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

ABSTRACT

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 Utøya massacre for Danes, and Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 for Dutch participants).

KEYWORDS:

• Flashbulb memory
• social identity
• Fukushima nuclear disaster

Acknowledgements

Annette Bohn is supported by The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF89). Funding for Study 2 data collection was provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Academic Research Committee of Lafayette College. The authors would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jennifer M. Talarico http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8248-0620

Annette Bohn http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0088-5323

Ineke Wessel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6312-376X

Notes

1. The literature does include examples of personal, directly experienced events that have sometimes been examined along with public events (e.g., Brown & Kulik, 1977; Demiray & Freund, 2015; Rubin & Kozin, 1984), or even as analogs to the more traditional disasters and political events (e.g., Talarico, 2009; Kraha & Boals, 2014). Furthermore, in studies examining physical proximity to an event, direct experience is often conflated with the nearest distance (e.g., Er, 2003; Neisser et al., 1996; Sharot, Martorella, Delgado, & Phelps, 2007). However, these are exceptions not the rule.

2. We excluded the substantially older participants because they might have perceived the events differently than the majority who were young adolescents at the time of the event. Running the analyses including the older participants yielded similar patterns of results. All three excluded participants reported no flashbulb memory for the Fukushima disaster and mentioned the events of 9/11 as their other flashbulb memory.

3. The description of the other flashbulb memory was missing for one Dutch participant.

4. Obviously, this option was not available to the 40 participants with another flashbulb memory (n = 28 German, 11 Dutch, and 1 Danish) who completed the questionnaire prior to 9 November 2016.

5. The preregistration included a power analysis showing that 34 flashbulb memories per group would be sufficient to detect large effect sizes of at least f = .4 with an alpha of .05 (not .005 as intended). We deemed controlling Type I error inflation as more important than preventing false negatives and therefore adjusted the alphas accordingly.

6. For Danish participants: the Roskilde Train disaster and when Denmark won the European soccer championship. For Dutch participants: the Enschede fireworks disaster, the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight 17, the Bijlmer plane crash and the assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn. For German participants: the Munich attack, Love Parade disaster, Germanwings 9525 crash, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Additional information

Funding

Annette Bohn is supported by The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF89). Funding for Study 2 data collection was provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Academic Research Committee of Lafayette College.