Violence Has An Effect Of Stress On Long-Term Memory Process

Witnessing a distressing incident such as an act of violence tends to stimulate arousal and can be stressful. Research done in the area of memory and emotion has presented extensive evidence that stress has an effect on long-term memory process. Prior to encoding if stress is induced memory is preserved or enhanced for negative emotional, relative to neutral, information. This topic is extremely important because the heavy impact an eyewitness testimony has in court. In cases were an eyewitness provides a testimony against the perpetrator, the perpetrator is almost always convicted. There was been cases in which with the testimony of an eyewitness the perpetrator is locked away and years later is found to be innocent through scientific data

As the researchers expected t-tests demonstrated that cortisol levels were considerably greater in the stress group immediately after experimental manipulation. Also, within the stress group cortisol levels were considerably raised immediately after stress induction and remained considerably raised throughout slideshow encoding. T-tests revealed that subjective arousal reaction was notably greater in the stress group throughout and directly after the experimental manipulation. Additionally, within the stress group involvement in the stress task considerably increased subjective arousal both throughout and immediately after stress induction. Results in memory accuracy produced a considerable main effect of stress group. Stress at encoding notably improved memory for the negatively arousing story generally. Memory accuracy did not significantly vary throughout slideshow phase as a function of stress group. Results produced an important main effect of misinformation condition demonstrating that misinformed subjects were considerably more expected than their non-misinformed counterpart to endorse misinformation at memory testing. Despite their hypothesis a significant three-way interaction between misinformation condition, stress group and story phase was not

This result offers further proof for the idea that stress influences encoding of aversive events likely by the biasing of attentional processes towards emotionally prominent stimuli throughout encoding and the preferential strengthening of emotional memory representations by stress hormones during encoding and consolidation. Subjects that were stressed before encoding and reported that they were extremely aroused by the thematically negative situation, were consequently less likely to provide misinformation for the most negatively arousing portion of the slideshow. These findings provide additional support that stress enhances memory for negative arousing situations and expands this finding into the area of misinformation illustrating that stress and arousal mediated emotional memory heightening effects decreases vulnerability of emotional information to misinformation. There were a few limitations this study had the first one was the laboratory setting because there is a difference between a real life assault in which the state of arousal is activated by survival mechanisms and not a simple stress situation in which a speech is to be given in front of the experimenters. Also the participants memory was tested by having them recognizes the right answer out of four options in the real