It must be said that I recognize the irony here, but the term I’m looking for is a term for a certain kind of cognitive bias where we recall negative events more easily than we recall positive events.
I’m fairly certain this term exists and that I knew it at one time, but now it eludes me. I’ve googled for hours and turned up nothing. I’m hoping that, should the Teeming Millions know of this term, the frustration of my search will put a sufficiently negative frame of reference on this term that I will never forget it.
No, Confirmation Bias is where we remember stuff that fits our own preconceptions better than we remember that which does not. Not quite the same thing. I’m looking for a general tendency to latch onto negative stuff more thoroghly than we latch onto positive stuff, regardless of any preconceptions and/or regardless of whether we have preconceptions in the first place (is “in the first place” redundant when describing preconceptions?).
And as for that Kensinger study, it came up all over the place in my googling, and while it references the idea that I’m trying to nail down to a single term, it never provides the term itself. I even went off on a google tangent and tried to dig up her research or any more thorough papers she may have written, but I still missed the term.
I resorted to emailing her, but that research is 4 years old and I know I don’t have the same professional email today that I had 4 years ago; only time may tell if she does.
Meanwhile, I have turned to Uncle Cecil and his dedicated fans to see if they can provide the answer before (if ever) I get one from Ms. Kensinger.
It strikes me, however, that if the findings reported in chiroptera’s link are at all new and interesting (as the report seems to imply), then this is not a particularly well known phenomenon, and thus probably does not have a established name (although, perhaps, Dr Kensinger may have invented one for it).