When you're depressed or anxious, remembering happier memories is a simple approach to help yourself feel better. Reminiscing on a day spent alone in the woods can provide you inner serenity. Reminiscing about a football game you went to with a bunch of friends in college may bring back pleasant memories. The feeling of connection to loved ones might be felt when thinking about a birthday gathering with close family.
However, not all happy memories are created equal. Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado published an interesting paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in April 2020: The degree of social connection inherent in a memory is examined in general. The social content of the examples I used to open this post differs. There are no other people on the walk through the woods. The football game brings together a group of people who may or may not have close social ties. The people closest to you are invited to your birthday celebration. According to Speer and Delgado's research, the degree of social connection in a memory determines its worth to you, even if the incident you remembered was positive. Participants in one study were given a series of clues to assist them remember life events. The participants were asked to rate how positive the experience they remembered was, how intense the recollection was, and whether the memory contained any other persons, acquaintances, or intimate social relationships. Following that, participants were given two tasks to complete with the memories they had identified. They were first shown two of the memory cues from before. They were asked which of their memories they wanted to reminisce about. After then, participants were given time to reflect on the memory they had chosen. The cues were chosen to ensure that the memories recalled were all favourable, but differed in social substance. People chose to recollect memories involving close significant others over memories involving no other people or acquaintances in this task by a small (but statistically significant) margin. Participants were presented the cues again in a second task, and for each cue, they were asked how much they would pay (up to $1,000) to repeat the experience they remembered. Many studies have utilised this measure of willingness to pay to determine how much people enjoy items. People were prepared to pay more for more pleasant recollections than for less favourable memories, which is unsurprising. Even when the positive effect was removed, participants were willing to pay much more to recreate memories involving near significant others than memories involving only distantly linked people or memories involving no one. Another two-day investigation was conducted as part of this series. Participants were given a large number of memory cues on one day so that the researchers could identify at least 24 happy memories. The participants were then given a stressful task requiring holding their arm in freezing cold water under the supervision of a lab technician on a second day (2-4 days following the first session). Participants are known to experience stress as a result of this task, which results in an increase in the stress hormone cortisol. Following the stress induction, participants were asked to recall 24 good memories from the previous day. Using a mouth swab to collect saliva, participants' cortisol levels were assessed numerous times during the task. The average baseline level of cortisol among the subjects did not differ significantly. Furthermore, the increase in cortisol in all subjects immediately after the stress test was similar, implying that they all had a similar reaction to the manipulation. The overall positivity of the memories people recovered, as well as the amount of social engagement in those memories, had an effect on cortisol levels after the memory retrieval exercise. That is, recalling happy memories reduced cortisol (suggesting a reduction in general physiological stress), while recalling happy memories involving close loved ones reduced cortisol even more. These findings imply that social connection is beneficial to people not only in the now, but also in the future. To be content with your life, you must have happy memories that you can recall, as well as positive experiences that make you feel connected to those closest to you.
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September 2021
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