Sigmund Freud suggested that traumatic events are forgotten because they are hidden from our conscious awareness, or repressed; Brown and Kulik (1977) found that highly emotional events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy are often vividly remembered (although this has been widely disputed); now, research published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that people tend to underestimate the intensity of the actual emotions if they are mixed, rather than happy or sad.