The role of event relevance and congruence to social groups in flashbulb memory formation

Flashbulb memories are vivid, confidently held, long-lasting memories for the personal circumstances of learning about an important event. Importance is determined, in part, by social group membership. Events that are relevant to one's social group, and furthermore, are congruent with the prior beliefs of that group, should be more likely to be retained as flashbulb memories. The Fukushima nuclear disaster was relevant to ongoing political conversations in both Germany and the Netherlands, but, while the disaster was congruent with German beliefs about the dangers of nuclear energy, it was incongruent with Dutch support for nuclear power. Danish participants would not have found the disaster to be particularly relevant. Partially consistent with this prediction, across two samples (N=265 and N=518), German participants were most likely to have flashbulb memories for the Fukushima disaster. Furthermore, event features thought to be related to flashbulb memory formation (e.g. ratings of importance and consequentiality) also differed as a function of nationality. Spontaneously generated flashbulb memories for events other than Fukushima also suggested that participants reported events that were relevant to national identity (e.g. the Munich attacks for Germans, the UtOya massacre for Danes, and Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 for Dutch participants).

Title	The role of event relevance and congruence to social groups in flashbulb memory formation
Creator	Talarico, Jennifer M.
	Wessel, I.
	Bohn, A.
Publisher	Memory
Division	Natural Sciences
Organization	Lafayette College
Date Issued	2019
Date Available	2020-08-09
Type	Article
Language	English
Keyword	social identity
	Fukushima nuclear disaster
	flashbulb memory
Bibliographic Citation	Talarico, J. M., A. Bohn, and I. Wessel (2019) "The role of event relevance and congruence to social groups in flashbulb memory formation." Memory 27 (7): 985-997.
Standard Identifier	Handle 10385/cr56n1495
Standard Identifier	DOI 10.1080/09658211.2019.1616097
Permalink	http://hdl.handle.net/10385/cr56n1495
Rights Statement	In Copyright
Rights Holders	Taylor & Francis