Knowledge Bank

Throughout our lives, we experience a constant stream of events. The emotions we feel as a result of each event is a product of multiple factors, including the context in which the event occurs, our predictions of the event, and individual differences, such as personality and time perspective biases. The relationships between these factors are numerous and multi-directional. For example, while context, prediction, and personality influence how we remember events, our memories of events in turn shape our personalities and future predictions. This cyclical relationship could indicate a role of memory in mood disorders, such as depression. For example, people high in the personality trait neuroticism may be predisposed to remember even neutral stimuli as being negatively valenced if the stimuli are situated in certain emotional contexts. They may also be more likely to make negative predictions and to have a past-negative time perspective, meaning they are biased to focus on the past in a negative manner. This could cause this population of people to be more susceptible to mood disorders since they are be stuck in a pessimistic feedback loop. Therefore, the interactions between context, prediction, and individual differences in the processing of emotional and neutral stimuli are an important area of investigation.