Blessedly forgetful and blissfully unaware: a positivity bias in memory for (re)constructions of imagined past and future events

ABSTRACT

People frequently consider the alternatives of the events that can happen in the future and of the events that already happened in the past in everyday life. The current study investigates the effects of engaging in imagination of hypothetical future (Experiment 1) and past (Experiment 2) events on memory and metamemory. We demonstrate, across two experiments, that imagination of positive future and positive past events yielded greater memory performance than negative events, as well as receiving higher vividness and plausibility ratings. In addition, simulation of a negative event occurring positively in the future or having occurred positively in the past produced higher memory performance, compared to simulation of a positive event occurring / having occurred negatively. However, participants’ predictions for their subsequent memory performance did not reflect their increased tendency to remember positive or could-be / could-have-been positive events neither for future nor past reconstructions. These findings are interpreted in the framework of positivity bias which suggests that people have a tendency towards positivity when simulating future events; and we extend this positivity bias to reconstructions of the hypothetical past events as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• imagination of hypothetical past and future
• metamemory
• positivity bias
• fluency

Acknowledgments

This work has been conducted for partial fulfilment of senior thesis project requirements for Belgin Ünal. This work has been funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu) Program Code 2209A – Research Projects Fellowship for Undergraduate Students Term 2017/2, Grant number: 1919B011701988.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been conducted for partial fulfilment of senior thesis project requirements for Belgin Ünal. This work has been funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu) Program Code 2209A – Research Projects Fellowship for Undergraduate Students Term 2017/2 [grant number 1919B011701988].