Discuss the role of emotional factors in memory.

simply reflects normal narrative convention because when we recount important events, we do so by using conventional storytelling techniques. He also argued that flashbulb memories are subject to the same types of imprecision and forgetting as any memories. According to Brown and Kulik, who first described flashbulb memory, said the event must be surprising and have real consequences for the person’s life. They believe that such emotional events trigger a neural mechanism that causes the details to be imprinted into the memory. They believe that this is a special type of memory because of the detail and accuracy with which the event is remembered and the fact that its structural formation of the memory is always alike. They found that six kinds of information were most likely to be remembered about a certain moment when a event was first heard. They remembered things like; where they were, what they were doing, what they felt about it, who told them, what others felt about it and what happened in the immediate aftermath. It is important to note that it is the circumstances surrounding being informed of the event rather than the event itself, which forms the flashbulb memory.  Research on flashbulb memories was done by Conway, he found that 86% of British undergraduate students had vivid memories of the unexpected resignation of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, even after 11 months. This experiment was compared with   only 29% of non-British students. Conway claimed that this particular event met the criteria for a flashbulb memory for British people: somewhat unforeseen, highly significant and arousing deep emotions. Conway criticized such studies by pointing out that a certain event did not meet the criteria of the flashbulb memory. He believes that it was neither unexpected nor likely to have an immediate consequence for the students concern from his own study.  McCloskey done a test to find the accuracy of flashbulb memory. He interviewed people a few days after the explosion of the American space shuttle challenger in 1986 about their memories surrounding the event, then the same people were re-interviewed again nine months later. From this investigation McCloskey found that there were inaccuracies in the memories and there were discrepancies between what was recalled shortly after the accident and what was recalled nine months later. From this he concluded that the so-called flashbulb memories are subject to the same types of inaccuracy and forgetting as other memories, therefore flashbulb memories are not special but are products of ordinary memory mechanisms. This type of experiment was not artificial, laboratory study. People were asked to recall a real event that they either witnessed through the TV or media. Conway and his fellow colleagues the idea that flashbulb memories were just stronger versions of ordinary memories. They claimed that the challenger accident did not meet the criteria for a flashbulb memory. The emotional factors in forgetting was studied be Levinger and Clark. They investigated the retrieval of links to the words that were emotionally charged, compared with the retrieval of links to neural words. The time taken to produce the associations was recorded, then immediately after the word links had been generated, the participants were given the original cue words and were asked to recall their linked words. Levinger and Clark found that the participants took longer to provide free associations to the negatively charged words compared with the neutral words. Compared with the neutral words, the negatively charged words produced higher galvanic skin responses in the participants. The participants found it more difficult to recall their associations for the negatively charged words compared to the neutral words. They concluded from this study that repression led to the emotionally negatively charged words being more difficult to recall. This may be arisen from the arousal these words produced. Therefore the results they found supported the Freud theory that repression causes forgetting. This type of experiment was more recent evidence challenging these findings. Bradley and Baddeley ran a similar experiment using 32 student participants and found that when the words were recalled after 28 days, the emotional associations were better recalled than the neutral associations. This does not support the idea that repression hypothesis since therefore the emotional words actually became more memorable over time.  Some research has been focused on repressed memories in child sexual abuse. The contentious resolves around the issue whether there recovered memories are genuine. The only problem with establishing  the validity of these claims is that there normally no independent, objective to confirm this evidence. William investigated into the research of child abuse. He found that 38% of a group of African-American women who were known to have suffered some sexual abuse during there childhood, reported repressed memories of abuse. However, it also seems clear that some of these so-called repressed memories  are false memories. The criticisms from this experiment was that it was biased, only selected poor women and chose African-American women. It was possible that they didn’t want to tell the interviewers about the abuse.