The emotion attached to unpleasant memories weakens faster over time than the emotion attached to pleasant ones.
Diary studies asking people to rate an event's emotional intensity at the time and again later find the negative decays more steeply. The asymmetry supplies a mechanism for nostalgia that requires no distortion of the facts: the events are recalled accurately and the feelings attached to them are not equally preserved.
In practice
- A brutal project is remembered fondly by the people who lived through it, and their contemporaneous messages say otherwise.
- A period everyone agreed was miserable becomes, a decade later, the era people say they miss.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind