Memory of Felt Emotion
Many researchers use self report measures of felt emotion as a manipulation check. This raises an interesting question and a possible methodological weakness: are people always accurate when they recall how they felt in the past? Several findings suggest this is not the case. For instance, in a study of memory for emotions in supporters of former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot, supporters were asked to describe their initial emotional reactions after Perot’s unexpected withdrawal in July 1992 and again after the presidential election that November.
Between the two assessment periods, the views of many supporters changed dramatically as Perot re-entered the race in October and received nearly a fifth of the popular vote. The results showed that supporters recalled their past emotions as having been more consistent with their current appraisals of Perot than they actually were.
Another study found that people’s memories for how distressed they felt when they learned of 9/11 terrorist attacks changed over time and more so, were predicted by their current appraisals of the impact of the attacks (Levine et al., 2004). It appears that memories of past emotional responses are not always accurate, and can even be partially reconstructed based on their current appraisal of events.
Studies have shown that as episodic memory becomes less accessible over time, the reliance on semantic memory to remember past emotions increases. In one study Levine(2009) primes of the cultural belief of women being more emotional than men had a greater effect on responses for older memories compared to new memories. The long term recall of emotions was more inline with the primed opinions showing that long term recall of emotions was heavily influenced by current opinions.
Read more about this topic: Emotion And Memory
Famous quotes containing the words memory of, memory, felt and/or emotion:
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
—J.M. (James Matthew)
“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“In the present state we are in, we find such a strong sympathy and union between our souls and bodies, that the one cannot be touched or sensibly affected, without producing some corresponding emotion in the other.... We are not angels, but men cloathed with bodies, and, in some measure governed by our imaginations.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)