Flashbulb Memories

Flashbulb Memories are especially vivid memories created by highly-charged emotional events. Flashbulb Memories tend to encapsulate the surrounding context of the situation and not just the event itself. Flashbulb memories are so termed because they are were hypothesised to be like a photograph taken with a flash: burn immediately into the film or mind. In fact flashbulb memories are the closest that humans get to photographic or eidetic memory.

Brown and Kulik (1977) discovered flashbulb memories, they gave participants a questionnaire about the deaths of Kennedy, Malcolm ‘X’, Martin Luther King, and the day of Princess Diana’s death. Continue reading Flashbulb Memories →