Williamson John B, Drago Valeria, Harciarek Michal, Falchook Adam Dov, Wargovich Bliss Anne, Heilman Kenneth M
Department of Psychiatry, Center for OCD and Anxiety Related Disorders.
Center for Cognitive Aging and Memory, College of Medicine.
Cogn Behav Neurol. 2019 Mar;32(1):11-15. doi: 10.1097/WNN.0000000000000183.
Salience of emotional autobiographical memories may have temporal patterns associated with valence. Recall of negative emotional memories is often important in survival and well-being. Based on the possible survival value of negative memories, we posited that when given an open-ended request to recall either a sad or a happy memory, people are more likely to recall an older sad memory than a happy one.
We asked 20 healthy participants, aged 18-63 years, to freely recall happy and sad emotional memories and estimate the length of time that had passed since the recalled event had occurred. We analyzed the age of each memory based on valence.
Sixteen of 20 participants volunteered a more remote sad than happy memory (P<0.05). Older participants' sad memories were more remote (P<0.05), but the ratio of happy to sad memories was not affected by age.
Self-selected free retrieval of autobiographical happy and sad emotional memories reveals a time bias. Although the reason for this temporal dichotomy is unknown, it may be that engaging systems involved in defense and survival alters the encoding and/or retrieval characteristics of the memory that modify salience.
情绪性自传体记忆的显著性可能具有与效价相关的时间模式。负面情绪记忆的回忆在生存和幸福感方面通常很重要。基于负面记忆可能具有的生存价值，我们推测，当被给予开放式要求去回忆一段悲伤或快乐的记忆时，人们更有可能回忆起一段更久远的悲伤记忆而非快乐记忆。
我们要求20名年龄在18至63岁之间的健康参与者自由回忆快乐和悲伤的情绪记忆，并估计自回忆事件发生以来所经过的时间长度。我们根据效价分析了每个记忆的年龄。
20名参与者中有16人主动提供了一段比快乐记忆更久远的悲伤记忆（P<0.05）。年长参与者的悲伤记忆更久远（P<0.05），但快乐记忆与悲伤记忆的比例不受年龄影响。
自传体快乐和悲伤情绪记忆的自我选择自由检索揭示了一种时间偏差。尽管这种时间二分法的原因尚不清楚，但可能是参与防御和生存的系统改变了记忆的编码和/或检索特征，从而改变了显著性。
