#hpa-axis

Thinking about the "good old times" elicits positive feelings and can enhance individual wellbeing. New research suggests that reminiscing about the positive past may be adaptive for humans, as it may help us cope with everyday stressors. Ever found yourself daydreaming about vacation while you're at school/work? If so, you catch my drift.

To empirically assess this, Delgado and colleagues studied whether memories of the happy past could actually blunt the effects of an acute stressor by dampening the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response (i.e., cortisol levels). To test this, 96 healthy participants described and gave subjective emotion ratings for specific episodic memories of positive (e.g., family vacation) and neutral (e.g., commuting to work) content. Three days later, they were either exposed to an acute stressor (i.e., socially evaluative cold pressor task) or performed a non-stressful control task. Afterwards, they were asked to retrieve a subset of the same episodic memories triggered by visual word cues (e.g., family vacation). Salivary cortisol samples were used to measure cortisol level changes over time. 

The authors found that participants who recalled happy memories  rated their memories with greater positive affect and stronger emotional intensity than participants who recalled neutral memories. The authors also found a  negative correlation between subjective ratings of positive emotion experienced during autobiographical recall and cortisol response, meaning that this group exhibited a sharper decrease in cortisol levels 20 minutes after the stressor compared to the stress group that only thought about neutral memories. Moreover, the authors' state:

Interestingly, individuals who experienced greater positive affect during recall were also individuals who reported higher levels of resiliency, highlighting how something naturally-occurring like recalling the past may be a potentially advantageous strategy for buffering negative affect in some individuals. Our findings support the idea that positive autobiographical memories may serve an adaptive function of regulating emotion and reinforcing positive wellbeing

This just leaves me wondering what the authors would have found if they had included a group that recalled negative memories…. 

Anyhow, there you go, stay positive people!

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