The Role of Photographs and Time Lag on Positivity Ratings of Vacation and Weekend Memories

Two studies examined the question of whether photograph taking of an event influences the positivity of the evaluations of the event at a later point in time. Memories of photographed events yielded higher positivity ratings than memories that were not photographed. Although we expected fading of positivity ratings to occur more slowly over a period of two months for memories of photographed events, we found faster affect fading for those memories in Study 2 instead. The findings of the two studies support the idea that taking photographs of events sustains the affective reconstruction of autobiographical memories, regardless of whether these events are special, such as vacation memories, or more mundane, such as memories of the past weekend.