How thinking about what could have been affects how we feel about what was

ABSTRACT

Episodic counterfactual thoughts (CFT) and autobiographical memories (AM) involve the reactivation and recombination of episodic memory components into mental simulations. Upon reactivation, memories become labile and prone to modification. Thus, reactivating AM in the context of mentally generating CFT may provide an opportunity for editing processes to modify the content of the original memory. To examine this idea, this paper reports the results of two studies that investigated the effect of reactivating negative and positive AM in the context of either imagining a better (i.e. upward CFT) or a worse (i.e. downward CFT) alternative to an experienced event, as opposed to attentively retrieving the memory without mental modification (i.e. remembering) or no reactivation. Our results suggest that attentive remembering was the best strategy to both reduce the negative affect associated with negative AM, and to prevent the decay of positive affect associated with positive AM. In addition, reactivating positive, but not negative, AM with or without CFT modification reduces the perceived arousal of the original memory over time. Finally, reactivating negative AM in a downward CFT or an attentive remembering condition increases the perceived detail of the original memory over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterfactual thinking
• autobiographical memory
• memory reactivation
• emotion

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Andrew Meriwether and Gregory Stewart for help collecting data and to Matthew Stanley, Natasha Parikh and Kevin LaBar for useful discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Felipe De Brigard http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0169-1360

Peggy L. St Jacques http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0935-4588

Daniel L. Schacter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2460-6061

Notes

1 Although we did not have a prior hypothesis as to whether or not these results would depend upon correctly remembering having reactivated the memory in the context of a CFT, we decided to conduct a second analysis, following the same logic as the analysis above, but including only correctly remembered trials. However, the pattern of results was essentially the same. We include these analyses and results in Supplementary Information.

2 For completeness, we are including the analyses of Ease and Reliving across both Experiments in Supplementary Information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging AG08441 to DLS and a grant from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, at Duke University for FDB.