Memories for the emotions that you and others experienced during COVID-19 lockdown

ABSTRACT

People's memory for emotion is often biased by their beliefs of what they should have felt. This bias may be stronger when people estimate the emotions of others. We hypothesised that people might remember a lockdown as worse than it really was for them, and, especially if their own was not too bad, they might believe that others had a worse experience. We investigated people's memories of their own emotions experienced during a national COVID-19 lockdown and the emotions they estimated others were feeling. Two hundred and thirty-four participants from Aotearoa New Zealand each completed two matched questionnaires, one during a lockdown and one after the lockdown had ended. The questionnaires asked them to rate eight different emotions, some positive and some negative, and their life satisfaction. They also rated the government's current performance on managing COVID-19 at both time points. Participants had a relatively good memory for their emotions but, as predicted, they tended to recall the lockdown experience as more negative than they had originally experienced it. They also estimated the experiences of others to be more negative than their own. These results agree with our predictions and suggest that we should be cautious about accepting people's memories of how they actually felt during disasters as accurate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)