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Current issues in understanding sexual victimization
Published in Rachel E. Lovell, Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Sexual Assault Kits and Reforming the Response to Rape, 2023
This is not to say that a victim's memory is fraught with relevant inaccuracies. In fact, stress and arousal may facilitate specific and long-lasting memories for salient and important elements of a traumatic or stressful event (Hoscheidt et al., 2014; Mather & Sutherland, 2011). A victim may remember the subjectively most important details or more details closer to the event while forgetting or never encoding more peripheral or less proximal details. Traumatic memory for salient details can be “burned in” someone's mind, sometimes referred to as a flashbulb memory. For example, a victim may vividly remember the smell of the perpetrator's breath and the feel of his erection against her while forgetting the order of events or what she was wearing. This does not correspond well with the need for chronology, detail, and “facts” that are the focus of a criminal investigation. Often the assumption can be that the victim would or should have access to information as if the memory was a recording. When it is not, the victim can be judged as lying by interviewers.
The development of memory
Published in David Cohen, How the child's mind develops, 2017
Then there is flashbulb memory – so called because psychologists have found that people have a kind of photograph of where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they learned of some momentous event. In November 1963, I was 15 and watching television with my mother when we heard on the television that President Kennedy had been shot dead. For British people, other key events will tend to be the fall of Mrs Thatcher or the death of Princess Diana. For Japanese people, the 2011 tsunami will be one of these milestones. These memories seem to act as bookmarks.
Changes in Cognitive Function in Human Aging
Published in David R. Riddle, Brain Aging, 2007
Autobiographical memory involves memory for one’s personal past and includes memories that are both episodic and semantic in nature. The bulk of the evidence suggests that recent memories are easiest to retrieve, those from early childhood are most difficult to retrieve, and there is a monotonic decrease in retention from the present to the most remote past, with one exception. Events that occurred between the ages of 15 and 25 are recalled at a higher rate — what is referred to as the reminiscence bump — a finding that has usually been attributed to the greater salience or emotionality of the memories during this time period. This general pattern holds across all ages, suggesting that autobiographical memory is largely preserved with age (for review, see [35]). More detailed analyses of the nature of the autobiographical information retrieved, however, has suggested that although memory for personal semantics is intact in old age, memory for specific episodic or contextual details about one’s personal past may be impaired. In a recent study, Levine et al. [36] observed that although older adults reported the gist of autobiographical event memories as well as young people, they reported fewer details. There may be exceptions to this finding, however. Recent studies of flashbulb memory have demonstrated that older adults remember as much as young adults about the details and circumstances surrounding highly emotional public events such as the death of Princess Diana or the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City [37, 38].
Rehearsal and Event Age Predict the Fading Affect Bias across Young Adults and Elderly in Self-Defining and Everyday Autobiographical Memories
Published in Experimental Aging Research, 2021
Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Leslie Rollins
Much like Shaquille O’Neil who mistakenly implied that he would make the free throws in the playoffs when it counted (Kurtzman, 2010), many individuals incorrectly think that they will remember the important events in their lives. However, the autobiographical memory research on eyewitness testimony and flashbulb memories suggest otherwise. Specifically, the eyewitness testimony literature estimates that three-quarters of the 77,342 incarcerations for burglary in 2002 were based on misidentifications (Gross, Jacoby, Matheson, Montgomery, & Patil, 2005). Although the flashbulb memory literature shows that ratings of vividness and belief in memory accuracy remain stronger over time for emotionally salient public events (e.g., the September 11th terrorist attacks) than for everyday events, it also shows that memory for contextual details associated with emotionally salient public events and everyday events decline at similar rates (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). More importantly for the current study, Talarico and Rubin (2003) found that the intensity of affect associated with both flashbulb memories and everyday memories faded over time. Taken together, these findings suggest that emotionally salient events may not be accentuated by heightened memory accuracy nor persistent emotional intensity.