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We acknowledge support from the Center for Health and Wellbeing, Princeton University. We thank Mary Himmelstein, Amy Krilla, Janie Qi, and Shimon Saphire-Bernstein for excellent assistance.
Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy.
“Experiences are fleeting [whereas] memories are what we get to keep from our experience” (Kahneman & Riis, 2005, p. 286). Discrepancies between memory and experience (referred to hereafter as the memory-experience gap) have been documented for both short (Hsee & Hastie, 2006) and extended experiences (Wirtz, Kruger, Scollon, & Diener, 2003). Yet the distinction between pleasant and unpleasant emotions (Isen, 1999), together with the view that they are not merely...