Monitor on Psychology - September 2011 - (Page 63)

autobiographical memories to see if the decline was similar for both. Talarico saw a chance to tackle these mysteries following the 9/11 attacks. She rushed to campus to find her mentor, longtime flashbulb memory researcher David Rubin, PhD, who agreed they should jump on the study. Fortuitously, the university’s institutional review board was meeting down the hall and quickly approved the research. faulty flashbulbs? The next day, the two researchers asked 54 Duke University students to recount their 9/11 memories. To get at the issue of what makes flashbulb memories unique, all the students answered questions about their memories of 9/11 and about a regular, everyday memory immediately after the event. One group of 18 students answered the same set of questions one week later; another group of 18 answered them six weeks later; and a different group of 18 answered them 32 weeks later. Talarico and Rubin had the different groups recount their memories at these intervals to avoid an inadvertent “rehearsal effect,” in which a memory gets strengthened through each retelling. Here’s what they found: The consistency and accuracy of both 9/11 flashbulb memories and everyday memories declined over time, at comparable rates. But students thought something quite different was going on. They believed that their 9/11 memories were much more accurate than their regular memories. One finding especially popped out for Rubin: People had already changed their stories of how they heard about the attacks over just a few days, from the day after the event to one week later. “Because at that point you’ve told 35 people how you heard about it, and it’s been solidified in your memory the way you’re telling it, not necessarily how it really happened,” he explains. And it isn’t that people just make errors of omission and forget details, notes Talarico. “They make errors of commission as well, changing a red shirt to a blue one, or saying they were with different people from those they first said they were with.” Talarico and Rubin’s findings square with results from the biggest 9/11 study done to date — the one led by Hirst of the New School for Social Research. In this seven-city investigation, 3,000 adults answered survey questions about their memories of learning about the attacks at three points in time: one week, 11 months and 35 months later. Hirst and his team looked at how people’s flashbulb recollections, such as where and from whom they learned of the attacks, compared with their factual recollections, such as which airlines and how many airplanes were involved. It turned out that the rate of forgetting for both types of memory slowed and stabilized after a year. But overall flashbulb recollections declined more than factual recollections, possibly because nonstop media coverage bolstered people’s factual memories (see sidebar). “What we’re really looking at in flashbulb studies is septeMber 2011 • Monitor on psychology consistency of people’s stories, and we found a dramatic inconsistency in what people report after one week and after 36 months,” Hirst says of the results, which were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 138, No. 2). “People are changing who they were with, how they found out about the attacks, those sorts of aspects.” Forty percent of the time people misremember some aspect of their 9/11 experience, the study indicates. And the part they get the most wrong is how they felt. My son was not quite four months old. I woke up first, around 7 a.m., and after warming up a bottle, I turned on the news. I believe the first tower had already collapsed. I called out to my girlfriend to come running. We sat glued to the television into the early afternoon. We shut the TV off and went for a very long walk around Mt. Tabor to try to make sense of what we had witnessed. I’ll never forget the room, the bland low pile synthetic beige carpet, the boa constrictor ‘Lowly’ in his tank by the window, the dirty laundry strewn all over the floor. —GRAPhiC DESiGNER, PoRTLAND, oRE. “You tend to project your current feelings about 9/11 on what you felt then,” explains Hirst. “You see this in other aspects of daily life. For instance, if we ask college students how they feel about a boyfriend or girlfriend now, everything’s good. But if you ask them about the person after they break up, they’ll say they knew he or she was bad for them. Our emotions change over time, and it’s hard to get back in that initial emotional space.” Etched by emotion The Hirst, Talarico and Rubin findings seem to suggest that flashbulb memories are not necessarily all that accurate, but they do appear to be more vivid than other memories — at least people certainly perceive them that way. One researcher investigating why this is, and whether emotion plays a role, is Elizabeth Phelps, PhD, one of Hirst’s collaborators on the seven-city study. A neuropsychologist based at New York University, Phelps wanted to see what happens in the brains of people most directly affected by 9/11 as they recall the experience. In a sample of New Yorkers, she sought to determine how proximity influenced memory. In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 104, No. 1) and conducted in 2004, Phelps cued 24 participants to recall their 9/11 experiences and an unrelated, significant autobiographical memory from 63

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Monitor on Psychology - September 2011

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011
Letters
President’s Column
Contents
From the CEO
Supreme Court hears psychologists on prison and video game cases
Antipsychotics are overprescribed in nursing homes
New MCAT likely to recognize the mind-body connection
A $2 million boost for military and families
In Brief
GOVERNMENT RELATIONS UPDATE
On Your Behalf
Judicial Notebook
Random Sample
TIME CAPSULE
QUESTIONNAIRE
Speaking of Education
SCIENCE WATCH
An uncertain future for American workers
Advocating for psychotherapy
PRACTICE PROFILE
ETHICALLY SPEAKING
Seared in our memories
Helping kids cope in an uncertain world
APA and Nickelodeon team up
Muslims in America, post 9/11
Bin Laden’s death
‘They expect us to be there’
Answering the call of public policy
Candidates answer final questions
APA News
Division Spotlight
New leaders
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
Disaster relief training
Honoring teaching excellence
Personalities

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011