2024

Taskinen, Jarmo; Lamberg, Juha-Antti; Sihvonen, Antti; Tikkanen, Henrikki

Emotions can profoundly influence how people recall the past. Our study examines the role of a particular negative emotion, anger, in retelling the past of a merger and its aftermath between two notable Finnish media companies. Our data consists of oral history accounts from person involved in the merger which were collected during three different times during and after the merger. We used a grounded theory approach to analyze how anger manifests in retelling the past and how anger develops over time. Our findings show that anger strongly influences how informants narrate past events and it takes on three primary forms in the oral accounts. These different forms of anger focus on narrating history against a threat in the present, narrating history as a revelation of resentment, and narrating history through contemplation of past conflicts. Over time, temporal distance raises the importance of emotion as retrospective memories become narrower and angrier over time. Different forms of anger and their influence on history production enable us to question the veracity of truth claims made in oral history accounts and to understand why the memories regarding the same events can vary substantially from person to person.