This is the fourth volume in the Emory Symposia in Cognition series. Like two of its predecessors, Remembering Reconsidered (edited by Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd, 1988) and Knowing and Remembering in Young Children (edited by Robyn Fivush and Judith A. Hudson, 1990), it deals with memory. But whereas those earlier volumes were overviews of broad fields, this book is devoted to a single problem and – in large part – a single research paradigm. That problem is the relation between affect and memory; it is studied here by examining recollections of unexpected and emotional events. Although such recollections have only been called “flashbulb memories” since 1977 (the phrase was coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik in a seminal paper), they have long been the subject of theoretical speculation. Recently they have also been the subject of empirical research, much of it focused on memories of one particular event: the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. It is those studies that form the core of this book.

The Emory Cognition Project conference on flashbulb memories was held on February 2–3, 1990. Our primary goal was to bring together everyone who had done research on memories of the Challenger episode and to review each others' data and learn from each others' methods. We hoped that the conferees would reach at least a sense of the meeting on the status of such memories: How do they compare with other kinds of recollections?