How does memory for the public past differ from memory for the personal past?

The good old days and the bad old days: evidence for a valence-based dissociation between personal and public memory. Sushmita Shrikanth &Karl K. Szpunar. Memory, Jan 6 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2020.1871024

Abstract: How does memory for the public past differ from memory for the personal past? Across five experiments (N = 457), we found that memories of the personal past were characterised by a positivity bias, whereas memories of the public past were characterised by a negativity bias. This valence-based dissociation emerged regardless of how far back participants recounted the personal and public past, whether or not participants were asked to think about significant events, how much time participants were given to retrieve relevant personal and public memories, and also generalised across various demographic categories, including gender, age, and political affiliation. Along with recent work demonstrating a similar dissociation in the context of future thinking, our findings suggest that personal and public event cognition fundamentally differ in terms of access to emotionally salient events. Direct comparisons between personal and public event memory should represent a fruitful avenue for research on event cognition.

KEYWORDS: Personal memorypublic memorycollective memoryemotion

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Shrikanth, S., Szpunar, P. M., & Szpunar, K. K. (2018). Staying positive in a dystopian future: A novel dissociation between personal and collective cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Apr 2018. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/04/participants-were-positively-biased.html