Happy Memories Are Even Happier if They Involve People

Source: iStock image licensed to Art Markman

An easy way to make yourself feel better when you’re sad or stressed is to think back to happier times. Recalling a day spent hiking the woods alone can give you a sense of inner peace. Recalling a football game you attended in college with a group of classmates may give you a sense of positive nostalgia. Thinking about a birthday party with close family can make you feel the warmth of connection to loved ones.

All positive memories aren’t the same, though. An interesting paper by Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado in the April, 2020 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General looks specifically at the degree of social connection embedded in a memory.

The examples I cited to start this post differ in their social content. The walk in the woods has no connection to other people. The football game involves a group of people, but not necessarily close social connections. The birthday party involves the people nearest and dearest to you.

The research by Speer and Delgado suggests that the degree of social connection in the memory influences its value to you above and beyond the positivity of the experience you remembered.

In one study, participants were given a series of cues to help them remember life experiences. The participants rated how positive the event was that they recalled, the intensity of the memory, and also whether the memory involved no other people, acquaintances, or close social connections.

Later, participants performed two tasks with the memories they identified. First, they were shown two of the cues to retrieve memories earlier. They were asked which they preferred to spend time reminiscing about. Then, participants were actually given time to think about the memory they chose. The cues were selected so that the memories people recalled were equally positive, but differed in their social content. In this task, there was a slight (but statistically significant) tendency for people to choose to recall memories involving close significant others rather than memories involving no other people or acquaintances.

In a second task, participants were shown the cues again and for each cue, they were asked how much they would be willing to pay (up to a maximum of $1,000) to relive the experience they remembered. This measure of willingness to pay has been used in many studies as a measure of how much people like things. Unsurprisingly, people were willing to pay more for more positive memories than for less positive ones. Once this effect of positivity was taken out, though, there was still a willingness to pay significantly more to relive memories involving close significant others than to relive memories involving only distantly-related people or those involving no other people.

Another study in this series took place over two days. On one day, participants were given a lot of cues to memories so that the researchers could identify at least 24 positive memories people had. Then, on a second day (2-4 days after the first session), participants were given a stressful task involving holding their arm in very cold water under the supervision of someone dressed as a lab technician. This task is known to cause stress for participants and to lead to an increase in the stress hormone cortisol.

After this stress induction, participants recalled 24 of the positive memories from the day before. Participants had their cortisol levels measured several times during the task by using a mouth swab to collect saliva.

Overall participants did not differ in their average baseline level of cortisol. In addition, the increase in cortisol in participants immediately after the stress task was similar in all participants, suggesting that participants had a similar reaction to this manipulation. The level of cortisol after the memory retrieval task was affected both by the overall positivity of the memories people retrieved as well as the amount of social interaction in those memories. That is, recalling positive memories decreased cortisol (which suggests a decrease in physiological stress overall) and recalling positive memories that involved close significant others decreased cortisol even more.

These results suggest that social connection is good for people not only in the moment, but also when people look back on their lives. Feeling satisfied with your life involves having happy experiences you can recall and also having positive experiences that make you feel connected to the people to whom you are closest.