Emotional stress and eyewitness memory: A critical review.

Abstract

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.

Comfort in the last 2 weeks of life: relationship to accessing palliative care services

“…Proxy reports are frequently used in palliative care research due to the difficulties encountered in research engaging people with a life-limiting illness [2,4,11,31,33]. Studies have examined the accuracy of retrospective reports by proxies, comparing reports of patients prior to death with those of their relatives after death [4,10,22,27,31,33].…”

“…In a population survey of this nature, deaths theoretically should be evenly distributed in each of the years across the 5-year period. This apparent anomaly may be due to recall error given that life-changing or highly emotional life events may feel more recent than they actually were [2,11].…”

Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual

“…In particular, studies have demonstrated that emotional arousal can impede perceptual memory (Richards andGross, 1999, 2000;Richards, 2004) and increase memories for emotional states (Richards et al, 2003). One explanation that has been proposed for this efffect is that expressive suppression and memory retention compete for cognitive resources, a notion that corresponds with a general resource depletion model of executive function in which attention, working memory, and voluntary thought and behaviour utilise the same frontal regions in the human brain (Yerkes and Dodson, 1908;Ellis and Ashbrook, 1989;Christianson, 1992;Wegner et al, 1993;Engle et al, 1995;Kirchbaum et al, 1996;Baumeister et al, 1998;Macrae et al, 1998;Schjoedt et al, 2011Schjoedt et al, , 2013. This efffect may be especially relevant in highly arousing social events where cultural norms impose strong expressive suppression on participants.…”

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.

“…the kinds of information and details that most resist distortion (e.g., Christianson & Loftus, 1990;Heuer & Reisberg, 1992), and how valenced stimuli, mood states, or levels of arousal modulate these effects (e.g., Bradley, Greenwald, Petry,& Lang, 1992;Bower & Forgas, in press;Christianson, 1992). …”