Emotional memories
Familiarity
- biases recognition - some of you know blues with guessing - minors and people with reduced intellectual abilities are more prone to being confused - people with frontal lobe damage are subject to confabulation
memory and emotion
- one crucial area for processing emotion is the amygdala (the "almond") - responds to a lot of stimuli... let's call them "stressful" - it is connected to the hippocampus and involved in memory as well
Cahill et al (2003)
- show participants emotional and neutral pictures - had participants immerse arms in cold (stress) and warm (no stress) water - after stress, memory for emotional pictures was improved
Flashbulb memories
- vivid memories of incredibly emotional events - termed coined in brown & kulick's 1977 study of Kennedy assignation - participants report very vivid detail - author likened to "taking a picture" Suggest different memory system
Jacoby's experiment, in which participants made judgments about whether they had previously seen the names of famous and non-famous people, found that inaccurate memories based on source misattributions occurred after a delay of...
24 hours (one day)
remember/know procedure
A procedure used on recognition memory tests to separate the influences of familiarity and recollection on recognition performance. For each test item, participants report whether it is recognized because the person can recollect contextual details of seeing the item (classified as a "remember" response) or because the item seems familiar, in the absence of specific recollections (classified as "know" response).
Talarico and Rubin (2003)
Compared people's memories of 9/11 and of a normal event and found that the memory accuracy didn't differ, but that the participants were more confident about the 9/11 memory. Conclusion: suggests that flashbulb memories aren't more accurate than normal ones, but maybe that they seem more accurate because of the excessive rehearsal and close connection.
Rimmele et al. (2011)
Effects of emotions on memory - showed 30 emotional pictures and 30 neutral pictures to 25 subjects (picture had color border) - participants asked to indicate remember/know in mix of new and old pictures — when they recognized the picture, also asked to indicate whether they remembered the frame color — when they claimed they remembered the frame, ask to pick one out of four Result: negative image is remember more! But can remember border of the neutral photo better
Weigand et al 2013
Gave oxytocin to 80 participants before showing pictures - oxy modulate amgydala -Oxy produces better memory for fearful pictures only
Neisser and Harsch (1992)
Tested theory of flashbulb memory. Participants had to write a description of how they heard a certain shocking event, and answer questions about where they were. What they were doing, their feelings, etc. answered less than 24 hours after disaster, then asked 2 1/2 years later. Many could not remember most of the things they remembered 24 hours after. Challenged flashbulb memory theory, although no sure way to measure levels of emotional arousal of each individual. - results: — up to 40% of participants gave remarkably different responses to the same questions
memory and emotion
The structures of the limbic system play an important role in ________ and ________.
For most adults over age 40, the reminiscence bump describes enhanced memory for
adolescence and young adulthood
Summary
emotions gives false confidence
Jacoby et al. (1989)
some non-famous names were familiar, and the participants misattributed the source of the familiarity failed to identify the source as the list that had been read the previous day Becoming famous overnight - presented three groups of 12 subjects a list of random names - after delay, gave participants a second list of names and asked participants to identify famous ones — group 1: no delay between lost, no overall between list — group 2: no delay between lists, some non famous names appeared in list 2 — group 3: 24 hr delay between list. Some non-famous names appear in list 2
