Emotion and Cognition Flashcards
emotion and cognition studies
Brown and Kulik (1977)|Neisser and Harsch (1982)|Sharot et al (2007)
BK aim
To investigate whether shocking events are remembered more vividly that other events.
BK method
80 male participants were asked to recall the circumstances where they had learnt about Kennedy’s assassination and Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and other events. They were also asked questions about how they felt about the event etc.
BK results
People had very vivid memories, FBM, of about the circumstances of receiving the news. The researchers found that there was a lowed rate of FBM in white people about assassinations of Martin Luther King than black people.
BK conclusion
In conclusions, it was found that personal importance is very important in creating a FBM, and the formation of a FBM is led by surprise and emotional arousal.
BK strengths
High reliability
* Standardised instructions and questionnaires were used. Therefore, the experiment is easily replicable.
Questionnaire - open ended which allows for flexibility of results
BK weaknesses
Sample bias
* Ethnocentric - wasn’t a cross-cultural study and the behaviour shown by the participants may have been emic
* Androcentric - only males were used for the study so not representative of the whole sample
Social desirability effect
The participants may have made up information in order to be liked by the researchers. They could do this because there was no archival evidence to prove what they said.
Lack of archival evidence
The whole experiment relies on self-reported data, meaning that there way no way to prove that what the participants said was true. Additionally, there was no way to measure the surprise or emotion of the participants during the event. Therefore, it is difficult to determine that FBM are attributed to those two factors
NH aim
To determine whether flashbulb memories were susceptible to distortion.
NH method
University students were given a questionnaire about the Challenger disaster 24 hours after the event and again after two and a half years latter. The second questionnaire also asked how confident the participants were of the memory.
NH results
A lot of the participants had distorted memories and their second questionnaire did not match the first one. The participants claimed that they were very confident that their memories were correct.
NH conclusion
In conclusion, emotional intensity was associated with higher confidence about a memory, but not the accuracy. Furthermore, they suggested that memories are vivid because the event us rehearsed and reconsidered many times.
NH strengths
Case study
Since it was a longitudinal case study, the researchers could conduct their research in far more detail - rich qualitative data
- relatively cheap, quick, and efficient way of gathering information from a large sample of people
- high ecological validity
NH limitations
Researcher bias
The researchers feelings may have influenced the case study which could have been demonstrated while converting qualitative observations to quantitative ones
Low reliability
* Since it is a case study, it’s difficult to replicate. Furthermore, it is not generalisable to the whole population. The behaviour observed may be an emic one, but we can’t be sure because it can’t be replicated.
Demand characteristics
The participants may have claimed to remember the event with confidence for fear of being judged or unliked by the participants. This may have been because the event was an important one for the country.
sharot aim
To determine the potential role of biological factors on flashbulb memories.
sharot method
Case study that was conducted three years after 9/11. The participants, 24 people who were in New York City on that day were recruited through advertisements and put into a fMRI. While inside, they were presented with word cues with the addition of either “Summer” or “September” projected along with them to have the participant associate the list with either summer holidays or 9/11. Participants’ brain activity was observed while recalling the event, with memories of summer acting as a baseline of brain activity for evaluating the nature of 9/11 memories. After the brain scanning session, participants were asked rated their memories for vividness, detail, confidence in accuracy and arousal, and to also write a description of their personal memories.
