A negative experience leaves a long mark – sometimes we remember it all our lives. Unpleasant impressions are fixed in memory so firmly that they can permanently alienate us from a person or situation. Do we exaggerate – and why?
Jeff Galak, Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), took up the study of the duration and depth of our unpleasant impressions. To understand how much we tend to exaggerate negative emotions, he had the participants in the experiment perform tasks associated with getting unpleasant sensations. Some of the test subjects did this only once, the rest were forced to experience the unpleasant experience again. During the experiments, the participants listened to annoying sounds, performed tedious and boring tasks.
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The scientist needed to conduct 7 tests and one field study to come to the conclusion that we do not just remember negative experiences, but exaggerate them in anticipation of a repetition of an unpleasant situation once happened. When stored in memory, the feeling of a negative experience is simplified and exaggerated compared to the feelings and emotions that a person actually experienced*.
It’s all about people’s tendency to choose and remember mostly unpleasant aspects of the event, the scientist believes. Thus, it turns out that all subsequent reflections of a person about what happened are concentrated around negative impressions – negative experience, failures, unpleasant moments – and the effect is enhanced.
* Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2011, vol. 140, № 1.