'The paper compares how the social controversial events are evaluated by the members of the ethnic groups involved in conflict and analyses the relation between the evaluation of the controversial event and propensity to react to similar events in the future. The paper uses the methodology used in the study of flashbulb memory (FM) for the study of the non-FM public events.

Two inter-ethnic conflicts were chosen - ‘Târgu Mureş conflict’ in Romania and ‘Ethnic State Policy conflict’ in Bulgaria (the opposing ethnic groups being Romanians versus Hungarians and Bulgarians versus Turks, respectively). A total of 1003 participants from Romania (251 Romanian, 252 Hungarian) and from Bulgaria (331 Bulgarian, 169 Turks) were included in this analysis.'