[zdragnar]

How universal are these biases? Anecdotally, I feel as though i have a stronger recall of negative experiences than equivalently good ones. If that is a thing, i wonder if it might be due to, or perhaps a cause of, depression.

[wott]

> Anecdotally, I feel as though i have a stronger recall of negative experiences than equivalently good ones.

It is the same for me, but I noticed I was the odd one, almost all around me follow the 'rule': they forget about most of the hardship, remember the good parts, and even assimilate the good parts for the whole experience.

It was especially noticeable a couple of years after school. My student mates and I started studies through a tough school (very intensive, exhausting, an unbelievable amount of work, not a minute of rest, rough teachers and discipline, lots of pressure), and we went through the same thing. But like 5 years after we escaped from there, they spoke of it only as a great experience, which was lots of fun. That sounded incredible to me. They had forgotten about all the bad times, which happened 10 times more often than the good ones. The 'great experience' I could understand a bit (it's normal when you have finally overcome something difficult to feel proud of it, and it also made you stronger, if it didn't break you); but 'lots of fun' it really wasn't. Ever. And I couldn't understand either that all the negative points had vanished in their mind.

I was about to add that I have always been more (now) or less (20 years ago, in those student years) on the depressive side, and that it could be related, but I read that you made the exact same theory in your next sentence! So it seems we are in this same bag:

> If that is a thing, i wonder if it might be due to, or perhaps a cause of, depression.

I came to think that depression make you see the world as it is, and not the version the world which is numbed by the 'drugs' which a normal body/brain produces and which blur the vision as rose-tainted spectacles do (anecdote: I have rose/orange-tainted cycling glasses and that's exactly the feeling some days when I take them on/off!) .

[samebreath]

biases generality is a great question to ask. I rely on smarter people than me quoting repeated and repeatable research. The best I've ever read is in the book Thinking Fast and Slow, and a beautiful representation of it can be seen on designhacks.co (the latter is on my wall as a reminder of how fallible the mind can be).

[lr4444lr]

I think the better question to ask is, what kind of memory? Research I cannot conveniently find at the moment shows that raw declarative memory is improved under trauma. For example, most people who were old enough, nationwide, can recall where they were and what they were doing on 9/11. Other kinds of memory, like skill automating (e.g. playing the chords effortlessly on a guitar or mastering the core grammar of a language) are much harder to do when you're under stress.

[AndreasM]

Interestingly, though, it often turns out that recalling "where they were and what they were doing on 9/11" is very often wrong. And that when you're wrong, you're more certain you're right.

Malcolm Gladwell did a very interesting podcast episode on that: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/24-free-brian-william...