The eyewitness literature often claims that emotional stress leads to an impairment in memory and, hence, that details of unpleasant emotional events are remembered less accurately than details of neutral or everyday events. A common assumption behind this view is that a decrease in available processing capacity occurs at states of high emotional arousal, which, therefore, leads to less efficient memory processing. The research reviewed here shows that this belief is overly simplistic. Current studies demonstrate striking interactions between type of event, type of detail information, time of test, and type of retrieval information. This article also reviews the literature on memory for stressful events with respect to two major theories: the Yerkes-Dodson law and Easter-brook's cue-utilization hypothesis. To account for the findings from real-life studies and laboratory studies, this article discusses the possibility that emotional events receive some preferential processing mediated by factors related to early perceptual processing and late conceptual processing.

This research concerns murderers' and sexual offenders' experiences of Swedish police interviews and their attitudes towards allegations of these serious crimes. The explorative study is based on a questionnaire answered by 83 men convicted of murder or sexual offences. Results show that when police officers interview murderers and sexual offenders, the individuals perceive attitudes that are characterized by either dominance or humanity. Logistic regression shows that police interviews marked by dominance are mainly associated with a higher proportion of denials, whereas an approach marked by humanity is associated with admissions. When suspects feel that they are respected and acknowledged, they probably gain more confidence and mental space, allowing them to admit criminal behaviour.

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Subjects watched either an emotional, neutral, or unusual sequence of slides containing 1 critical slide in the middle. Experiments 1 and 2 allowed only a single eye fixation on the critical slide by presenting it for 180 ms (Experiment 1) or 150 ms (Experiment 2). Despite this constraint, memory for a central detail was better for the emotional condition. In Experiment 3, subjects were allowed 2.70 s to view the critical slide while their eye movements were monitored. When subjects who had devoted the same number of fixations were compared, memory for the central detail of the emotional slide was again better. The results suggest that enhanced memory for detail information of an emotional event does not occur solely because more attention is devoted to the emotional information.