Testing the fading affect bias for healthy coping in the context of death

Abstract

Affect fades faster for unpleasant events than for pleasant events (e.g., Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997 ), which is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB; Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003 ). Although research has generally shown that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism, this same finding has not been demonstrated at a specific level of analysis accounting for particular event types and related individual differences (e.g., Gibbons et al., 2013 ). Given the strong unpleasant emotions associated with death (Rask, Kaunonen, & Paunonen-Ilmonen, 2002 ), the current study examined FAB in the context of death events and participant attitudes toward death. General healthy coping was shown by robust FAB across death and control (i.e., everyday) events and by a negative correlation between negative religious coping and FAB. Although healthy coping at a specific level of analysis was supported by increased FAB for participants who held accepting attitudes toward death when they recalled everyday events, it was not supported by decreased FAB for the same participants when they recalled death events. This effect was mediated by rehearsal ratings, not depression. Implications are discussed.

Grief and Avoidant Death Attitudes Combine to Predict the Fading Affect Bias

“…Other events switched their affective intensity to affect that was the opposite of the initial event affect ( n = 78, 9.85%), which is referred to as changed affect [22]. The flourishing and changed affect events overlapped with three of the five mislabeled/unrated events and the data for these events were removed from the analyses ( n = 114, 14.39%), because these affective changes should not be included in calculations of affect that is supposed to fade [8]. Importantly, participants either did not provide affect ratings for some events or they provided the wrong initial affect rating for events ( n = 226, 28.50%).…”

“…Many of the measures used in the Gibbons et al, (2016) study were also used in the current study [8]. We described the important predictors, control variables, and the outcome variable, fading affect, in the following subsections.…”

“…A growing literature suggests that the FAB is a healthy coping outcome that may help people seek pleasant experiences [2] in several contexts, including death [8]. The research on FAB research supports theories stressing positive outcomes and resiliency mechanisms, such as the mobilization-minimization hypothesis [18], where mental resources are used to reduce the impact of negative events and emotions.…”

“…One indicator of healthy bereavement may involve the phenomenon referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB) [2,3,4], where unpleasant emotions fade faster than pleasant emotions [5,6,7]. The literature on the FAB has examined the phenomenon across a variety of events, including significant/death and non-significant/everyday events [8]. However, studies have not examined the relation of bereavement outcomes to the FAB for these types of events.…”

“…Conversely, the FAB is disrupted by unpleasant emotions, such as dysphoria [3], dispositional mood [22], and trait anxiety [23]. Although FAB research has examined the phenomenon in the context of death [8,24,25], it has not examined the relation of the FAB to grief for death events.…”