Fading Affect Bias

What is the Fading Affect Bias?

The fading affect bias (FAB) is the tendency for unpleasant feelings associated with autobiographical memories to diminish faster than pleasant feelings associated with those memories.

What changes over time?

The event and the feeling it evokes are different things. You might remember an embarrassing conversation clearly while feeling much less embarrassed by it years later. Losing some of the emotional sting does not necessarily mean losing the details.

What does the evidence show?

Skowronski and colleagues' review (2014) examines the change from feelings at an event to feelings during later recall. It also describes differences across events, situations and individuals. The average pattern does not mean every unpleasant memory loses its force, or that distress follows a predictable schedule.

Why it matters

The emotional tone of your past can change even when you remember what happened. That helps explain why a past experience and your present reaction to it are not interchangeable.

Fading affect bias vs. rosy retrospection

Rosy retrospection concerns remembering an experience more positively than it was experienced. Fading affect bias focuses on how the feelings attached to memories diminish over time.