ABSTRACT
Many studies have documented the strong relation between how vividly an event is recalled, and the emotionality of that event. For example, researchers have questioned subjects about specific target events (e.g., when one first learned about the explosion of the American space-shuttle, Columbia) and asked the subjects to assess both how vivid their memory for this event is, and also how emotional the event was at the time of its occurrence. Across a range of target events, researchers have found a strong positive relation between these two measures—the greater the emotionality, the greater the vividness (Bohannon, 1988; Brown & Kulik, 1977; Christianson & Loftus, 1990a; Pillemer, 1984; Rubin & Kozin, 1984). In fact, this pattern is consistent across species of emotion, with strong correlations between emotionality and vividness for fearful events, for sad events, for happy or angry events (Reisberg, Heuer, McLean, & O'Shaughnessy, 1988; Robinson, 1980; White, 1989).
