The nature of memory for everyday events, and the contexts that can affect it, are controversial topics being investigated by researchers in cognitive, social, clinical, and developmental/lifespan psychology today. This book brings many of these researchers together in an attempt to unpack the contextual and processing variables that play a part in everyday memory, particularly for emotion-laden events. They discuss the mental structures and processes that operate in the formation of memory representations and their later retrieval and interpretation.

The nature of memory for everyday events, and the contexts that can affect it, are controversial topics being investigated by researchers in cognitive, social, clinical, and developmental/lifespan psychology today. This book brings many of these researchers together in an attempt to unpack the contextual and processing variables that play a part in everyday memory, particularly for emotion-laden events. They discuss the mental structures and processes that operate in the formation of memory representations and their later retrieval and interpretation.

And lastly, why is remembering a creative act that can, and often does, produce faulty memories of our experiences?"--BOOK JACKET.

How can I improve my memory? Do my emotions affect my memories? How will my memory change as I get older? The Psychology of Memory provides a unique insight into a fundamental part of being human, debunking many common misconceptions about what memory is, how memory works, and the accuracy of our memories. It explores the complexity of human memory, looking at how we remember different types of information and the impact of issues like ageing and emotion on how we create, store, and retrieve memories. Extremes of memory from so-called photographic memory to dementia are discussed, along with ways our memory can impact our everyday lives in educational and legal settings. Treating memory as malleable, dynamic, and active, The Psychology of Memory teaches us about how our individual memories function, and how we can harness this to see memory in a new way; to use the past, our experiences and information, in service of the present and future.

This experiment was designed to investigate the effect of emotion on an individual's ability to bind actors and actions in memories for events. BInding is the process of creating associations among features of a stimulus in order to represent that they belong together; however, errors can occur when a feature from one stimulus is incorrectly associated with a feature from another stimulus. Participants viewed a series of video clips, each depicting an actor performing a simple emotional or non-emotional action. One week later, they viewed a series of retrieval video clips consisting of old, (previously seen), conjunction (previously seen action performed by a different actor) and also new video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old clips the most, followed by both conjunction clips, and then new clips. Participants also responded "yes" more often to emotional items and also displayed higher confidence ratings to "yes" responses for emotional items.

The organization of the first Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC) conference centered around two specifically identifiable research topics -- autobiographical memory and eyewitness memory. These two areas -- long-time staples on the menu of investigators of memory in more natural settings -- differ on a variety of dimensions, perhaps most notably in their specific goals for scientific inquiry and application. For many questions about memory and cognition that are of interest to scientific psychology, there have been historical as well as rather arbitrary reasons for their assignment to the autobiographical or eyewitness memory fields. Perhaps as a result of differing historical orientations, the first volume's seven autobiographical memory chapters focus upon the qualities or types of recall from research participants, whereas the seven chapters in the eyewitness memory volume generally focus upon the quantity (a concern for completeness) and accuracy of recall. This interest in the ultimate end-product and its application within the legal process in general encourages eyewitness memory investigators to modify their testing procedures continually in an attempt to gain even more information from participants about an event. Indeed, several of the eyewitness memory chapters reflect such attempts. Beyond the specific contributions of each chapter to the literature on autobiographical and eyewitness memory, the editors hope that the reader will come away with some general observations: * the autobiographical and eyewitness memory fields are thriving; * these two fields are likely to remain center stage in the further investigation of memory in natural contexts; * although the autobiographical and eyewitness memory chapters have been segregated in these two volumes, the separation is often more arbitrary than real and connections between the two areas abound; * the two research traditions are entirely mindful of fundamental laboratory methods, research, and theory -- sometimes drawing their research inspirations from that quarter; and * the two fields -- though driven largely by everyday memory concerns -- can contribute to a more basic understanding of memory at both an empirical and a theoretical level.

This study promotes a new interpretation of involuntary autobiographical memories, a phenomenon previously defined as a sign of distress or trauma.