More than 3,000 individuals from seven US cities reported on their memories of learning of the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as details about the attack, one week, 11 months, and/or 35 months after the assault. Some studies of flashbulb memories examining long-term retention show slowing in the rate of forgetting after a year, whereas others demonstrate accelerated forgetting. The present paper indicates that (1) the rate of forgetting for flashbulb memories and event memory (memory for details about the event itself) slows after a year, (2) the strong emotional reactions elicited by flashbulb events are remembered poorly, worse than non-emotional features such as where and from whom one learned of the attack, and (3) the content of flashbulb and event memories stabilizes after a year. The results are discussed in terms of community memory practices.Keywords flashbulb memories; long-term retention; memory practices; event memory; emotional memory Brown and Kulik (1977) suggested the term flashbulb memory for the "circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event," for example, hearing the news that President John Kennedy had been shot. Since Brown and Kulik's description of their findings, the range of topics addressed in studies of flashbulb memories has grown substantially, from initial questions about special mechanisms (McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988; Neisser & Harsh, 1992) to more recent questions about the impact of aging and dementia (Budson, Simons, Sullivan, Beier, Solomon, Scinto, et al., 2004;Budson, Simons, Waring, Sullivan, Hussoin, & Schacter, 2007; Davidson, Cook, & Glisky, 2005), the history of post-traumatic stress disorder (Qin, Mitchell, Johnson, Krystal, Southwick et all, 2003), as well as the role of social identity [e.g., as seen in the presence or absence, respectively, of flashbulb memories of French citizens and French-speaking Belgians of the death of French President Mitterraand (Curci, Luminet, Finkenauer, & Gisle, 2001; see also Berntsen, 2008;Hirst & Meksin, 2008)]. Researchers have also begun to investigate memories for the flashbulb event itself (Curci & Luminet, 2006; Luminet, Curci, Marsh, Wessel, Constantin, Genocoz, et al., 2004; Pezdak, 2003;Shapiro, 2006; Tekcan, Berium, Gülgöz, & Er, 2003). In this literature, the term flashbulb memory refers to memory for circumstances in which one learned of the event and would include memories of where, when, and from whom one learned of, for instance, the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. The term event memory refers to memory for facts about the flashbulb event and would include, for instance, that four planes were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack and that both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were targets. 1 1 There is much terminological confusion in the literature. First, the term flashbulb memory could be construed as implying an accurate representation of the circumstances in which one learned of the emotionally charged public...

Within a week of the attack of September 11, 2001, a consortium of researchers from across the United States distributed a survey asking about the circumstances in which respondents learned of the attack (their flashbulb memories) and the facts about the attack itself (their event memories). Follow-up surveys were distributed 11, 25, and 119 months after the attack. The study, therefore, examines retention of flashbulb memories and event memories at a substantially longer retention interval than any previous study using a test-retest methodology, allowing for the study of such memories over the long term. There was rapid forgetting of both flashbulb and event memories within the first year, but the forgetting curves leveled off after that, not significantly changing even after a 10-year delay. Despite the initial rapid forgetting, confidence remained high throughout the 10-year period. Five putative factors affecting flashbulb memory consistency and event memory accuracy were examined: (a) attention to media, (b) the amount of discussion, (c) residency, (d) personal loss and/or inconvenience, and (e) emotional intensity. After 10 years, none of these factors predicted flashbulb memory consistency; media attention and ensuing conversation predicted event memory accuracy. Inconsistent flashbulb memories were more likely to be repeated rather than corrected over the 10-year period; inaccurate event memories, however, were more likely to be corrected. The findings suggest that even traumatic memories and those implicated in a community's collective identity may be inconsistent over time and these inconsistencies can persist without the corrective force of external influences.

speakers reshape listeners' memories through at least two discrete means:(1) social contagion and (2) socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (ss-RIF). Three experiments explored how social relationships between speaker and listener moderate these conversational effects, focusing specifically on two speaker characteristics, expertise and trustworthiness. We examined their effect on ss-RIF and contrasted, within-subjects, their effects on both ss-RIF and the previously studied social contagion. Experiments 1 and 2 explored the effects of perceived expertise; Experiment 3 explored trust. We found (1) that speakers who were perceived as experts induced greater levels of social contagion and lower levels of ss-RIF than non-expert speakers, and (2) that, likewise, trust in the speaker had similar mnemonic consequences, in that neutral speakers induced more social contagion and less ss-RIF than untrustworthy speakers. These findings suggest that how speakers shape listeners' memories depends on the social dynamic that exists between speaker and listener.

In the aftermath of a national tragedy, important decisions are predicated on judgments of the emotional significance of the tragedy in the present and future. Research in affective forecasting has largely focused on ways in which people fail to make accurate predictions about the nature and duration of feelings experienced in the aftermath of an event. Here we ask a related but understudied question: can people forecast how they will feel in the future about a tragic event that has already occurred? We found that people were strikingly accurate when predicting how they would feel about the September 11 attacks over 1-, 2-, and 7-year prediction intervals. Although people slightly under- or overestimated their future feelings at times, they nonetheless showed high accuracy in forecasting 1) the overall intensity of their future negative emotion, and 2) the relative degree of different types of negative emotion (i.e., sadness, fear, or anger). Using a path model, we found that the relationship between forecasted and actual future emotion was partially mediated by current emotion and remembered emotion. These results extend theories of affective forecasting by showing that emotional responses to an event of ongoing national significance can be predicted with high accuracy, and by identifying current and remembered feelings as independent sources of this accuracy.

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