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Fading affect bias (FAB) is a phenomenon wherein the intensity of negative emotions associated with an autobiographical memory decrease more rapidly than the intensity of positive emotions. The present study had three aims: (1) to determine whether FAB could be replicated in extreme event memories (the loss of loved ones) in the Mexican culture; (2) to determine whether greater fading would occur in psychologically closed compared to unresolved memories; and (3) whether depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) moderate FAB. Mexican community members' positive, negative, and memories for the loss of loved ones were recorded. Emotional intensity was rated at the time the event occurred and currently. Memories for the death of loved ones showed fading, but not as much fading as that shown in everyday negative memories. Fading was not related to memory resolution. Participants with greater PTSD symptoms showed lower fading affect across all memories.

The 2020 U.S. Presidential election was a campaign that could be characterized as 'one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in recent memory,' partly because the general election debates were highly contentious and featured frequent interruptions and several insults and invectives between candidates. This research compared the language used in the debates to fact-checked truths and lies using a Reality Monitoring (RM) deception detection algorithm in Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to investigate the veracity of real-life high-stakes verbal messages in the political context. We found that overall RM scores were lower and not significantly different between debate language and fact-checked lies, and RM scores were significantly higher in fact-checked truth statements, indicating that most debate language uttered was deceptive. This result supports the finding that the RM algorithm in LIWC distinguishes truth from lies and debate language in the context of politics. The 60.7% classification rate in this study may reflect a problem with the relatively short word counts of fact-checked lie and truth statements, but most probably reflects individual candidates' deviations in RM features used in their statements. Each individual has a style that they use in communication—'the way people talk and write have been recognized as stamps of individual identity.' Even with a corpus of many statements from the same individual candidates, they probably regularly amplify certain features of RM and diminish other features of RM in their truthful and deceptive messages. This is a fruitful area of research that could be explored in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) (Carstensen, 1992, 1993) accounts for lifespan changes in human social networks and for the motivations which underlie those changes. SST is applied in this research with 256 prison inmates and non-inmates, ages 18-84, from Mississippi, Kansas, and New Mexico. Two research questions sought to identify (a) whether inmate networks change in size, and (b) whether overall closeness within an inmate's network changes over the adult years. Results indicate that older inmates, much like older non-inmates, have few peripheral partners, are buffered from the wider population of prisoners, and interact within a small group of very close partners. Although older inmates are not completely isolated, they do maintain fewer network partners as age increases, like their non-incarcerated counterparts, and overall are as emotionally close to network members as non-inmates.

If a listener becomes suspicious during a conversation, and asks questions (probes) of a speaker, the listener tends to judge the speaker's message as honest. This result has been termed the probing effect (McCornack, Levine, Aleman, Oetzel, & Miller, 1991). This study hypothesized that an untested decision-making phenomenon, an opposite probing effect, or a post-probe tendency to judge a message as deceptive, might occur when lie-biased individuals judge statement veracity. Prison inmates and non-inmates participated in dyads as judges and speakers. Speakers watched a video, and then lied or told the truth to judges. Judges covertly showed thumbs up or down before asking questions, and subsequently made post-probe judgments. Findings indicate that inmates use heuristic processing to a greater extent than non-inmates, and that inmates, surprisingly, exhibit a probing effect, and not an opposite probing effect, when heuristic processing is employed to decide message veracity. Keywords: Probing effect; Reversed probing effect; Lie-biased; Deception; Heuristics

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 extreme situations, but this study is the first to assess FAB in first-hand memories for a natural disaster survival situation. The FAB phenomenon is the tendency for emotional intensity associated with negative memories for events to fade over time and emotional intensity for positive events stays relatively stable over time. Researchers collected memories for the super-typhoon from survivors three years after the event. Results showed that negative emotional intensity for the event faded after the event. Emotion in comparison positive memories for non-typhoon events did not fade, and emotion in comparison negative memories faded, following results in several other FAB studies. The Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) was used as an initial assessment of mood before the study began, and PANAS scores reliably predicted current emotional intensity scores. Memory vividness and emotional intensity in first-hand accounts of a natural disaster experience behave like vividness and intensity in flashbulb memories, but details in first-hand accounts are similar to the amount of details in memories of near-death experiences. How memory rehearsal behaves in relation to time elapsed since event has yet to be captured for first-hand survival experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 from Filipinos. Memories were coded as violent/nonviolent and resolved/unresolved, and we predicted that resolved memories should show greater fading and that affective details should be lower in those memory accounts. FAB analyses revealed that negative affective intensity faded while positive affect remained constant, supporting FAB for positive and negative memories. However, there was no evidence of FAB in Filipinos' death memories. Filipinos' positive memories were distributed from the period of the reminiscence bump and focused on themes of childbirth and marriage, while negative and death memories did not cluster at any period of life.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]