ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by reviewing laboratory-based studies that have examined the costs and benefits of collaborative remembering. It treats collaborative remembering as a unitary construct inasmuch as it affects eyewitnesses and jurors in a similar manner. The chapter shows that collaborative remembering typically results in poorer overall memory across group members than the sum of the information recalled by those same people in isolation. It focuses on recent studies of the effects of emotion on collaborative remembering also address the limited generalizability of some of the collaborative inhibition findings to eyewitnesses and jurors. Despite the importance of emotion in memory, and the presence of emotional information in both eyewitness and juror memory, there are only a handful of studies that have examined how emotional information affects collaborative remembering. Although there has been extensive research on factors that affect eyewitness testimony, very little research has examined the effects of collaborative eyewitness discussion of events they witnessed as a group.
