Emotional gradients in autobiographical memories across the lifespan

Autobiographical memory is the mental re-experiencing of complex events from one’s life (Grilli and Sheldon, 2019). Memories are not perfect reproductions – rather, they are reconstructed to serve one’s goals, identity, and social communication. Emotions are known to modulate memory. In this study, we investigated changes in the emotional phenomenology of autobiographical memories across different life periods. 65 participants (ages 22-35) completed the Autobiographical Interview (Levine et al., 2002), in which they verbally recalled memories from childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the past year; they also recalled a negative memory (from any period) and imagined a future memory. Recall occurred in random order across two sessions to control for state effects. Memory emotionality was scored in multiple ways. Participants self-reported the vividness and emotion (valence, arousal, and dominance) within their memory. Raters evaluated the emotion of each memory on a 1-9 Likert scale (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.90). Finally, transcripts were analyzed with LIWC-22 to determine the average emotion of words within each memory.  Across scoring methods, we found participants consistently reported greater vividness in their memory from adulthood compared to childhood. We observed gradients in emotion across the lifetime: childhood memories were more negative and less dominant, while adulthood memories were more positive and more dominant. Childhood memories contained more words associated with negative emotions, especially anger. Imagined future memories were more positive compared to childhood memories. Our results extend previous findings of a negative-to-positive temporal gradient in self-selected memories (Williamson et al., 2019) by showing this gradient to apply not only when emotional memories are prompted, but also when memories are freely retrieved without special instruction. We also show the pattern to extend to future, imagined memories. We speculate that this gradient may explain why self-appraisal is typically more positive and negative for future and past selves, respectively.