Exceptional Memory - Emotional Memory

Emotional Memory

An emotional or flashbulb memory refers to the memory of a personal significant event with distinctly vivid and long-lasting detailed information. These events are usually shocking and with photographic quality. Brown and Kulik, who coined the term found that many highly emotional memories can be recalled with very accurate details, even when there is a delay after the event.

A Flashbulb memory is said to be less accurate and less permanent than photographic memories, but its forgetting curve is less affected by time in comparing to other types of memories. One important aspect of flashbulb memory is that it involves emotional arousal when the event is being remembered. Therefore, this kind of memory does not have to be accurate, and the accuracy usually decreases during the first 3 months and goes up again at about 12 months.

A study conducted by Sharot et al. (2006) showed that the rating of vividness of terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, by the participants is related to the physical location of the person when the event happened.

Finkenhauer et al. (1998) provided an outline of important criteria that can help form flashbulb memories:

1. The event needs to be novel.
2. The event has to be important to the person experiencing or witnessing or hearing about it, and it has to have a significant effect on the person.
3. The surprising event needs to be intense enough in order to significantly trigger the person's emotional reaction.
4. A person needs to have an effective attitude to help understand and elaborate the event, in other words, the more background information the person has learned before the event, the more elaborate the person's memory of that event would be.
5. When people engage in overt rehearsal of the event by talking about it with others.
6. When the information of the public event is heard frequently from the media, this process can lead to overlearning of the information.