Flashbulb Memories
long-lasting vivid memories of highly- important & dramatic events - R Brown & J Kulik 1977
Kennedy assassinations
Elvis Presley death
John Lennon shooting
Challenger explosion
Mrs Thatcher's resignation
Princess Diana death
George Harrison death
Twin Towers attack
127 of 179 could remember what doing when Abraham Lincoln assassinated - Coleford 1899
Oklahoma bombing eyewitness - "engraved on his memory" - L Cahill & J L McGaugh 1998
happy events also - eg: first romance, high school graduation, weddings, births of children, etc
'flashbulbs' no different to ordinary memories - Rubin & Kozin 1984
by-passing of STM rehearsal mechanisms?
support for distinctiveness & meaning
qualitatively different - special neural mechanism? - R Brown & J Kulik
repeated frequently in discussion with others? - Neisser 1981
hormones create arousal and remembering of experience as adaptive behaviour - L Cahill & J L McGaugh 1998
Challenger interviewees' reinterviewed 9 months later and recall not so accurate - M McCloskey, C G Wible & N J Cohen 1988
92% still accurate
similar studies similar results - 3 year Retention Interval - Neisser & Harsch 1992 - 78% few days after to 58% 7-8 months - Bohannon 1988
Conway's Mrs Thatcher research - M Conway, S J Anderson, S F Larsen, C M Donnelly, M A McDaniel, A G R McClelland & R E Rawles 1994
more black Americans had flashbulbs of Martin Luther King's assassination than whites - J Kulik & R Brown 1982
for ethical reasons, research tends to be on public rather than personal events
Repression
Freudian Ego-Defence Mechanism
forget anxiety-inducing events
'Motivated Forgetting' - Bernard Weiner & Henry Reed 1969
easier to recall neutral than emotionally-charged words - G Levinger & J Clark 1961
longer exposure time needed to recognise threatening words like 'raped' and 'penis' - Elliot McGinnies 1949
hostile fathers -> more repressed childhood memories - Lynn Myers & Chris Brewin 1994
129 young women hospital treatment for sexual abuse - 17 years later 38 percent no recollection of abuse - 16 percent unable to recall at one time - Linda Meyer Williams 1994
28% of group of female incest victims had severe memory deficits from childhood - most frequently those who had suffered violent abuse - Judith Herman & Emily Schatzow 1987
20 years later Eileen remembered her father sexually abusing and then killing her friend Susan - Philip Zimbardo, Mark McDermott, Jeroen Janz & Nico Metaal 1995
'Irene' unable to recall watching her mother die - I M I Hunter 1957
depressive symptoms relieved by remembering - Anthony Bateman & Jeremy Holmes 1995
Joseph Boden & Roy Baumeister 1997
used repressive coping questionnaire devised by D A Weinberger, G E Schwartz & R J Davidson1990
repressors less able to recall details of emotional events than non-repressors
pleasant events recalled better than unpleasant ones- W R Walker, R J Vogel & C P Thompson 1997
substantial number of criminals don't remember their crime - Alan Parkin 1993
how to prove?
brain scans identify repressing activity - Richard Kanaan, Tom Craig, Simon Wesseley & Anthony David 2007
ethical issues in testing for
World War II veterans couldn't remember battlefield trauma - Bertam Karon & Anmarie Widener 1977
role in compensating for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? - Hannah Kaminer & Peretz Lavie 1991
D S Holmes 1990
reviewed 60 years of experimental tests on repression
no evidence to unequivocally support existence of repression
lab experiments don't induce levels of anxiety Freud meant
False Memory Syndrome
'recovered memories' of abuse suggested by therapist
eg: Beth Rutherford
therapist enquired about abuse
Beth then read about abuse
Beth's dreams analysed as being about real abuse
medical examination: Beth a virgin
child's memory of gun attack proved false - Robert Pynoos & Kathleen Nader 1989
children led to create false memories - Michelle Leichtman & Stephen Ceci 1995
detailed accounts likely to be accurate - Chris Brewin, Bernice Andrews & Ian Gotlib 1993
important to be cautious - Alan Baddeley 1999
courts deciding against therapists? - K Patel 1994