Emotion and Cognition

Flashbulb memory theory

• Highly detailed, vivid 'snapshots' of surprising and emotionally arousing events

• Proposed by Brown and Kulik

• Suggests a special biological mechanism is triggered, leading to permanent memory storage

Evaluation:

(+) Biological supports the role of emotion in memory

(+) Highlights the different types of memory processing

(-) Confidence doesn't equal accuracy

(-) Difficult to measure personal relevance, surprise and rehearsal accurately

(-) Cultural differences challenge the universality of the theory

(-) Impossible to verify memory accuracy

(-) No direct way to measure emotional state at the time of encoding