PSYCH 9B Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Gordon H. Bower, Flashbulb Memory, September 11 Attacks
Document Summary
Gordon bower: emotions function like nodes in an associative network of information (schema) People remember information better if they learn it and recall it in the same emotional state. Should work for any information: the content or emotional tone of the information does not matter. The context in which you learn something becomes associated with that information and coming back into context leads to better recall. If they recall the words in the same emotional state, the response is better. Recall performance was best when subjects learned and recalled words in the same emotional state. Emotional state dependent memory is a very weak effect. The information being recalled is easily confusable except for its association with one particular emotional state (e. g. bower"s lists of unrelated neutral words) People remember information better if the emotional tone of that information matches their current emotional state. For example, you remember happy events when feeling happy; sad events when feeling sad.
