William Chopik

So whether that be like your dating relationship or your relationship with your friends, but then also what's going on in their professional lives as well.

So we found some linkages with all your relationships and then all your kind of professional and academic stress.

The relationships that kind of were most closely related to your memories were the current relationships with your parents.

So if that was going well, you tended to remember your past with them more fondly.

And then when you were kind of argumentative and fighting with them and having more stress and strain, that's when you remember things more harshly.

And maybe they weren't as emotionally available and maybe they weren't as nice as you initially thought.

So it kind of waxed and waned a little bit depending on how well your current relationships were going.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty good characterization of you don't think you had the best childhood, but then maybe a bunch of other stuff and positive things have happened in your life.

And that kind of compensates for the fact that you didn't have as great a childhood.

But we've done studies of...

older adults too.

So we have another study of people in their 70s and we asked them, and again, their childhoods were very far away.

So we asked them twice over a four-year period, how warm was your mom?

How warm was your dad?

How much did she teach you things?

How much did you interact with your parents?

And even when people were 70, their answers were changing.

So

I won't kind of mislead you.

They do stabilize a bit, and you get more consistent, and you kind of solidify what your life story was from the past.