Recent research published in applied cognitive psychology This suggests that negative emotions associated with everyday memories fade faster than those associated with sexual experiences. The findings provide evidence that while the human brain tends to soften the impact of bad memories over time as a healthy coping mechanism, this fading of emotions occurs more slowly in the case of emotionally charged, intimate encounters.
Scientists wanted to better understand the psychological phenomenon known as fading affective bias (FAB). This concept explains how unpleasant emotions associated with past events tend to fade from memory faster than pleasant emotions.
Jeffrey A. Gibbons, professor of psychology at Christopher Newport University, wanted to expand on previous research examining this concept. He and his team designed a study to investigate how attachment and sexual behavior influence this natural coping mechanism.
“The first studies published in 2021 on this topic were driven by an interest in determining whether FAB (faster decay of unpleasant emotions than pleasant emotions) is associated with sexual behavior,” Gibbons said. “We found that FAB was higher when participants with high partner ratings described both sexual and nonsexual events, but especially when participants with high partner ratings described sexual events.”
Past studies have compared relationship events to non-relationship events, and romantic sexual experiences to romantic non-sexual experiences. However, previous research has not directly compared sexual events to non-sexual, non-romantic events.
“That study compared FAB for romantic and non-romantic events, and just as Zengel and colleagues examined FAB for sexual and romantic and non-sexual romantic events, we compared FAB for sexual and romantic events and non-sexual, non-romantic events,” Gibbons said. “We were filling a gap in the literature.”
Researchers used an online survey platform to recruit 272 participants between the ages of 18 and 30. The sample was primarily female, Caucasian, and heterosexual. Participants completed a series of psychological questionnaires before detailing their memories.
These studies measured a wide range of personal characteristics, including neuroticism, which refers to the tendency to experience negative emotions such as worry and anger. Participants also reported their current levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.
Other studies assessed self-esteem, relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and potential indicators of compulsive sexual behavior. The researchers also measured participants’ feelings of attachment to their mothers, fathers, and close friends. They utilized a positive affect schedule and a negative affect schedule to assess participants’ current emotional state.
The researchers then asked each participant to recall and describe eight specific events from the past three months. These include two pleasurable sexual incidents, two unpleasant sexual incidents, two pleasurable non-sexual incidents, and two unpleasant non-sexual incidents.
Non-sexual events were decidedly unromantic. For each of the eight memories, participants rated how they felt at the exact time the event occurred on a specific scale. They then rated how they currently felt about the event at the time of the survey.
The scale ranged from minus 3, which was very uncomfortable, to plus 3, which was very comfortable. By comparing these two numbers, the researchers were able to calculate exactly how much emotion had diminished over the past three months. Participants also stated how often they rehearsed these memories.
Rehearsing here means actively thinking about the event and talking about it with others. Participants rated their rehearsal frequency on a scale of 0 to 6.
Scientists have discovered that a strong fading effect bias exists throughout memory. This means that negative emotions generally fade much faster than positive ones. The exact type of event played an important role in the results.
“The general public should know that participants in our study were better emotionally regulated (i.e., had higher FAB) during non-sexual, non-romantic events than during sexual, romantic events,” Gibbons told PsyPost. This finding suggests that emotions tied to sexual experiences tend to linger longer and are more difficult to dissipate than everyday events.
The authors also considered how various personality and lifestyle factors predicted the strength of emotional decline. Healthy adaptive traits reliably predicted fading bias. Participants with higher self-esteem and higher emotional intelligence were more likely to let go of negative emotions.
Dr. Gibbons explained, “While strong gratitude for a romantic partner leads to just as healthy emotional regulation (i.e., high FAB) as a strong bond with a close friend, mother, or gratitude toward oneself, a lack of gratitude toward a romantic partner and a lack of bonding with a close friend, mother, or gratitude toward oneself are associated with very poor emotional regulation.” Participants with these positive traits retained positive emotions more effectively.
The study also revealed a complex interplay between sexual dependence and sexual satisfaction. The bias was surprisingly large when participants reported high sexual dependence but low sexual satisfaction.
“One of the surprising results is that people exhibit high FAB (good emotional control) when they’re hooked on sex, but they’re not sexually satisfied,” Gibbons said. “We suggested that this result may be because participants know that they should not enjoy sex if they are driven to consider or engage in advanced sex that is beyond their control.”
The researchers also looked at how thinking and talking about memories influences the process of emotional fading. They found that mental rehearsal, or simply thinking about the event personally, is the main reason why biases fade. Telling others about the event did not have the same mediating effect.
Scientists suggest that this may occur because sex is a private and intimate topic. People often feel uncomfortable sharing their sexual experiences socially with friends and family. As a result, personal processing of these memories becomes the primary way individuals cope with associated emotions.
The researchers noted several limitations to the study design. Because the experiment was conducted online, participants were able to select nonapplicable responses to some relationship questions, resulting in some data being lost. The demographics of the sample were also limited, as nearly 70 percent of participants were women.
Additionally, the study’s unique design made it difficult to directly compare it to previous studies. The researchers hope to address these issues in the future.
“To fill a gap in the literature, we did not replicate the previous procedure. This was a limitation because we did not have a basis for accurate comparison,” Gibbons said. “However, this study has many interesting results that can be examined using a diary study rather than a retrospective study, which is also a limitation.”
In the future, researchers hope to track how people process emotional events when they occur. Doing so provides evidence of how these emotions naturally unfold.
“As with most of our retrospective studies, in the future we plan to replicate the current study using longitudinal diary procedures to potentially discover whether FAB precedes (and perhaps can lead to) positive cognitions about partners, close friends, or oneself, or whether these positive cognitions precede (and perhaps can lead to) FAB,” Gibbons said. This type of continuous tracking may reveal the direct causes and effects of these emotional processes.
To achieve this, you may need to change the experimental setup from a virtual to a physical setup. Doing so may improve participant retention.
“Longitudinal diary studies have not had great success when conducted online, as a high proportion of participants do not complete the entire study, so such diary studies will probably need to be conducted in person,” Gibbons added. “We have plans to study FAB across many different contexts that have not been investigated before.”
The study, “The relationship between sexual activity and fading emotional bias across sexual and nonsexual events,” was authored by Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Brenna McManus, Ella White, Zach Arum, John Tucker, and Emily Pappalardo.
