Memories of the seemingly mundane bring us joy: study

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Thanks in part to social media and the internet, life’s exciting moments are more documented than ever before, but researchers at Harvard Business School say documenting the ordinary can make it extraordinary down the road.

New research says memories of moments that might have seemed boring at the time can bring us joy down the road. ©Kostenko Maxim/shutterstock.com/ -AFP/ Relaxnews

Inspired by past research indicating it’s difficult to predict how we’ll feel about something down the road, psychological scientist and lead researcher Ting Zhang of Harvard Business School asked 135 undergraduate students to create time capsules at the beginning of summer in which they wrote about their lives at the moment.

Content included but was not limited to the last social event they’d attended, recent conversations with friends, songs they were currently listening to and an excerpt from a final paper they had written for class.

Researchers then asked participants to predict how they would feel about each aspect of their time capsule upon opening it three months later, when they would be asked to re-rate the memories.

Zhang and his colleagues found the students greatly underestimated how meaningful they would find the time capsules and these findings repeated themselves in a second study, conducted online.

Here, participants undervalued remembering a routine experience with their significant other, although they accurately estimated how meaningful they would find the memories of a special occasion such as Valentine’s Day.

The third and final experiment revealed that when given the option to write about a recent conversation or watch a video of a talk-show interview, just 27 percent of participants prioritized the conversation.

In a month’s time participants were asked whether they would rather remember the conversation or the talk-show interview and 58 percent chose the conversation.

Here, they had been overly optimistic, assuming they would remember more of the conversation than they could recall one month later. Curiously, such overestimations of the scope of their memory reflected a tendency to underestimate how interesting the conversation would be to them in one month’s time.

On the flipside, participants pointed out that it doesn’t take much to evoke the feelings and circumstances of documented experiences, be they banal or life-changing.

“People find a lot of joy in rediscovering a music playlist from months ago or an old joke with a neighbor, even though those things did not seem particularly meaningful in the moment,” says Zhang. “The studies highlight the importance of not taking the present for granted and documenting the mundane moments of daily life to give our future selves the joy of rediscovering them.”

Seeming to refer to heavy social media use, researchers point out that some acts of documentation such as excessive photo taking at inconvenient moments can detract from the joy of the moment and degrade the overall experience.

Zhang says more research is necessary to determine the fine line between documentation for the future and enjoying the moment.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science. -AFP/ Relaxnews