A supporting study made by Conway et al in 1994 which supports Brown and Kuliks belief found that 86% of British students appeared to have flashbulb memories of the time that Margaret Thatcher resigned in comparison to a 29% of non-British students who had flashbulb memories. This shows that you are more likely to have a flashbulb memory if the event will affect you personally. However this could be argued with the fact that this memory was enhanced by constant reminders by the press and the news of the event thus building it up in a story like way which would make it easier to remember, and also some argue that this example doesn’t fit the criteria for flashbulb memories.
However not all psychologists agree that flashbulb memories are individually special and perpetually detailed. For example, a study to support Neisser’s idea by McCloskey et Al in 1988 concluded that flashbulb memories are subject to discrepancies just as normal memories are. Therefore they are just a product of a normal memory perhaps enhanced. The study which McCloskey et Al did was based around an event which was not staged therefore it was useful because it reflected true feelings and true memories from something which the participants had seen on television or read about in the newspaper, therefore it is reliable. However it still was not entirely relevant to everyone and not everyone has access to news so a lot of people may have had more exposure to the story of the American shuttle than others, so their view would be biased. Yet Conway still rejected this idea, claiming that this did not fit into the of flashbulb memories.
Another category of memory which is affected by emotion is named repression. Repression is defined by Freud as an unconscious process which keeps baleful or worrying memories from conscious awareness. Some may theorize that these memories may be recovered via therapy or analysing dreams in the psycho-analytical way. There is an argument that repressed memories, when recovered, are often false and can be a distorted image of what actually happened. Freud validated his idea by treating patients with Neurotic disorders of which he gave examples. It is difficult to demonstrate repression in its entirety. He said that throughout his studies he was able to suggestively lead his patients into recovering false “memories” of anything that he so wished, especially sexual-related memories, even coming across certain cases in which the “recovered” memories could not have been possible.
An investigation was made into repression by Levinger and Clarke in 1961. The conclusion made from their study was that negatively charged words were far more formidable to recall than the words with no emotional connotation, thus supporting Freud’s theory that forgetting is caused by repression.
However this study was not very realistic – the environment in which it is sent does not reflect a normal situation in which repression would be found.
Another study into repression was made by Williams into women who had been sexually abused as children, and seeing if they could recall the incidents. It was concluded by this study that a high proportion of these women could not recall those incidents in the interview 20 years later, thus showing that repression is evident even in strong emotional memories. However in the cases in which the memories were recovered, this could be false memories which may have been distorted and fictitious. Also, this study was retrospective and is therefore the outcomes are not entirely reliable.
A study which shows evidence against the existence of repression was made by Baddeley and Bradley in a similar experiment to Levinger and Clarke in 1990. It is found in this study that after a 28 day period emotional associations were better recalled than entirely neutral words with no implications. This doesn’t support the repression hypothesis made by Freud because words with emotional charge became more memorable over time. However, this experiment was also lab-based and not used in a situation which would be found in everyday life. Therefore the participants could have different outcomes to what they would have had if they were in a different situation.
Another study which contradicts Levinger and Clarke’s study is the Holmes study from 1990, which concluded that there is no valid and convincing experimental support for repression which would cause forgetting. However Holmes’s overview was just a view over a few experiments, and he could not have possibly looked at all the outcomes of repression and forgetting, and he carried out no experiment himself.
Emotional factors are obviously very prominent in the way that we remember or indeed forget things in our memory, but repression and flashbulb memories are both ambiguous subjects which can not be proved in their entirety in how they effect memory. There is a significant lack of criticisms in both repression and flashbulb memories, which makes it hard for us to make a complete decision on whether one is more important than the other.