Research Hit: We’re Bad at Remembering How Happy We Were

The good ‘ole days, eh! There is some evidence to suggest that we always view the past though rose-tinted glasses — feeling that the past was somehow better than the present. However, research just out has shown that that actually doesn’t seem to be the case.

Research by Alberto Prati, Claudia Senik for the Association of Psychological Science has shown that current feelings impact our view of the past. To do this they have assessed data from different longitudinal studies into how happy people feel over time. These include a German study over 10 years of 11’000+ participants, a British study over 12 years of 20’000+ participants, a French study of over 18’000 participants, and about 4’000 results from the USA over a period of 35 years.

Those are some pretty impressive study numbers and time spans!

What did they find?