Life is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep it that Way!

By W. Walker, John J. Skowronski, C. Thompson. 2003

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d82b78473f0169971043ee638c1de8b26a8c04f

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Adolescents’ Psychological Well-Being and Memory for Life Events: Influences on Life Satisfaction with Respect to Temperamental Dispositions (2009, background): “Thus, recollecting and evaluating life as satisfying may be due to people’s tendency to seek or/and avoid pleasant and unpleasant life experiences, respectively (Walker et al. 2003).”
Self-enhancement and self-protection: What they are and what they do (2009, background): “Of course, this immediately raises the question to a self-enhancement adherent as to why positively biased memories are so readily available; indeed, as diary studies have demonstrated, people remember positive life events better than negative life events (Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, & Shannon, 1991”
The centrality of event scale: a measure of integrating a trauma into one's identity and its relation to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. (2006, background): “In spite of such an overall pleasantness bias in autobiographical memory (Walker et al., 2003), memories for traumas and highly stressful events are in most cases very well remembered when compared to other autobiographical events (e.”
Event self-importance, event rehearsal, and the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory (2006, methodology): “The dependent variable that we computed was similar to that used by Walker et al. (1997), Walker et al. (2003a) and Skowronski et al. (2004).”
An Application of Travel Blog Narratives to Explore Memorable Tourism Experiences (2015, background): “Walker, Skowronski, and Thompson (2003) suggest two likely reasons for people to be more biased towards recollecting positive events: firstly, people generally perceive events in their lives as more pleasant than unpleasant and; secondly, memories associated with unpleasant events fade faster than…”
Material Parenting: How the Use of Goods in Parenting Fosters Materialism in the Next Generation (2015, background): “An example of the former is the general tendency of people to remember the past as being more pleasant than it actually was (Walker, Skowronski, and Thompson 2003).”
Optimism predicting employees' creativity: The mediating role of positive affect and the positivity ratio (2012, background): “However, considering that individuals naturally prefer to experience pleasant affects to unpleasant ones (they seek the former and avoid the latter; Bergsma, Poot, & Liefbroer, 2008 ; Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003 ), one may reasonably consider our measures as proxies of positive and negati”
Emotion regulation in depression: Examining the role of cognitive processes (2010, background): “Recent studies have demonstrated that memories of unpleasant, compared to pleasant events, fade faster and that this differential fading is associated with happiness (Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003 ), that recalling positive autobiographical memories can repair an induced negative mood state ”
HOW DESCRIBING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EVENTS CAN AFFECT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES (2004, background): “Walker, Skowronski, and Thompson (2003) recently reviewed a number of studies in autobiographical memory.”