ИСТИНА

People’s negative personal memories, when functional, have been shown to serve predominantly directive functions by taking lessons and applying those lessons to the current problems. To the best of our knowledge, no prior studies have examined the possibility that memories of negative past events per se could help people to view the current situation in more benign terms and, consequently, regulate one’s mood. This experimental study is the first to examine whether negative autobiographical memories serve as a counterpart to positive ones in emotion regulation. The main hypothesis posits that the feeling that things have changed for the better may arise in response to recalling a negative memory employing the mechanism of ‘retrospective downward autobiographical comparison’, that is, a comparison between the worse past and better present. The proposed hypothesis was tested in 99 young adults. Participants attended four sessions held approximately one week apart. All participants performed four memory tasks: autobiographical positive, autobiographical negative, vicarious positive, and vicarious negative. In the ‘happy’ condition of autobiographical memory task, participants were asked to give brief but detailed descriptions of a highly positive experience that made them feel happy, satisfied, and lucky at the time it occurred. In the ‘unhappy’ condition, they received the opposite instructions. In the vicarious memory tasks, participants were asked to do the same on behalf of their favourite fictional characters. Departing from the self-report methodology, we assessed emotional states before and after each memory task using the indirect projective method: The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). The results replicated and elucidated previous data on the mood-repair effect by deliberate recall of positive memories. Positive memory tasks significantly decreased the negative component of the mood (NA) in both autobiographical and vicarious conditions. Notably, an increase in positive affect (PA) was observed in the vicarious condition only, while it remained the same after the autobiographical recall. This asymmetry may be due to the entertaining nature of vicarious memory tasks. The most striking finding from this study is the reverse effect of negative memory tasks in autobiographical and vicarious conditions. A decrease in PA and stasis of NA was detected in the vicarious condition. In contrast, negative autobiographical recall, consistent with our predictions, consistently boosted PA and inhibited NA. It is noteworthy that the obtained result could not be attributed to the specific thematic content of memories. In this study, all negative autobiographical memories were grouped into a relatively small number of categories. No significant differences were found in the frequency of memories assigned to each of the categories between the participants divided according to their mood shift after performing the memory tasks (boosters vs. non-boosters). Notably, the effect took place spontaneously without the explicit goal of changing the existing mood and addressed implicit emotion regulation. These results go beyond previous reports, showing that a retrospective downward autobiographical comparison approach may provide useful insights into the functionality of autobiographical memory.