Chapter Three - The Fading Affect Bias: Its History, Its Implications, and Its Future

Abstract

Abstract Recalling a memory often prompts an emotional response. Research examining the fading affect bias (FAB) indicates that the emotional response prompted by positive memories often tends to be stronger than the emotional response prompted by negative memories. This chapter presents an overview of research that has explored the FAB effect. This overview indicates that the FAB reflects two trends: (1) over time, the affect associated with positive memories tends to fade more slowly from event occurrence to event recall than the affect associated with negative memories, and (2) it is more often the case that events that were negative at their occurrence will ultimately come to prompt positive affect-at-recall than it is the case that events that were positive at their occurrence will come to prompt negative affect-at-recall. Research has also revealed that the FAB can be altered by event moderators, situational moderators, and individual-difference moderators. The chapter uses this research review to highlight several needed directions for future research, suggest some theoretical ideas that may underlie the FAB, and discuss some ways in which the FAB might be important to life in a social world.