Misremembering pain: A memory blindness approach to adding a better end.

How people remember feeling in the past informs future decisions; however, memory for past emotion is subject to a number of biases. Previous research on choice blindness has shown that people often fail to notice when they are exposed to misinformation about their own decisions, preferences, and memories. This type of misinformation can influence how they later remember past events. In the present study, we examined the memory blindness effect in a new domain: memory for pain. Participants (N = 269) underwent a cold-pressor task and rated how much pain, distress, and positive and negative affect they had experienced. Later, participants were shown their pain ratings and asked to explain them. Some of the participants were shown lower pain ratings than they had actually made. In a second session, participants recalled how painful the task had been and how much distress and positive and negative affect they remembered experiencing. The results indicated that the majority of participants who were exposed to misinformation failed to detect the manipulation, and subsequently remembered the task as being less painful. The participants in the misinformation condition were not overall more willing to repeat the study tasks, but the participants who recalled less distress, less negative affect, and more positive affect were more willing to repeat the study tasks again in a future experiment. These results demonstrate the malleability of memory for painful experiences and that willingness to repeat aversive experiences may depend more on memory for affective reactions to the original experience than on memory for the physical pain itself.

Emotional response in schizophrenia to the "36 questions that lead to love": Predicted and experienced emotions regarding a live social interaction.

Evidence suggests that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) report anticipatory pleasure deficits compared to controls and that these deficits are linked to decreased motivation to engage socially. However, these deficits have been identified via self-report measures of hypothetical pleasant stimuli, leaving it unclear whether they exist in reference to actual social situations. To address this issue, we created a live social interaction that minimized the reliance of higher-order cognitive processes. SZ and control participants were told that they would be playing an "enjoyable sharing game" with another study participant (who was actually a confederate) that involved asking and answering questions (36 interpersonal closeness generation questions; Aron et al., 1997). Participants then reported their current mood and the emotions they anticipated experiencing during the pleasant social interaction. Immediately following the interaction, they reported their experienced emotions. We found that the SZ group anticipated more negative emotion (d = 1.0), but were less accurate in forecasting negative emotion (d = .81), than controls, and these effects were large. There were small, non-significant group differences in anticipation, experience, and accuracy in forecasting of positive emotion (all ds < .29). Also, social anhedonia was positively correlated with anticipated negative affect and negatively associated with experienced positive emotion. At the same time, controls reported finding the interaction to be a more positive emotional experience overall, d = 0.75. This is the first study to show that "anticipatory pleasure deficits" in SZ might actually be heightened anticipated negative emotion and that inaccurate forecasting could be linked to decreased social motivation.

Depression history and memory bias for specific daily emotions.

Reports of emotions experienced over the past week can be influenced by memory bias, which is more pronounced for people with depression. No studies, however, have examined memory bias for specific emotion clusters (e.g., sadness, anxiety, and anger) experienced on a day-to-day basis among people with depression or a history of depression. Participants (N = 1,657) from the Midlife in the United States Study were assessed for depression. Approximately 6 months later, participants reported their emotional experiences for 8 days and recalled these experiences on the final day. Differences in recalled and reported emotion were compared between participants with and without a history of depression. Participants overestimated experience only of negative emotions, particularly anger, and this negativity bias was greatest for participants with a history of depression. Feelings related to anger were prone to greater overestimation than sadness or anxiety. These findings emphasize the role of memory bias in retrospective reports of specific emotions and illustrate the presence of an amplified memory bias among people who are at a greater risk for recurrent depressive episodes.

Mixed Emotions Across Adulthood: When, Where, and Why?

Psychologists often interpret mixed emotional experiences, defined as experiencing more than one emotion over a given period of time, as indicative of greater emotional complexity and more adaptive functioning. In the present paper, we briefly review studies that have examined these experiences across adulthood. We describe how mixed emotions have been defined in the lifespan literature, and how the various studies examining age differences in this phenomenon have yielded discrepant results. We then discuss future research directions that could clarify the nature of mixed emotions and their utility in adulthood, including the assessment of situational context, understanding when mixed emotions are adaptive in daily life, and determining how cognitive functioning is involved in these experiences.

Daily events are important for age differences in mean and duration for negative affect but not positive affect.

Across midlife and into old age, older adults often report lower levels of negative affect and similar if not higher levels of positive affect than relatively younger adults. Researchers have offered a simple explanation for this result: Age is related to reductions in stressors and increases in pleasurable activities that result in higher levels of well-being. The current study examines subjective reports of emotional experience assessed across 8 days in a large sample of adults (N = 2,022) ranging from 35 to 84 years old. By modeling age differences before and after adjusting for daily positive uplifts and negative stressors, this article assesses the extent to which daily events account for age differences in positive and negative affect reports. Consistent with previous research, the authors found that older age is related to lower mean levels and shorter duration of a negative emotional experience in a model only adjusting for gender, education, and ethnicity. After adjusting for daily events, however, the linear age-related effects were no longer significant. For positive affect, adjusting for daily events did not alter age-related patterns of experiencing higher mean levels and longer positive experience duration, suggesting that other factors underlie age-related increases in positive affect. (PsycINFO Database Record

Age Differences in Emotional Well-Being Vary by Temporal Recall.

OBJECTIVE: Older adults often appraise and remember events less negatively than younger adults. These tendencies may influence reports that rely more on nonexperiential, reconstructive processes. As such, the current study examined whether age differences may be more pronounced for reports of emotions that span across increasingly longer temporal epochs compared to reports of more proximal emotional experiences. METHOD: Participants (aged 25-74 during Burst 1) from the Midlife in the United States Survey and the National Study of Daily Experiences reported the negative affect they experienced across a month, a week, and throughout the day at two measurement bursts 10 years apart. RESULTS: Across all negative affect measures, older age was related to lower levels of negative affect. The effect of age, however, varied across the three temporal epochs, such that age differences were smallest when people reported their daily negative affect and greatest when they reported their monthly negative affect. DISCUSSION: Taking into account how emotion reports differ based on method provides a more realistic picture of emotional experience in adulthood. Findings suggest that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on whether questions ask about short versus longer time periods. Age advantages are most pronounced when people recall emotions across increasingly longer periods of time.