Negative emotions tied to sexual experiences take longer to fade than everyday memories

A recent study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that negative emotions linked to everyday memories fade faster than those tied to sexual experiences. The findings provide evidence that while the human brain tends to soften the blow of bad memories over time as a healthy coping mechanism, this emotional fading happens more slowly for emotionally charged intimate encounters.

Scientists wanted to better understand a psychological phenomenon known as the Fading Affect Bias or FAB. This concept describes the way unpleasant emotions tied to past events tend to fade from our memory more quickly than pleasant emotions.

Jeffrey A. Gibbons, a psychology professor at Christopher Newport University, wanted to expand upon previous research examining this concept. He and his team designed a study to investigate how attachment and sexual behavior influence this natural coping mechanism.

“The original study published in 2021 on this topic was driven by an interest in determining if the FAB (faster fading of unpleasant than pleasant fading affect) was related to sexual behavior,” Gibbons said. “We found that the FAB was high when participants with high partner-esteem were describing both sexual and non-sexual events, but it was particularly high when these high partner-esteem participants described sexual events.”

Past research compared relationship events to non-relationship events, or compared romantic sexual experiences to romantic non-sexual experiences. However, previous studies never directly compared sexual events to non-sexual, non-romantic events.

“As that study compared the FAB across romantic relationship events and non-romantic relationship events, and Zengel and colleagues examined the FAB across sexual romantic and non-sexual, romantic relationship events, we compared the FAB across sexual, romantic relationship events and non-sexual, non-romantic events,” Gibbons said. “We were filling a gap in the literature.”

The researchers recruited 272 participants between the ages of 18 and 30 using an online survey platform. The sample was predominantly female, Caucasian, and heterosexual. Before providing details about their memories, participants answered a series of psychological questionnaires.

These surveys measured a wide range of personal characteristics, including neuroticism, which refers to a tendency to experience negative emotions like worry or anger. Participants also reported on their current levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.

Other surveys assessed their self-esteem, relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and potential indicators of compulsive sexual behaviors. The researchers also measured the participants’ sense of attachment to their mothers, fathers, and close friends. They utilized the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule to evaluate the participants’ current emotional states.

Next, the researchers asked each participant to recall and describe eight specific events from the past three months. These included two pleasant sexual events, two unpleasant sexual events, two pleasant non-sexual events, and two unpleasant non-sexual events.

The non-sexual events were explicitly non-romantic. For each of the eight memories, participants rated how they felt at the exact time the event happened on a specific scale. They then rated how they currently felt about the event at the time of the survey.

The scale ranged from a negative three for very unpleasant to a positive three for very pleasant. By comparing these two numbers, the researchers could calculate exactly how much the emotion had faded over the past three months. Participants also indicated how often they rehearsed these memories.

Rehearsal in this context means actively thinking about the event or talking about it with others. Participants rated the frequency of their rehearsals on a scale ranging from zero to six.

The scientists found a strong fading affect bias across the memories. This means negative feelings generally faded much faster than positive ones. The exact type of event played a significant role in the results.

“The average person should know that the participants in our study emotionally regulated better (i.e., higher FAB) for non-sexual, non-romantic events than for sexual, romantic events,” Gibbons told PsyPost. This finding suggests that emotions tied to sexual experiences tend to linger longer and resist fading compared to everyday occurrences.

The authors also looked at how different personality and lifestyle factors predicted the strength of the emotional fading. Healthy adaptive characteristics positively predicted the fading bias. Participants with high self-esteem and strong emotional intelligence showed a stronger tendency to let go of negative emotions.

Gibbons explained that “strong appreciation of one’s romantic partner leads to the same healthy degree of emotion regulation (i.e., high FAB) as strong bonds to a close friend, one’s mother or an appreciation of one’s self, but the absence of romantic partner appreciation along with the lack of bonds to a close friend or one’s mother or self-appreciation relate to very poor emotion regulation.” The participants with these positive traits held onto positive emotions more effectively.

The study also revealed complex interactions between sexual addiction and sexual satisfaction. When participants reported high sexual addiction but low sexual satisfaction, the fading bias was surprisingly large.

“One surprising result is that people show a high FAB (good emotion regulation) when they are addicted to sex, but they are not sexually satisfied,” Gibbons said. “We suggested that this result may be due to participants knowing that they should not be enjoying sex when they are driven to think and engage in a high level of sex that is beyond their control.”

The researchers also looked at how thinking or talking about memories affected the emotional fading process. They found that mental rehearsal, or simply thinking about the events privately, was the primary driver of the fading bias. Talking about the events with others did not have the same mediation effect.

The scientists suggest this happens because sex is a private and intimate topic. People often feel uncomfortable sharing sexual experiences socially with friends or family. As a result, privately processing these memories becomes the main way individuals cope with the associated emotions.

The researchers noted a few limitations in their study design. Because the experiment took place online, participants had the option to select a non-applicable answer for several relationship questions, resulting in some lost data. The demographic makeup of the sample was also a limitation, as women made up nearly seventy percent of the participants.

Additionally, the unique design of the study made it difficult to match it directly against past works. Researchers hope to address these issues in the future.

“As we were filling a gap in the literature, we did not replicate previous procedures, which is a limitation because we had no basis for an exact comparison,” Gibbons said. “However, the current study provided many interesting results, which can be examined using diary studies, rather than a retrospective study, which is another limitation.”

Moving forward, the researchers hope to track how people process emotional events over time as they happen. Doing so would provide evidence of how these feelings naturally unfold.

“As with most of our retrospective studies, we plan to replicate the current study using a longitudinal diary procedure in the future to potentially discover if FAB precedes (and could possibly lead to) positive perceptions about one’s partner, close friend, or oneself or if these positive perceptions precede (and could lead to) the FAB,” Gibbons said. This type of ongoing tracking could clarify the direct cause and effect of these emotional processes.

To accomplish this, the experimental setup might need to change from a virtual setting to a physical one. Doing so would likely improve participant retention.

“We would likely need to run such a diary study in person because we have not had great success running longitudinal diary studies online, as participants have not completed the entire study at a high rate,” Gibbons added. “We do have plans to study the FAB across many different contexts, which have not been investigated previously.”

The study, “The Relation of Sexual Activity and Attachment to the Fading Affect Bias Across Sexual and Non-Sexual Events,” was authored by Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Brenna McManus, Ella White, Zach Alam, John Tucker, and Emily Pappalardo.