Rosy Retrospection

Rosy retrospection is the tendency to remember past events, especially personal experiences such as vacations or earlier life periods, more positively than they were actually experienced or rated at the time they occurred. The psychologists Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson, with colleagues, documented the effect in the 1990s in studies comparing people's real-time ratings of an experience such as a vacation or a bicycle trip with their later recollections of the same experience, finding the later recollections were systematically more favorable. The effect is related to but distinct from nostalgia, and it has been proposed as a contributor to the general tendency for people to look back on the past, including their own earlier years, more fondly than their contemporaneous accounts support.