Happy memories

To some extent, who we are is who we remember being. (I am crudely paraphrasing someone, I think John Locke.) A couple of researchers at Concordia University recently completed a study of the way important life events define a person’s sense of self, and how the emotions that accompany these events change over time (how people felt at the time of the event compared to how they feel about it when they recollect it later). This article from WebMD describes the study in some detail, and this one from ABC News puts the story in the context of other research. When people look back at something that had great importance for them, their pleasant memories are stronger and their painful memories milder, compared to what they say they felt at the time. One goal of the study was to examine the relationship between self and autobiographical memory. Your memories of important events in your life contribute to your sense of who you are, and perhaps the bias toward remembering the positive emotions and letting the negative emotions fade with time helps us build and maintain a positive image of what our lives are about.

The ABC News story describes work by another researcher who found something similar; people recalled more happy times than they did sad times, and the pleasant memories tended to linger longer than the unpleasant ones. The exception, interestingly, is that depressed people had about equally good recall of both good and bad times. I wonder if this is related to depressive realism (the hypothesis that depressed people tend to make more realistic judgments of their own abilities and strengths).

The average age of participants in the Concordia study was mid-20s; I wonder how old the people were in the other studies that the ABC News article mentions. Older people have had more time for their painful memories to mellow or otherwise shift. Part of what’s going on might be a mental mechanism for keeping a positive attitude toward our lives, but part of it might also be that as time goes by and you gain more knowledge of all the ramifications of an event, you can see benefits that you couldn’t see when it was upon you in all its misery. I don’t remember where this quote came from, but Garrison Keillor once said:

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”

Some things, of course, you never would have wanted, like the death of someone close to you. But even then you may find that something is more endurable than you thought it might be. C.S. Lewis, writing in A Grief Observed about the death of his wife, said:

“One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call “the thing itself”. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.”

Maybe with the passing of time it’s easier to realize this.