What’s often not taken into account in these situations, is that personal photos are often taken during good moments: holidays, parties, and vacations. They may have been more fun, or care free, or simply just easier, but regardless, they always seem “better.” Whether you’re scrolling through old college photos on your phone, or with a grandparent flipping through a photo album, the experience of reminiscence through the photographs can instil a sense that things were better back then. Acknowledging these tendencies can put a brake on an excessive rose-tinted perspective. This doesn’t mean that those cartoons that were out of taste didn’t exist back then however. Additionally, while today I can easily point to examples of movies I think are poor, it would be more difficult to do the same for several years ago as I’m less likely to have vivid memories of cartoons that I didn’t care about. It might not be the case that cartoons aren’t as great today as they were in the past, but rather my recollection of the cartoons of the past coincides with fond childhood experiences of watching those films. For example, before standing by the opinion that “they simply don’t make cartoons like they used to,” perhaps I should consider such a claim in light of the cognitive processes highlighted here. It is always helpful to question and challenge one’s own opinions and evaluations. Though it can be very challenging to counter a sense of feeling that something is true, debiasing rosy retrospection requires a certain aspect of conscious deliberation. 7 This means that when you evaluate the past, positive events relative to negative ones are disproportionately more accessible than when you evaluate the present. 6 When reflecting on the past, people may not necessarily rely on a recollection of exact events and circumstances of the past per se, but of how one felt during that time, which can be a vivid recollection of optimism and hormonal adulthood.Īside from age, research has suggested that negative autobiographical memories-the memory system consisting of past experiences that create a personal life narrative-are more complex and decay over time relative to positive ones. 5 Younger people also tend to be more optimistic of the future. Known as the reminiscence bump, the most vivid long-term memories are often sourced from the ages between 10-30, with a concentration of memories of personal events occurring during one’s 20’s, 3 when many of life’s significant moments occur.Ī cognitive account of the reminiscence bump points to greater levels of hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which are activated to a greater extent in younger individuals, 4 and play a critical role in episodic memory formation. One reason that older adults have a more rosy picture of the past, which for them is young adulthood, may be because those time periods coincide with more emotionally salient memories. Rosy retrospection is a product of how our brains process memory over time.

Retrospect synonyms