Fading Affect Bias

Fading affect bias is the tendency for the negative emotion associated with an unpleasant autobiographical memory to fade over time more quickly than the positive emotion associated with a pleasant autobiographical memory, so that memories on balance become relatively more positive as time passes. The psychologists W. Richard Walker, John Skowronski and Charles Thompson documented the effect across a series of diary and recall studies beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, consistently finding that the intensity of negative feelings attached to unpleasant past events declined faster than the intensity of positive feelings attached to pleasant ones. The effect has been proposed as a normal, adaptive feature of autobiographical memory that helps maintain psychological well-being, and researchers have found it to be substantially reduced or absent in people experiencing depression or post-traumatic stress.