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Research of
Professor Martin A. Safer
301 O'Boyle Hall (202) 319-5754
Memory for Pain and Emotions
My studies investigate how individuals recall prior levels of pain and emotions. A unique feature of many of these studies is that they are field experiments, where conditions of recall are varied. Also, we have examined individual differences in recall. Participants in these studies include pain patients, cancer patients, students taking exams, widow/widowers remembering grief, and clients receiving psychotherapy. We are currently investigating how intimate couples remember their relationship and how adolescents remember suicide thoughts.
Smith, W.B., & Safer, M.A. (1993). Effects of present pain level on recall of chronic pain and medication use. Pain, 55, 355-361.
Christianson, S.A., & Safer, M.A. (1996). Emotional events and emotions in autobiographical memories. In D.C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: An overview of autobiographical memory (pp. 218-243). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, W. B., Gracely, R. H., & Safer, M. A. (1998). The meaning of pain: Cancer patients' rating and recall of pain intensity and affect. Pain, 78, 123-129.
Keuler, D. J., & Safer, M. A. (1998). Memory bias in the assessment and recall of pre-exam anxiety: How anxious was I? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, S127-S137.
Safer, M. A., Bonanno, G. A., & Field, N. P. (2001). "It was never that bad": Biased recall of grief and long-term adjustment to the death of a spouse. Memory, 9, 195-204.
Safer, M. A., & Keuler, D. J. (2002). Individual differences in misremembering pre-psychotherapy distress: Personality and memory distortion. Emotion, 2, 162 – 178.
Safer, M. A., Levine, L. J., & Drapalski, A. (2002). Distortion in memory for emotions: The contributions of personality and post-event knowledge. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1495 – 1507.
Levine, L. J., & Safer, M. A. (2002). Sources of bias in memory for emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 169 – 173.
Memory over Time
How one remembers the past has implications for one’s current and future behavior and goals. Our current research investigates how individuals anticipate their reaction to certain events (e.g., election of President Bush, death of the Pope), how they actually react to these events, and how they later remember them.
Eyewitness Memory
Eyewitness memory is one of the most widely researched topics in applied memory research. I have served as an expert witness on eyewitness memory in a criminal felony case. My particular interest is in trying to understand why memory for traumatic, stressful events is sometimes very good and sometimes very poor. Richard Wise and I have recently published the first ever survey of what judges know about factors affecting eyewitness memory. Our current research is to investigate what other relevant groups (attorneys, police, jurors, judges in other legal systems) know about factors affecting eyewitness accuracy, with the long range goal of developing educational programs for teaching about eyewitness factors.
Scrivner, E., & Safer, M.A. (1988). Eyewitnesses show hypermnesia for details about a violent event. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73, 371-377.
Christianson, S.A., & Safer, M.A. (1996). Emotional events and emotions in autobiographical memories. In D.C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: An overview of autobiographical memory (pp. 218-243). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Safer, M. A., Christianson, S.A., Autry, M. W., & Osterlund, K. (1998). Tunnel memory for traumatic events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, 99-117.
Wise, R. A., & Safer, M. A. (2003). A survey of judges’ knowledge and beliefs about eyewitness testimony. Court Review, 40 (1), 6 - 16.
Wise, R. A., & Safer, M. A. (2004). What U.S. judges know and believe about eyewitness testimony. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 427 – 443.
Last Revised 24-Oct-05 01:02 PM.
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