Charles B Stone

John Jay College of Criminal Justice | John Jay CUNY · Department of Psychology

Social media provides an easy and ubiquitous means by which individuals can curate and share their personal experiences while also interacting with their friends, family, and the world at large. One means by which individuals can craft their personal past via social media is through their personal photographs. However, psychologists are only beginn...

We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compare...

Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate and share their life stories with the world at large. Not surprisingly then, researchers have started to examine the reasons why individuals post personal memories on social media and said individuals’ characteristics. Across two studies, we extended t...

Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetti...

Remembering the past through conversations with others is a uniquely human endeavor. Conversational remembering consists of specific dynamics and can lead to mnemonic outcomes. While conversational dynamics refer to the interactive processes (e.g., the roles speakers and listeners may undertake during the conversation) shaping collaborative remembe...

The jury is a defining component of the American criminal justice system, and the courts largely assume that the collaborative nature of jury deliberations will enhance jurors’ memory for important trial information. However, research suggests that this kind of collaboration, although sometimes improving memory, can also lead to incomplete and inac...

Throughout much of the 20th century, psychologists have largely examined mnemonic processes through an individualistic lens at the expense of social influences (see Danziger, 2009 for a review). However, this perspective began to change toward the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, thanks in large part to the work of Bartlett (1933/...

Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate, share, and communicate information with their friends, family, and the world at large. Indeed, 90% of the American adolescents are active social media users, as well as 65% of American adults (Perrin, 2015; see also Duggan & Brenner, 2013). Despite th...

The terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 (9/11) left an indelible mnemonic mark on America and Americans alike. Despite this, little is known how memories surrounding 9/11 might transmit and impact the next generation. Here, we are interested in the extent to which the flashbulb (personal) and event (knowledge) memories (FBM and EM, respectivel...

The present study examined the mnemonic consequences of true/false denials and affirmatives on how a listener appraises their personal past. To this end, participants (listeners) rated the extent to which they were confident certain events occurred during their childhood. They rated these events both before and after a confederate (speaker) denied...

Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation's past shape what is forgotten about the nation's past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psycholo...

No one doubts that memories are shaped by the social context in which they are formed or later remembered. In this essay we focus on how the social context of remembering and memorizing with others shapes the way both the speaker and listener remember the past, what we refer to as collaborative remembering. In addressing the mnemonic consequences o...

We examined and compared the initiating conditions of flashbulb memory (FBM) confidence and event memory accuracy across two different, yet similar public, political events occurring in two different countries: Australia and Japan. To do so, we seized upon the occurrence of two politically important events: the resignation of the Japanese and Austr...

We examined whether and how memories and knowledge of World War II (WWII) transmit across generations. We recruited five French-speaking Belgian families and interviewed one member from each generation. As the oldest generation had to be alive during WWII, their interviews constituted “memories” while the interviews of the middle and youngest gener...

How communities forge collective memories has been a topic of long-standing interest among social scientists and, more recently, psychologists. However, researchers have typically focused on how what is overtly remembered becomes collectively remembered. Recently, though, Stone and colleagues have delineated different types of silence and their inf...

We investigated the moderating impact of the personality construct alexithymia on the ability of younger and older adults to control the recall of negative and neutral material. We conducted two experiments using the directed forgetting paradigm with younger and older adults. Participants studied negative (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) wo...

A burgeoning literature has established that exposure to atrocities committed by in-group members triggers moral-disengagement strategies. There is little research, however, on how such moral disengagement affects the degree to which conversations shape people's memories of the atrocities and subsequent justifications for those atrocities. We built...

People build their sense of self, in part, through their memories of their personal past. What is striking about these personal memories is that, in many instances, they are inaccurate, yet confidently held. Most researchers assume that confidence ratings are based, in large part, on the memory's mnemonic features. That is, the more vivid or detail...

In the 1960s, a historical event occurred at one of Europe's most prestigious universities: The Dutch-speaking students forced the French-speaking students to relocate and establish their own university. We compared the extent to which members of each social group developed elaborate memories of the events surrounding the conflict and whether they...

We examined and compared the predictors of autobiographical memory (AM) consistency and event memory accuracy across two publicly documented yet disparate public events: the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States on January 20th 2009, and the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549, off the coast of Manhattan, o...

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker...

Silence about the past permeates acts of remembering, with marked mnemonic consequences. Mnemonic silence-the absence of expressing a memory-is public in nature and is embedded within communicative acts, such as conversations. As such, silence has the potential to affect both speakers-the source of the silence-and listeners-those attending to the s...

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The main goal of the special issue on ‘the interplay between collective memory and the erosion of nation states: The paradigmatic case of Belgium’ is to examine the erosion of the Belgian State as an exemplary illustration of the way memories of past events can influence current attitudes, emotions, representations and behaviours. We believe that t...

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A large body of literature on "within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting" (WI-RIF; Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994) shows that repeatedly retrieving some items, while not retrieving other related items, facilitates later recall of the practised items, but inhibits later recall of the non-practised related items. This robust effect has recently...