W. Richard Walker- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Colorado State University Pueblo
W. Richard Walker
- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Colorado State University Pueblo
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51
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Introduction
The bulk of my research examines autobiographical memory, specifically the emotions associated with event memories. The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is the tendency for negative emotions to fade more than positive emotions, which is evidence of a healthy coping mechanism operating in memory. Depression, anxiety and other factors can diminish the FAB, while social rehearsal typically increases it.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - present
Publications
Publications (51)
Colleges want students to be involved in campus activities and to be engaged with campus culture. These concepts,
while sharing overlap, have important differences. Student involvement refers primarily to the behaviors outside of class, such as participation in clubs or honor societies. Student engagement is a psychological investment with cogniti...
The fading affect bias (FAB) is the faster fading of unpleasant affect than pleasant affect for autobiographical event memories, and it is considered a healthy coping mechanism because it is positively related to healthy measures (e.g., self-esteem and positive PANAS), whereas it is negatively related to unhealthy measures (e.g., psychological dist...
This chapter reviews a number of positivity biases in cognitive and social psychology. These biases are understood to generally help people recover from negativity and to foster positive evaluations of the self and others. Emphasis is placed on the Fading Affect Bias, among other biases.
The strongest storm in Philippines history, super-typhoon Haiyan, barreled through central Philippines in 2013 and left a high death toll and extensive destruction in its wake. Past studies have investigated Fading Affect Bias (FAB) in extremely negative situations like the death of a loved one and found that the FAB generally occurs in those extre...
The affect associated with negative events fades faster than the affect associated with positive events (the fading affect bias). The fading affect bias is present in most participants and is thought to be evidence of a healthy coping mechanism operating in autobiographical memory. Prior research shows that the fading affect bias can be distorted b...
The tendency for the affect associated with positive autobiographical events to fade less over time than the affect associated with negative autobiographical events (the fading affect bias, FAB) has been observed in a variety of contexts, but numerous mediators have been reported. This current study searches for the FAB, and for potential moderator...
We argue that many of the benefits theorists have attributed to the ability to forget should instead be attributed to what psychologists call the “fading affect bias,” namely the tendency for the negative emotions associated with past events to fade more substantially than the positive emotions associated with those events. Our principal contention...
Perceivers often view individuals described as “warm” to be generally positive and individuals described as “cold” to be generally negative. Consistent with the tenets of Construal Level Theory, McCarthy and Skowronski (2011) demonstrated this difference was larger among perceivers who were instructed the information was psychologically distant rat...
The sex difference in jealousy is an effect that has generated significant controversy in the academic literature (resulting in two meta-analyses that reached different conclusions on the presence or absence of the effect). In this study, we had a team of researchers from different theoretical perspectives use identical protocols to test whether th...
Affect fades faster for unpleasant events than for pleasant events (e.g., Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997), which is referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB; Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003). Although research has generally shown that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism, this same finding has not been demonstrated at a speci...
Emotions associated with memories for the loss of a loved one and for negative events in general decrease in intensity more than memories associated with positive events, a phenomenon known as the fading affect bias (FAB). We tested whether FAB was cross-culturally evident by collecting positive, negative, and memories for the deaths of loved ones...
Two studies examined African Americans essays on coping with violent and nonviolent
death and fading affect bias. Essays from 101 African Americans were coded for
psychological resolution (resolved or unresolved) and for type of death (violent or
nonviolent). Linguistic analyses were used to examine the experience of loss and
coping methods. Religi...
The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) occurs when the affect associated with personal events fades differentially across time: Positive affect fades slower than negative affect. Three studies examined whether the magnitude of the FAB is moderated by narcissism. Results from Study 1 (diary method, N = 26) showed that low narcissism participants evidenced a l...
The affect associated with negative events fades faster than the affect
associated with positive events (the Fading Affect Bias; the FAB). The research
that we report examined the relation between trait anxiety and the FAB. Study 1
assessed anxiety using the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale; Studies 2 and
3 used the Beck Anxiety Inventory. Stu...
This colloquium was presented to 120 students and faculty at WSSU in the fall of 2014. It includes a discussion of some of the main points and narratives featured in the book, Pollyanna's Revenge. Please cut and paste the link to youtube below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJK6jGOMhaQ
The best revenge is a life well lived. This is the essence of a new book exploring human memory and emotion. Pollyanna's Revenge: How Memory and Emotion Foster Happiness explores people's ability to stay strong in the face of adversity, to bounce back after failure, and to thrive in even the most dire of circumstances. This new book combines empiri...
Previous research indicates that psychopaths are prone to emotional detachment and that they are generally less responsive to emotional stimuli. The present study was conducted to determine if increased levels of psychopathy were associated with distortions in autobiographical memories. Participants (N=166) from two universities completed a self-re...
The fading affect bias (FAB) refers to the negative affect associated with autobiographical events fading faster than the positive affect associated with such events, a reliable and valid valence effect established by researchers in the USA. The present study examined the idea that the FAB is a ubiquitous emotion regulating phenomenon in autobiogra...
Recalling a memory often prompts an emotional response. Research examining the fading affect bias (FAB) indicates that the emotional response prompted by positive memories often tends to be stronger than the emotional response prompted by negative memories. This chapter presents an overview of research that has explored the FAB effect. This overvie...
The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is the tendency for unpleasant emotions to fade more over time than pleasant emotions (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). The FAB is negatively related to dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), which led researchers to suggest that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism that improves the overall p...
Prior research suggests that the negative affect associated with autobiographical memories fades faster across time than the positive affect associated with such mem-ories (i.e., the fading affect bias, FAB). Data described in the present article reveal several moderators of this bias. The FAB is small when events are perceived to be self-important...
As illustrated by the insights and ideas of philosophers such as John Locke, the exact relation between autobiographical memory and the self has long been a focus of scholarly interest. Recent efforts have explored these insights and ideas using the scientific techniques available to modern psychology. This article provides an entrée into this real...
This chapter reports on autobiographical memory. The focus is placed in the discussion on two related lines of research: namely, fading affect bias and the processes by which people remember the date when events have occurred. Specifically, it considers the emotions that accompany recall of autobiographical memories and how and why the intensity of...
Research has shown that the tendency for emotional affect to fade more over time for unpleasant events than for pleasant events, known as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB), increased across 3-month, 9-month and 4.5-year intervals. The current study attempted to determine the temporal locus of the FAB using the data set by Walker et al. as well as two ad...
The current study examined the role of spreading activation in autobiographical memory. We employed the Galton-Crovitz cueing technique to assess retrieval times for self-referent information. In Experiment 1, 19 undergraduates retrieved 2 personal memories to 48 target words. It was found that spreading activation occurred in autobiographical memo...
This article reviews research examining the fading affect bias (FAB): The finding that the intensity of affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories. The FAB is a robust effect in autobiographical memory that has been replicated using a variety of methods and p...
People may choose to rehearse their autobiographical memories in silence or to disclose their memories with other people. This paper focuses on five types of memory rehearsal: involuntary rehearsal, rehearsal to maintain an event memory, rehearsal to re-experience the emotion of an event, rehearsal to understand an event, or rehearsal for social co...
The intensity of emotions associated with memory of pleasant events generally fades more slowly across time than the intensity of emotions associated with memory of unpleasant events, a phenomenon known as the fading affect bias (FAB). Four studies examined variables that might account for, or moderate, the bias. These included the activation level...
Important events create flashbulb memories that are vivid and stable. Therefore, we used change in vividness and related phenomenological measures as a new cognitive technology to examine flashbulb memory qualities in a retrospective test-retest memory procedure. We expected phenomenological measures to show smaller changes for flashbulb memories t...
An experiment examined the idea, derived from the Self Memory System model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), that autobiographical events are sometimes tagged in memory with labels reflecting the life era in which an event occurred. The presence of such labels should affect the ease of judgments of the order in which life events occurred. According...
Four samples of participants recalled autobiographical memories. While some evidence emerged from regression analyses suggesting that judgements of the amount of detail contained in each memory and judgements of the ease with which events could be recalled were partially independent, the analyses generally showed that these judgements were similarl...
According to Pennebaker and Harber's (1993) Social Stage Model of Coping, people frequently engage in collective coping after a traumatic event. Over time, people stop talking about the event, even though they continue to think about it. Therefore, socially rehearsing events may help people adapt to tragedies in their life. Several studies examinin...
Four samples of participants recalled autobiographical memories. While some evidence emerged from regression analyses suggesting that judgements of the amount of detail contained in each memory and judgements of the ease with which events could be recalled were partially independent, the analyses generally showed that these judgements were similarl...
In Experiment 1, participants rated the believability of 9 unbelievable and 9 believable headlines as determined via preratings. After 1 day, participants made believability ratings and recognition judgments for 18 unbelievable headlines (9 targets and 9 foils) and 18 true headlines (9 targets and 9 foils). Experiment 2 conceptually replicated the...
The Rogers, Howard, and Vessey (1993) method for testing equivalency between groups uses standard tests of significance to evaluate non-difference, but the method can be extended to examine similarity at the individual level. The definition of equivalency is extended in the present paper to include 2 separate components: non-difference (at the grou...
Rapidly growing cognitive technologies (such as word processors, web browsers, cell phones, and personal data assistants) aid learning, memory, and problem solving, and contribute to every part of modern life from interviewing crime witnesses to learning a foreign language to calling one's mother. This collection of essays on cognitive technology e...
Affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster over time than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories (the fading affect bias). Data described in the present article suggest that this bias is observed when people use their own words to describe both the emotions that they originally felt in response to even...
In this article we argue that social discourse can affect the structure and content of autobiographical memory. In making this argument, we review literature documenting the impact of social factors, including culture, social roles, and social disclosure frequency, on aspects of autobiographical memory. We also describe several social norms that go...
Participants in two studies recalled autobiographical events and reported both the affect experienced at event occurrence and the affect associated with event recollection. The intensity of affect associated with a recalled event generally decreased, but the affective fading was greater for negative events than for positive events. The magnitude of...
In two studies people judged the order in which two real-world events occurred. Ordering performance was better for events that were recent or widely separated in time. Ordering performance was also consistently related to predicted event memorability and to the amount of processing given to an event during encoding. Ordering performance was not co...
People's recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in people's perceptions of events. The authors review the results of several studies and present several new comparative analyses of these studies, all of which indicate that people perceive events in their lives to more often be pleasant than...
Examines the relationship between science knowledge and pseudoscientific beliefs. Uses a survey method in the study and investigates paranormal beliefs as a whole. Concludes that strong scientific knowledge does not prevent a person from having pseudoscientific beliefs. (Contains 14 references.) (YDS)
We examined the effects of retention intervals on the recollection of the emotional content of events. Memory for personal events was tested for three retention intervals: 3 months, 1 year, and 4.5 years. Participants made pleasantness ratings both at the time of recording the event and during testing of the events. Analyses of the data show that j...
We examined the effects of retention intervals on the recollection of the emotional content of events. Memory for personal events was tested for three retention intervals: 3 months, 1 year, and 4.5 years. Participants made pleasantness ratings both at the time of recording the event and during testing of the events. Analyses of the data show that j...
Two separate issues concerning the relation between age and love are addressed in this article. The first issue is concerned with the age generalizability of the factor structure produced by responses to the Love Attitudes Scale. The data presented indicate that the factor structure of responses to the Love Attitudes Scale is highly similar in coll...
The subjective impression that many of us have when we attempt to provide accurate dates for autobiographical events is that it is a very difficult task. This personal subjective experience is corroborated by our observations of respondents in event-dating studies. These respondents often spontaneously express a great amount of dismay (sometimes qu...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64018/1/Autobiographical_memory.pdf
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kansas State University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-63).
Questions
Questions (2)
I mean measures like EEG, salivary cortisol, even basics like GSR or BP?
Does anyone have access to samples from any of the following regions: Africa, South America, Central America, Australia, or the Middle-East. I am working on a cross-cultural project with Timothy Ritchie and Matthew Crawford. We are looking for samples around the world to replicate the Fading Affect Bias. A dataset will almost certainly mean authorship on an upcoming paper.
We would also be interested in samples of Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, or Native-Americans.
