Giebl Saskia, Storm Benjamin C, Buchli Dorothy R, Bjork Elizabeth Ligon, Bjork Robert A
a Department of Psychology , University of California , Los Angeles , CA , USA.
b Department of Psychology , University of California , Santa Cruz , CA , USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016;69(2):351-60. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1085586.
People often think of themselves and their experiences in a more positive light than is objectively justified. Inhibitory control processes may promote this positivity bias by modulating the accessibility of negative thoughts and episodes from the past, which then limits their influence in the construction of imagined future events. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the correlation between retrieval-induced forgetting and the extent to which individuals imagine positive and negative episodic future events. First, we measured performance on a task requiring participants to imagine personal episodic events (either positive or negative), and then we correlated that measure with retrieval-induced forgetting. As predicted, individuals who exhibited higher levels of retrieval-induced forgetting imagined fewer negative episodic future events than did individuals who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting. This finding provides new insight into the possible role of retrieval-induced forgetting in autobiographical memory.
人们往往会以一种比客观事实更积极的眼光看待自己和自己的经历。抑制控制过程可能通过调节过去负面想法和事件的可及性来促进这种积极偏差，进而限制它们在构建想象中的未来事件时的影响。我们通过研究提取诱发遗忘与个体想象积极和消极情景未来事件的程度之间的相关性来检验这一假设。首先，我们测量了一项要求参与者想象个人情景事件（积极或消极）的任务的表现，然后将该测量结果与提取诱发遗忘进行关联。正如预期的那样，与表现出较低水平提取诱发遗忘的个体相比，表现出较高水平提取诱发遗忘的个体想象的消极情景未来事件更少。这一发现为提取诱发遗忘在自传体记忆中可能发挥的作用提供了新的见解。
