Recent evidence has suggested that people can be biased to endorse negative items as “old,” falsely claiming that they’ve studied negative items that in reality are novel ( Dougal & Rotello, 2007). In fact, there can be little correlation between people’s confidence in their memories and the consistency with which they remember event details ( Neisser & Harsch, 1992 Schmidt, 2004 Schmolck et al., 2000 Talarico & Rubin, 2003). Often individuals retain high confidence in the accuracy of the reported details despite recounting different details each time. In reality, however, people’s accounts of these details change over time: Someone initially may state that he learned of the Challenger explosion from a friend but six months later may note that he learned of the explosion from a television broadcast (e.g., Neisser & Harsch, 1992). If these details were retained accurately, then people should report exactly the same details at each retelling. Compelling evidence for inaccuracies within emotional memories has come from studies that measure the consistency with which people report details such as where they were, or what they were doing, when they learned that an event occurred. People vividly recall natural disasters ( Bahrick, Parker, Fivush, & Levett, 1998) or injuries that they experienced ( Peterson & Bell, 1996 Peterson & Whalen, 2001), and even years later, people can remember the context in which they learned about assassinations ( Christianson, 1989 Colgrove, 1889 Winograd & Killinger, 1983), terrorist attacks ( Budson et al., 2004 Budson et al., 2007 Paradis et al., 2004 Pezdek, 2003 Smith et al., 2003 Wolters & Goudsmit, 2005), space shuttle explosions ( Bohannon, 1988 Kensinger, Krendl, & Corkin, 2006 Neisser & Harsch, 1992), or the start of a war ( Bohn & Berntsen, 2007 Tekcan, 2001).ĭespite their subjective vividness, however, even emotional memories are subject to distortion. Many studies have replicated Brown and Kulik’s (1977) original finding. Though these memory reports could not be retrospectively checked for accuracy, people’s beliefs that the information was retained vividly and accurately gave rise to the proposal that emotional memories may differ from nonemotional ones in terms of the details retained. When they asked people, fourteen years after the assassination of J.F.K., to report details such as where they were when they learned of the assassination, how they learned the news, what they were doing at the time, and how the news impacted them, nearly everyone recalled these details confidently. ![]() These authors argued that when a highly surprising event occurs, a special memory mechanism takes over, causing the moment to be recorded with picture-perfect accuracy. This belief in the durability of emotional memories – a term that is often used as short-hand to denote memories for events that elicited an emotional response at the time of their occurrence – is closely related to the concept of a “flashbulb memory,” a phrase coined by Brown and Kulik (1977). William James wrote that “some events are so emotional as to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues” ( James, 1890/1998), capturing this intuition that although memory is not always perfect, sometimes a memory can accurately preserve a moment in time. However, many of us nevertheless share the intuition that there are some moments in our lives that have been indelibly preserved: perhaps a wedding day, or the day a baby was brought home from the hospital. Many marital squabbles arise due to inconsistencies in how a past event is remembered, and nearly everyone has, at one time or another, struggled to remember when they were last in a particular location or why the person across the room looks familiar. ![]() Though we are not always aware of our memories’ errors, most of us would not be surprised to learn that memory is not perfect. We remember some pieces of an event but forget others, and the event details we recall often are shaped by our current mindset and molded by thoughts and experiences that have occurred between the original event and the moment of remembering. Even when we retain memories of past events, they never are exact reproductions of those initial experiences. We are left with durable and lasting traces of many events and yet we can forget other events just moments after their occurrence. ![]() “There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”Īs captured in this quotation from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, memory is both resolute and fragile.
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