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You may have heard that emotion "supercharges" memory, and you may actually have some pretty powerful emotional memories of your own. But what you likely don't know is the fine-print about the relationship between emotion and memory processing. The Psychological Science fine-print goes something like this: Emotion narrows our focus and heightens the amount of attention we put on visual cues. This enables the creation of a vivid visual image that lingers in our mind's eye. BUT -- that image and all else that comes with it is no more, nor less, accurate than other memories. That is, all personal memories are subject to distortion, fading, and suggestion. Each time we tell the story of past lived experience to others we change it a bit in the re-telling. What makes memories long lasting is the visual detail and the integration with other aspects of our knowledge (see exhibits A & B below), but even then, we can't guarantee the absolute accuracy of any personal story.
Exhibit A
Exhibit A
Responses from people who have learned the truth:
"That explains why the same story told by multiple people tends to have key differences"-anonymous
In a longitudinal study centered on the 9/11 attacks it was found that there was a decreasing number of consistent details and an increasing number of inconsistent details about what they were doing and where they were on that day (Talarico & Rubin, 2003).
20 out of 45 participants claimed to have seen a documentary, that did not exist, about Princess Diana’s death containing paparazzi videos of the event (Goldstein, 2020)
The descriptive words used for an event can change the response given based on the perceived extremeness of the word (Goldstein, 2020).
Exhibit B
Exhibit B
It is a common misconception that survival-related or emotional events cause our brains to record experiences with greater accuracy.
While memories that are formed in these situations seem vivid, and while in a 2010 study conducted by Otgaars & Smeets it was demonstrated that memories that were formed while participants were asked to image being in a survival situation were more easily recalled compared to a control, there's more to the story than "survival" and mysterious survival mechanisms.
That is this -- The study results also revealed that participant's recall was more susceptible to inaccuracy. Indeed, it turns out that the hypothetical survival scenario was just inviting participants to think more deeply and personally about the material. It wasn't "survival" that mattered, rather it was deep encoding and spreading activation that caused the results.
In other words, those flashbulb memories that happen when we have an emotional experience may seem vivid and memorable, they aren't especially accurate -- they are also prone to the misinformation effect and other kinds of suggestibility, just like other memories.
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