the main predictor of our findings. As mentioned before, the impact of the global pandemic on autobiographical memory has just recently started being studied (Brown, 2021;Castillo et al, 2022;Öner et al, 2023;Rouhani et al, 2023). Collective event recall includes recall of details, which are prevalently and consistently recalled by individuals, but also memories of feelings during such an event, which in turn imply feelings generated upon recollection that might or might not be consistent.…”

“…Collective event recall includes recall of details, which are prevalently and consistently recalled by individuals, but also memories of feelings during such an event, which in turn imply feelings generated upon recollection that might or might not be consistent. In any case, collective events such as the pandemic are often recalled with a negative valence and there is a tendency to overestimate the intensity of past negative feelings (Castillo et al, 2022). In our study, it is worth noting that participants' mood reports for the pandemic period are themselves based on a general memory of how they felt at that time.…”

“…Currently, there is relatively little existing evidence regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on autobiographical memory (Brown, 2021;Castillo et al, 2022;Öner et al, 2023;Rouhani et al, 2023). The pandemic started abruptly and the quarantines changed people's lives drastically, creating an inflection point that might have had an effect on how well events prior, during, and after the pandemic are remembered and on how the events are temporally distributed.…”