Emotion and false memory: How goal-irrelevance can be relevant for what people remember.

Elaborating on misleading information concerning emotional events can lead people to form false memories. The present experiment compared participants' susceptibility to false memories when they elaborated on information associated with positive versus negative emotion and pregoal versus postgoal emotion. Pregoal emotion reflects appraisals that goal attainment or failure is anticipated but has not yet occurred (e.

Forgetting feelings: Opposite biases in reports of the intensity of past emotion and mood.

Memory for feelings is subject to fading and bias over time. In 2 studies, the authors examined whether the magnitude and direction of bias depend on the type of feeling being recalled: emotion or mood. A few days after the U.

Like Schrödinger's cat, the impact bias is both dead and alive: reply to Wilson and Gilbert (2013).

In their comment on our article on affective forecasting (Levine, Lench, Kaplan, & Safer, 2012), Wilson and Gilbert (2013) criticized the meta-analysis, proposed alternative explanations for the empirical studies, and concluded that the impact bias is alive and well. Our reply demonstrates that, irrespective of the exclusion of effects and selective recoding of effects recommended for the meta-analysis, the pattern of results remains the same: Study participants' forecasts are more accurate when they report their feelings about a focal event, or immediately after a focal event, than when they report their feelings in general after a delay. New analyses rule out individual differences and focalism as alternative explanations for the results of our empirical studies.

Motivation matters: differing effects of pre-goal and post-goal emotions on attention and memory.

People often show enhanced memory for information that is central to emotional events and impaired memory for peripheral details. The intensity of arousal elicited by an emotional event is commonly held to be the mechanism underlying memory narrowing, with the implication that all sources of emotional arousal should have comparable effects. Discrete emotions differ in their effects on memory, however, with some emotions broadening rather than narrowing the range of information attended to and remembered.

Accuracy and artifact: reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting.

Research on affective forecasting shows that people have a robust tendency to overestimate the intensity of future emotion. We hypothesized that (a) people can accurately predict the intensity of their feelings about events and (b) a procedural artifact contributes to people's tendency to overestimate the intensity of their feelings in general. People may misinterpret the forecasting question as asking how they will feel about a focal event, but they are later asked to report their feelings in general without reference to that event.