Making the best of the past ⏳ — Fading Affect bias (FAB)
Replaying your past like a movie, automated mind cleanups, and past negative/positive mindsets
It was pouring like anything 🌧. I was walking downhill along with my 5-year-old daughter. Holding up an umbrella ☔️, I was trying to keep us both from getting wet. My husband was right ahead, carrying our 2-year-old son. We were on our way from the train station to the ferry in Varenna, a small town in Italy. Loaded with luggage and two toddlers, our Airbnb was still a ferry ride plus a taxi ride away.
We ultimately made it, soaking wet…or maybe not 🤔. The details are hazy. It’s been 9 years. But what I remember very well is the most cherished holiday that followed.
I remember roaming the cobblestone streets in the quaint little towns of Lake Como. I remember sipping coffee every morning in a local ‘bar’. I remember drinking watered-down wine with lunches. I remember my kids enjoying a gelato🍦 every single day in those three weeks!
Besides that stormy day, I’m sure there were more challenges during that holiday. I vaguely remember the struggle of pushing the kiddy stroller on the non-stroller-friendly streets 😅. But what my mind vividly remembers are the pleasant memories 😇.
All memories invoke emotions, pleasant or unpleasant. As it turns out, humans have a tendency to remember pleasant emotions better.
The tendency to fade the emotions associated with unpleasant memories faster than the emotions associated with pleasant memories is called the Fading Affect bias, or FAB.
It’s like replaying your past as a movie with a warm filter on. Bad feelings appear trivial. Good feelings tend to last.
Broaden and build
For a long time, psychologists paid more attention to negative emotions. To help people suffering from depression or dysphoria, they wanted to find ways of reducing the ill effects of negative emotions.
Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology and neuroscience, took a deep dive into positive emotions instead. She came up with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.
When positive emotions are in short supply, people get stuck. They lose their degrees of behavioral freedom and become painfully predictable. But when positive emotions are in ample supply, people take off. They become generative, creative, resilient, ripe with possibility, and beautifully complex.
— Barbara Fredrickson
It’s a cycle:
Positive emotions → Open to new ideas and actions → Strong social support → Better health and fulfillment → Positive emotions
Deep down, our brain is an optimist. FAB helps our brain edit our life’s story to maintain a positive sense of self.
This doesn’t mean we are delusional. It just means our brain has perfected an automated cleanup process.
Automated cleanup
Recalling positive events—like the day you brought your puppy 🐶 home or the time your child took her first step—brings sheer joy.
Recalling negative events, like the day you lost a loved one, is very painful. No surprises there.
But the emotions you feel while recalling don’t need to be identical in intensity. More so for negative events.
All emotions fade with time. You felt intense joy when you ran a marathon or won a match. But when your photo app shows you a blast from the past, your joy is milder than before.
The extreme anger of a breakup becomes milder when you recall it years later.
Just like clearing our devices of unwanted heavy files, unused apps, etc. helps them run faster, our brain has a similar mechanism.
Maintaining intense negative emotions puts an extra burden on our cognitive and biological systems. Deleting them or saving a dialed-down version is efficient.
Although negative emotions can’t turn positive, the intensity of the pain reduces with time. According to a study, FAB begins within the first 12 hours, stabilizes for 3 months, and then increases.
A negative event like the day someone got fired might even start invoking positive emotions. They’d realize that getting fired led them to start their own business and achieve much more success.
Better past makes us action-oriented.
Better past brings hope for a better future.
Unfortunately, FAB is very weak in people suffering from depression or dysphoria.
Are you a past positive or a past negative?
People usually fall into one of the two categories when it comes to recalling their past, past positive or past negative.
Past positives tend to remember positive events more clearly and negative events vaguely.
Past negatives, on the other hand, remember the negative experiences in great detail. Their memory of positive events and the associated emotions is vague, at best.
If you are a past negative, you don’t experience FAB much. That makes life tough!
Just like we have physical needs (food, water, air, shelter), we have underlying psychological needs:
You need to feel you belong.
Your life has meaning and purpose.
People see you and value you.
You have a future that makes sense.
Fading affect bias is one of the natural mechanisms to meet these needs. So is optimism bias.
Unmet psychological needs lead to anxiety and depression. So if you’re an extreme past negative, it’s time to switch your mindset.
Easier said than done.
One of the strategies you can employ is social disclosure. Simply put, sharing positive events with others increase their positive intensity. Sharing negative events decrease their intensity.
Telling your friends about an embarrassing moment and laughing over it can lighten the load.
In fact, the diversity of the target audience also matters. The more you share with different types of people, the better you feel.
This doesn’t mean you start flooding your social media feed. Studies have shown that social media events don’t cause FAB.
It’s time we simply start heading out to the local piazza like the old Italian folks.