The Good Times Define Us, Not the Bad

May 31, 2006 -- -- Life has its ups and downs, but a huge body of research shows that, for most of us, the ups define who we are, not the downs.

We are a pretty happy species -- despite adversity and those occasional heartbreaks -- and when we look back at the emotional events that have shaped our views of ourselves, we tend to dwell upon the good ones, not the bad.

A new study from Concordia University in Montreal reveals that we really do look back on our own lives through rose-colored glasses. The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Personality, found that people reshape their memories of past events as the years go by.

The study was part of a doctoral dissertation by Wendy-Jo Wood, now a clinical psychologist at Nova Scotia Hospital in Halifax. It included more than 300 college students who were asked to recall several past events and describe how they felt then and how they feel now.

The participants consistently de-emphasized the negative and emphasized the positive. In retrospect, even heartbreaking events, like the death of a friend or a physical assault, were viewed more negatively in the past than today.

Even a personal tragedy can eventually become a beneficial experience, because we take pride in the fact that we managed to get through it and go on with our lives. Or at least that's what our memory tells us in its ongoing effort to use the stream of past events, good as well as bad, to tell us who we are.

Psychologists call that autobiographical memory. It's all those things that happen to us personally in our journey through life. They are also called self-defining memories.

There has been a lot of effort in recent years to understand the way we look back on our own lives. Psychologist Richard Walker of Winston-Salem State University and a team of researchers culled through numerous studies from around the world to see what they tell us about how we view ourselves and our past.

They found that our memory has a "positive bias." We remember far more pleasant than unpleasant events.