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 not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e. the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing experienced and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we discovered that people systematically recall a higher intensity of negative feelings than initially reported – overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experiences. The COVID-19 dataset also revealed that individuals who experienced greater improvement in emotional well-being displayed smaller biases in recalling their feelings. Across both datasets, the intensity of remembered feelings was correlated with initial feelings and current feelings, but the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the COVID-19 dataset than in the 9/11 dataset. Our results demonstrate that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of prior negative emotional experiences with their degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• emotion
• appraisal
• autobiographical memory
• well-being

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Patrick Mair for his perspectives on statistical analysis and Dr. Daniel L. Schacter for his insights on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Part of this data was presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society, seminars at Harvard University, and the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. Analysis code is available at https://github.com/DaPsyientist/COVID911_EmoMem and data is available at https://osf.io/kqe54/.

Author contributions

JC and HF were involved in conceptualisation, investigation, data curation, formal analysis, methodology, visualisation, and writing. OTK and JS were involved in the investigation, data curation, and writing. YS, MAK, SV, JPO and HMD were involved in the investigation and writing. DCS was involved in the investigation. RM was involved in investigation, data curation, and project administration for the 9/11 dataset. WH was involved in conceptualisation, investigation, data curation, methodology, funding acquisition, project administration and supervision for the 9/11 dataset. EAP was involved in conceptualisation, investigation, data curation, methodology, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, and writing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ⁣⁣the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Grant No. R01 DA042855 to EAP), James S. McDonnell Foundation (to EAP and WH), National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Grant No. 2105147 to HMD), as well as Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship (187911) from the Swiss National Science Foundation (to YS).