Social Memory Flashcards
Do intense emotions prove memory recall is accurate?
Memories of implausible experiences elicit physiological responses similar to those elicited by verifiable traumatic experiences, but these cannot be taken as evidence of the memories authenticity.
What is source monitoring?
You can have different sources from your memories meaning they can be based on something real or something that can be confused with real life, leading to distorted memories.
What are the 3 stages of a misinformation effect experiment?
- Watch some materials
- Read a summary of the event, half with incorrect details
- Memory task, worse memory performance of participants exposed to post event misinformation than controls
How can we tell which memories are not real?
- Descriptions are longer
- More verbal hedges such as ‘I think I saw’
- More cognitive but not sensory information
What are flashbulb memories?
Memories of the circumstances in which people learnt of an impactful or emotionally charged event. The source events are inherently public because there is an informant.
What are canonical categories?
Types of information frequently reported in the accounts of the news
What examples of canonical categories?
- Place
- Aftermath
- Ongoing activity
- Own affect
- Other affect (how other people were affected)
- Informant
What was found from Brown and Kulik (1977)?
They looked at how many people had flashbulb memories from JFK’s assassination compared against MLK and Malcom X. It was found that there was no difference in race for amount of people who had flashbulb memories of JFK’s assassination. Whereas, for Malcom X and MLK more black participants had flashbulb memories. This shows that the type of person you are may affect whether you have a flashbulb memory or not.
What key features are required to create a flashbulb memory?
- Unexpectedness and novelty
- Consequentiality (what consequences on my life has this had both directly and indirectly) - this is debated however as should it be consequences for my life or general society
- Rehearsals - you recount this event a lot and talk about the circumstances in which you found out
What are flashbulb memories not?
- They are not complete
- They are not first hand memories
- They do not contain facts about the event as there is correction of inaccuracies over time due to the media
Are flashbulb memories special/different to normal memories?
Hirst et al 2009 - When initially recalled they tend to be better recollections but over time consistency declines like other memories. Although, the confidence people have in their flashbulb memories remains very high.
What relation does conversation have to social memory?
We often remember things during a conversation.
How does repetition of information to both speaker and listener effect memory?
- Reinforces existing memories
- Enhances remembering of those memories
- Stronger effect for those remembering rather than listeners
How does retrieval-induced forgetting work?
- when recalling an event, the details you do not remember are forgotten more frequently than the recalled memories
- Anderson, Bjork and Bjork - when the unrecalled memories are linked to the recalled memories then there is a greater chance of forgetting than if they were recalled on their own
Socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting works by someone missing out details of this story so the listener does not know all of the story and when repeating it doesn’t include this so everyone forgets the first detail that was missed.
What is social contagion?
The spread of one persons memory to another by means of social interaction (Hirst and Echterhoff, 2012)
