of details about where the participants were at the time of the attacks, what they were doing, etc. In 2002 it was found that 49% of women and 47% of men fulfilled these requirements. In 2003, this dropped to 46% of women and 44% of men (Conway, 2009). Women seemed more likely to have a more consistent memory for the event than men in this study. A longer time since the incident decreases the consistency of the memory. However, a study aimed at finding whether a series of terrorist attacks with common features elicit flashbulb memories found a different pattern of gender effects. Men rated the distinctiveness of their flashbulb-producing event higher than women did. Additionally, men had memories with more detail than women. Women however, reported higher rates of emotional reactivity. Biological reasons for gender variances in flashbulb memory may be explained by amygdala asymmetry. The amygdala is a part of the limbic system, and is linked with memory and emotion. Memory is enhanced by emotion, and studies have shown that people are more likely to remember a negative event than a neutral or positive one. Investigations into the amygdala revealed "people who showed strong amygdala activation in response to a set of positive or negative stimuli (relative to other study participants) also showed superior memory for those stimuli (relative to other study participants)". This may explain why flashbulb memory typically involves traumatic events. When viewing emotional content, research has shown that men enhance their memory by activating their right amygdala while women activate the left side. Although it is still unclear how lateralization affects memory, there may be a more effective relationship between activation of the left amygdala and memory than activation of right and memory. Generally speaking, studies testing differences between genders on episodic memory tasks revealed that "women consistently outperform men on tasks that require remembering items that are verbal in nature or can be verbally labeled" (Herlitz, 2008). It seems that women also "excel on tasks requiring little or no verbal processing, such as recognition of unfamiliar odors or faces" (Herlitz, 2008). Men only seem to excel in memory tasks that require visuospatial processing. Gender differences are also very apparent in research on autobiographical memory. To sum up these gender differences, most literature on memory indicates that: Overall women seem to have better memory performance than men in both emotional and non-emotional events. There are