Abstract
Four events were selected to investigate the characteristics of flashbulb memories: the “921” earthquake; the news of the terrorists attacking the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and then both fell down on September 11, 2001; the scene of acknowledging the results of the Joint College Entrance Examination and learning that one is accepted to the college; Chinese Taipei defeated Japan and won the bronze medal in the 34th Baseball World Cup in 2001. Among these four events, the “921” earthquake and the 911 attack were negative events, while the news of acceptance to college and Chinese Taipei won the bronze medal in the 34th BWC were positive events; the “921” earthquake and the news of acceptance to the college both happened two and a half years earlier, while the other two events took place about half a year prior to the test. The results showed, as a whole, that the memories and the confidence levels of the negative events surpassed those of the positive events, yet on further analysis, the memories for the positive and negative events that both occurred two and a half years ago bore no difference. Moreover, central information of the selected events, which was the source of the emotion aroused, elicited better memories and higher levels of its corresponding confidence than those elicited by peripheral information irrelevant to the source of the aroused emotion.
| Keywords: | flashbulb memory; negative events; positive events |
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