ArticlePsychological science2018
An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory.
Article in Psychological science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Episodic details are better remembered in plausible relative to implausible counterfactual simulations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Emotional future simulations: neural and cognitive perspectives.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Bias and constructive processes in a self-memory system.Memory (Hove, England) · 2024Article
- Automated scoring of the autobiographical interview with natural language processing.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- A pre-post study of stressors and burnout affecting breast radiologists before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.European journal of radiology open · 2023Article
- The seven sins of memory: an update.Memory (Hove, England) · 2022Review
- Looking on the Bright Side: Aging and the Impact of Emotional Future Simulation on Subsequent Memory.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2020Article
- Implicit Memory, Constructive Memory, and Imagining the Future: A Career Perspective.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
People frequently engage in future thinking in everyday life, but it is unknown how simulating an event in advance changes how that event is remembered once it takes place. To initiate study of this important topic, we conducted two experiments in which participants simulated emotional events before learning the hypothetical outcome of each event via narratives. Memory was assessed for emotional details contained in those narratives. Positive simulation resulted in a liberal response bias for positive information and a conservative bias for negative information. Events preceded by positive simulation were considered more favorably in retrospect. In contrast, negative simulation had no impact on subsequent memory. Results were similar across an immediate and delayed memory test and for past and future simulation. These results provide novel insights into the cognitive consequences of episodic future simulation and build on the optimism-bias literature by showing that adopting a favorable outlook results in a rosy memory.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.