Two Key Studies of the Effect of Emotion on Cognition: Brown & Kulik (1977) & Talarico & Rubin (2003) (SL IB Psychology)

Aim: To investigate the nature and quality of flashbulb memories

Participants: A self-selecting (volunteer) sample from Harvard University which consisted of 40 Caucasian (white European) Americans and 40 African Americans with an age range of 20-60 years old

Procedure:

• The participants answered questionnaires that asked them about their memories (e.g. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with?) of when they first learned about the death of eight famous people including John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King
• They were also asked to recall an incident from their own lives in which they had experienced a sudden, unexpected shock e.g. the death of someone close to them, a serious medical diagnosis etc.
• They were then asked to give a free recall of this personal event in writing using any form, in any order, making the account as long or as short as they desired. They were also asked to rate how important this personal event was to them

Results: 

• The strongest FBMs were about the assassination of John F. Kennedy with 39/40 of the Caucasian Americans and 40/40 of the African Americans reporting it as a very strong FBM
• 69 out of the 80 participants reported FBMs linked to personal shock
• Race was a factor, with more African Americans having FBMs connected to the deaths of important black figures e.g. Malcolm X and more Caucasian Americans having FBMs for white leaders e.g. Gerald Ford

Conclusion: FBMs are vivid memories which are easily recalled; they vary in strength according to the significance of the event to the person recalling it. FBMs depend on the ‘shock’ factor of the event and are linked to powerful emotional responses

Evaluation of Brown & Kulik (1977)

Strengths

• Using both Caucasian and African American participants enabled the researchers to determine that FBMs are formed when events of personal relevance pertaining to individual characteristics (e.g. race) are recalled, also making the study somewhat less culturally bias
• Using a standardised procedure, with all participants experiencing the same stimuli and the same questions means that the study is replicable which increases its reliability

Weaknesses

• Relying purely on self-reported recall of both global and personal events lacks reliability as participants may have misremembered details, inserted details or invented details which would impair the validity of the findings
• The use of such a small sample makes the findings difficult to generalise

Key terms:

• Flashbulb memory
• Questionnaire
• Replicable 

Aim: To investigate the consistency and accuracy of FBMs over time

Participants: 54 undergraduate students from Duke University in New York (40 female; 14 male; mean age = 18.32 years old) 

Procedure: The participants were contacted one day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA and asked a series of questions about the circumstances they were in when they first learned of the attacks. They were asked questions such as:

• Who or what first gave you the information?
• When did you first hear the news?
• Were others present, if so, who?
• What were you doing immediately before you heard the news? 

The participants were also asked to recall an everyday event from a few days prior to 9/11. The participants were then split into three groups:

1. Group 1 were asked the same questions again one week later
2. Group 2 were asked the same questions again 6 weeks later
3. Group 3 were asked the same questions again 32 weeks later

Results:

• There were no differences in consistency between the FBMs and the everyday memories: both memories became eroded over time and lost accuracy
• The participants, however, claimed that their FBMs were just as vivid and accurate as they were the first time they recalled them (which for all participants was at the initial one-day-after questionnaire)
• The more vivid and shocking the FBM, the more participants insisted that they were accurate (even though the data showed this not to be the case)

Conclusion: FBMs do not appear to be accurate but people’s perception of them is that they are accurate over time.

Evaluation of Talarico & Rubin (2003)

Strengths

• Being able to access the sample so quickly after the event had taken place means that the initial memory was less likely to have suffered from interference from multiple sources of information
• The data was scored by two independent raters which helps to ensure the inter-rater (and therefore overall) reliability of the findings

Weaknesses

• As each group was tested only once, and at different time intervals to the other two groups it is difficult to compare the findings across all of the groups
• The sample was gender-biassed as females outnumbered males 3 to 1 which means that it is not representative of a wider population

Key terms:

• Perception
• Rater
• Reliability