Introduction:
Flashbulb
memories are memories that are created during a traumatic event. Persons
experiencing flashbulb memories are thought to accurately recall the event over
a long period of time. These memories are also thought to be infallible. But, there
are a few cases which have shown that these memories may not be as perfect as
most think. One experiment showed that social influences can affect traumatic
memories.
The current
study attempted to plant a false memory in for two separate traumatic events:
the World Trade
Center plane crash (2001) and the
terrorist bombings in Moscow in
1999. The false memory to be implanted is of witnessing a wounded animal on the
scene. The authors predicted that the Moscow
condition would be less susceptible to contamination that the World
Trade Center
attacks because the Moscow event
was more personal to the Russian people and the World
Trade Center
was more historical.
Method:
The study
was conducted in two sessions. In the first, 91 participants were asked to fill
out a questionnaire about the World Trade
Center terrorist attacks and the Moscow
bombings. The survey questions were supposed to cause the participants to
recall and write about the two events.
The second
session occurred roughly six months after the first session. Eighty
participants returned and were randomly assigned to answer questions about
either the WTC or the Moscow
bombings. They were asked to rate their memories on a scale of 1 ( very low) to 5 (very high). The questions reflected
historical significance of the event, emotions at the time of the event, and
their emotions now. The experimenters attempted to contaminate memory by asking
about a wounded animal that the participants had “recall” during the first
questionnaire in session 1.
Results:
The Moscow
memory was considered more emotional to the participants than the WTC during
both sessions. Past emotions were also more emotional for the Moscow
event. However, the Moscow event
was rated less historically significant in both sessions. The rating between
Session 1 and Session 2 did not correlate well. Moscow
memory was rated as more fearful while the WTC was astonishment.
None of the
participants remembering the WTC allowed for the corruption of their memory by
the experimenters. Only five of the Moscow
participants fell to the suggestion of a wounded animal on the scene of the
event. One of the participants memory was quite vivid.
The five
who falsely remembered rated the Moscow
event with more historical significance than the other participants of the Moscow
memory group. However, the emotion tied to the event was not significantly
different. The personal significance of the events was rated lower for the
people who falsely remembered a wounded animal than those
who did not. These participants rated similar emotional trends about the WTC
compared to the Moscow bombings as
the rest of the Moscow
participants.
Discussion:
In a
minority of participants (12.5%), the false memory of a wounded animal was
implanted into the traumatic memories of participants, but only for the Moscow
bombings. The emotion associated with the Moscow
events were rated very high. This contradicts that more emotional events are
protected against corruption.
Some
challenges acknowledged about the experiment is that
there might have actually been a wounded animal on the scene of the Moscow
attacks. But, according to research, there were no pictures of such a
case. The memory for the Moscow
event was two and a half years older than the WTC attacks at the time of the
first session. This might have caused the Moscow
memory to be more fallible because of a weakened memory. A final possibility is
that it is easier to imagine an animal at the scene of the Moscow
memory because it was in a residential area. The WTC was in a commercial area
where animals are not usually found.
Their
recognized drawback is that the events were almost three years apart and the
range of media coverage was very different. For the WTC, a majority of
Americans reported witnessing the event on live TV, and almost 100% saw
coverage of it. The statistics on the Russian event is not know,
but it is known that the event was not filmed live and that pictures in the
papers were of still images.
In
conclusion, the experimenters were able to implant false memories into the
traumatic memories of a minority of the group. This breaks traditional thought
that traumatic memories are not easily contaminated. Even so, the amount of
contamination is very small (12% of the Russian group) and there is no explanation
why the rest of the Moscow group
didn’t have false memories.