Painting with broad strokes: Happiness and the malleability of event memory

Individuals often feel that they remember positive events better than negative ones, but do they? To investigate the relation between emotional valence and the malleability of memory for real‐world events, we assessed participants' emotions and memories concerning the televised announcement of the verdict in the murder trial of O. J. Simpson. Memory was assessed for actual events and plausible foils. Participants who were happy about the verdict reported recalling events with greater clarity after two months, and recognised more events after a year, than participants whose reaction to the verdict was negative, irrespective of whether the events had occurred or not. Signal detection analyses confirmed that the threshold for judging events as having occurred was lower for participants who were happy about the verdict. These findings demonstrate that the association between happiness and reconstructive memory errors, previously shown in laboratory studies, extends to memory for real‐world events and over prolonged time periods.