Characteristics associated with real and made-up events: The effects of event valence, event elaboration, and individual differences.

In three studies, participants rated both real and made-up personal events on several different characteristics. These included meta-cognitive beliefs about the perceived realness and typicality of these events, imagery ratings of visual detail, and emotional ratings of intensity and feelings. Studies 1 and 2 explored the impact of event valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) on these characteristics, whereas Study 3 focused on the effects of event elaboration involving guided imagery and journaling techniques. All three studies also included consideration of individual difference factors that might either enhance or attenuate the ratings that were obtained. Both Studies 1 and 2 found that pleasant events (be they real or made-up), were viewed as more typical, and more likely to have happened and be true, than unpleasant events. This pattern of meta-cognitive judgments provided support for a general positivity hypothesis, which proposes that most individuals orient towards and emphasize pleasant rather than unpleasant life experience and events. In contrast, the imagery-related components of these events, such as visual details, location, and time, were much less sensitive to the manipulation of event valence. Strong imagery-related effects, however, were noted when events were elaborated in the final study. Furthermore, this event elaboration manipulation also resulted in heightened meta-cognitive judgments of typicality, likelihood of the event having happened, and of being true. Finally, across all three studies, a series of correlational analyses indicated that the individual difference factors did not have any systematic effect on any of the event characteristic ratings. However, when event valence was not specifically manipulated (in Study 3), depressed individuals spontaneously provided twice as many unpleasant personal events as nondepressed individuals. These findings were then discussed in terms of source-confusion issues regarding personal memory accuracy, as well as the further extension of a recent model of autobiographical memory to incorporate event properties such as valence and elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)