Remembrance of Eyewitness Testimony: Effects of Emotional Content, Self-Relevance, and Emotional Tone1

How to improve eyewitness testimony research: theoretical and methodological concerns about experiments on the impact of emotions on memory performance

The purpose of this paper is to present crucial shortcomings of research into eyewitness testimony. It presents the state-of-the-art of research on the relationship between emotions and memory performance. In addition, it addresses contradictions and concerns about previous studies. Despite the declarations of consensus on the role of emotions in memory coding and retrieving, there are as many studies suggesting that emotional events are better remembered than neutral ones, as there are reports that show the opposite. Therefore, by indicating the theoretical and methodological limitations of previous studies, this paper advocates a more rigorous approach to the investigation of emotions and their impact on the quality and quantity of testimony. It also provides a framework for inquiry that allows better comparisons between studies and results, and may help to build a more comprehensive theory of the effects of emotion on memory.

Memory for child sexual abuse information: simulated memory error and individual differences

Building on the simulated-amnesia work of Christianson and Bylin (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 13, 495-511, 1999), the present research introduces a new paradigm for the scientific study of memory of childhood sexual abuse information. In Session 1, participants mentally took the part of an abuse victim as they read an account of the sexual assault of a 7-year-old. After reading the narrative, participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: They (1) rehearsed the story truthfully (truth group), (2) left out the abuse details of the story (omission group), (3) lied about the abuse details to indicate that no abuse had occurred (commission group), or (4) did not recall the story during Session 1 (no-rehearsal group). One week later, participants returned for Session 2 and were asked to truthfully recall the narrative. The results indicated that, relative to truthful recall, untruthful recall or no rehearsal at Session 1 adversely affected memory performance at Session 2. However, untruthful recall resulted in better memory than did no rehearsal. Moreover, gender, PTSD symptoms, depression, adult attachment, and sexual abuse history significantly predicted memory for the childhood sexual abuse scenario. Implications for theory and application are discussed.

Self-relevance does not moderate choice blindness in adolescents and children

In two experiments we tested the choice blindness phenomenon in adolescents aged 11-16 years (Experiment 1, N = 87) and children aged 7-10 years (Experiment 2, N = 117) for the first time. Analogous to previously reported findings with adult participants, we expected to replicate the robust effect in these age groups. Furthermore, we investigated the hypothesis that self-relevance of choices, defined as the extent to which the self is implicated in a choice, moderates the choice blindness effect in adolescents and children. To this end, we directly compared high and low self-relevance conditions. As expected, the choice blindness effect was robust across age groups. Little support was found for the idea that self-relevance moderates the choice blindness effect. Specifically, no effect of self-relevance on choice blindness was found in adolescents, while the findings in the child sample were inconsistent. Different possible interpretations of the results as well as the possible role of ambiguity for the choice blindness effect are discussed.

Hippocampal activity is associated with self-descriptiveness effect in memory, whereas self-reference effect in memory depends on medial prefrontal activity

The self has long been regarded as a unique cognitive structure by virtue of its superior mnemonic abilities. Two separate effects result from this self memory facilitation: self-reference effect and self-descriptiveness effect in memory. Self-reference effect denotes that information processed with reference to the self is better remembered than information processed with reference to others, whereas self-descriptiveness effect indicates that items judged to be self-relevant is remembered better than items judged not to be relevant to self during self-reference task. Although there is a compelling connection between self-reference effect in memory and self mentalization processes indexed by the medial prefrontal activity, the underlying mechanisms of the self-descriptiveness effect in memory have remained underspecified. In the present fMRI study, we used a subsequent memory paradigm to examine the neural correlates of self-descriptiveness and self-reference effect in memory. Participants encoded personality traits while performing self-reference and other-reference task (judged the descriptiveness of the traits to themselves or a famous person "Bruce Lee"), and then were given a test of recognition memory outside the scanner. It is revealed that the hippocampal activity corresponded with self-descriptiveness effect in memory, but the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex and perirhinal cortex related to self-reference effect in memory. These findings suggested that the memory boost for self-relevant items relies on the enhanced relational binding mechanisms employed during self-relevant items.