Remembering the Earthquake: Direct Experience vs. Hearing the News

Abstract

Three groups of informants--two in California, one in Atlanta--recalled their experiences of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shortly after the event and again 11/2 years later. The Californians' recalls of their own earthquake experiences were virtually perfect. Even their recalls of hearing the news of an earthquake-related event were very good: much higher than Atlantan recalls of hearing about the quake itself. Atlantans who had relatives in the affected area remembered significantly more than those who did not. These data show that personal involvement in the quake led to greatly improved recall, but do not show why. Many Californian informants reported low levels of stress/arousal during the event; arousal ratings were not significantly correlated with recall. The authors suggest that repeated narrative rehearsals may have played an important role.

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks

“…Although memory for the context of occurrence may undergo distortion over time (see, e.g., Neisser et al, 1996), the intensity of the initially experienced emotional reaction is directly related to recall accuracy and confidence (e.g., Conway et al, 1994). 5 Binding theory explains enhanced memory for flashbulb events and their context of occurrence in the same way as enhanced memory for taboo words and their consistently linked colors in Experiments 1-3: Emotional events strongly engage the binding mechanisms for linking the event to its context, including the time, place, and manner of learning about it and other events ongoing at the time-for example, who else was present.…”

“…An example is flashbulb memories, which have two defining characteristics. One is especially high accuracy and confidence in the recall of emotionally arousing events, such as the deaths of Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the San Francisco earthquake, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the Hillsborough stadium disaster, and the verdict announcement in the O. J. Simpson trial (e.g., Conway et al, 1994;Neisser et al, 1996).…”

“…A second criticism is that flashbulb memory effects may reflect not superior encoding but a tendency to rehearse or repeat emotional experiences during the recall interval. For example, people tend to create narrative descriptions of salient emotional events in everyday life, and they subsequently rehearse these descriptions or communicate them to others, often many times in the weeks, months, and even years between the events and the recall test in flashbulb memory studies (see, e.g., Neisser et al, 1996).…”

Remembering President Barack Obama's inauguration and the landing of US Airways Flight 1549: A comparison of the predictors of autobiographical and event memory

“…Significantly, researchers have failed to find a consistent relation between four of these variables and FBM consistency (for a review, see Talarico & Rubin, 2009). The one exception is personal significance (Bohn & Berntsen, 2007;Conway et al, 1994;Curci, Luminet, Finkenauer, & Gisle, 2001;Er, 2003;Neisser et al, 1996;Niedźwieńska, 2003;Otani et al, 2005), and the related constructs of importance to social identity (see Berntsen, 2009) and to personal identity (as, for instance, measured by the Centrality of Event Scale; CES, Berntsen & Rubin, 2006 As for memory for the public events that elicit FBMs (i.e., event memory), although the literature is much smaller, the results have been more consistent (for studies on event memory, see, for example, Bohannon, 1988;Coluccia, Bianco, & Brandimonte, 2010;Curci & Luminet, 2006;Hirst et al, 2009;Shapiro, 2006;Smith, Bibi, & Sheard, 2003;Tekcan, Ece, Gülgöz, & Er, 2003). In addition to personal significance or importance to one's identity (Coluccia et al, 2010;Curci & Luminet, 2006;Tekcan et al, 2003), emotional intensity (Bohannon, 1988;Coluccia et al, 2010;Smith et al, 2003) and rehearsal (Hirst et al, 2009;Shapiro, 2006) have also been found to be positively related to event memory accuracy.…”

Behavioural, emotional, and cognitive responses in European disasters: results of survivor interviews

“…Studies in forensic and cognitive psychology, gauging the accuracy and consistency of eyewitness reports of emotional events, have shown that arousal enhances remembering of situations (Christianson, 1992;van Giezen et al, 2005;Hulse et al, 2007). In the case of natural disasters, emotional involvement and exposure to an earthquake has been associated with improved recall of the event itself (Neisser, 1996), in comparison only to seeing the event on television (Er, 2000). Furthermore, disaster-related interviews about Hurricane Hugo 4 (1989) and Hurricane Andrew (1992) have revealed remarkable memory stability over time (Norris and Kaniasty, 1992;Bahrick et al, 1998;Fivush et al, 2004).…”