Negative and Positive Emotions

"It is often said that we are our memories-that web of experiences, relationships, thoughts, and feelings that make us who we are" (CBS, 2010). It is in the human nature to reconstruct events of past life. Some events are kept in our memories and we can remember very well, while others are difficult to remember. However, even those memories that are difficult to remember are not completely erased from our mind. Only the intersection between our consciousness and that memory is erased.

People, as human beings, are faced with various situations during their life, situations that might be remembered as good or bad. Memories might come to our life silently toward our understanding of self or during social conversation toward other peoples. One the one hand, when people choose to recall their autobiographical memories silently, they tend to focus more on positive events rather than negative events. Also, when people choose to recall their autobiographical memories for the purpose of social communication, they tend to focus more on positive events rather than negative events. In this context, people are more likely to rehearse positive events rather than negative events. On the other hand, there is a contradiction that people rehearse negative events when they try to understand an event in the past. According to DiPaula and Campbell (2002), "people think about life events that puzzle them or that represent life failures" (as cited in Gibbons, Ritchie, Vogl, Skowronski & Walker, 2009, p.762). This type of rehearsal happens more often to the individuals who are depressed. Also, people are more likely to recall their negative events when rehearsal occurs involuntary. This is related with the "environment stimuli" that triggers the recollection of negative events. For instance, a person might hear a song that brings about a childhood memory. Similarly, this type of rehearsal is more often on the individuals who are depressed. In this context, people who are depressed may experience more negative rehearsal, than people who are not depressed.

According to Gibbons et al. (2009), the recall of positive or negative life events depends on the way the rehearsal happens. The first way that people rehearse their memories is silent. It makes sense that people want to remember the good feeling and forget the bad feeling, and this is true for the rehearsal to maintain memory. For example, a woman might rehearse her wedding memories with the purpose to reserve the pleasant feelings at a later date. Likewise, a prisoner might rehearse memories of a cruel police behavior in order to provide a motive for payback in a near future. This example is classified for the people who have experienced trauma. The recall of memories produces emotional response similar to the initial event. Buchanan ( 2007 ) suggests that " neural mechanism may act to recapitulate an emotional state early in the retrieval process and