Repressed Memories
Abstract
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
Further biological research on the effect of psychological trauma on the neurochemistry of memory may help clinicians distinguish between true repressed memories and false memories in clients who report abuse. However, to date there is no method to determine the accuracy of these memories. Therefore clinicians and the courts must rely on corroborative evidence, and behavioral and physiologic clues to distinguish veracity.
Recently there has been an extreme debate between "false" vs. "repressed" memories of abuse. A false memory is created when an event that really happened becomes confused with images produced by trying to remember an imagined event. The term false memory syndrome refers to the notion that illusionary and untrue memories of earlier child abuse can be 'recalled' by adult clients during therapy. In an increasingly polarized and emotive debate, extreme positions have been adopted, on one side by those believing that recovered memories nearly always represent actual traumatic experiences, for example, Fredrickson (1992) who argues for a 'repressed memory syndrome' and, on the other side, by those describing a growing epidemic of false memories of abuse which did not occur. (Gardner, 1992; Loftus, 1993; Ofshe & Watters, 1993; Yapko, 1994).
Recovery of repressed memories that lead to acc...
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Amici curiae is a social psychologist and legal scholar who studies the effects of the Recovered Memory Syndrome on individuals’ behaviors and judicial practices. Amici has conducted research and published several peer-reviewed articles explaining the role of hypnosis in uncovering repressed memories and related traumas that come along with it. This brief intends to provide the Court with relevant and current literature explaining the recovered memory phenomenon and its relationship with psychotherapeutic techniques where recovery of memories often occurs. Research presented by amici demonstrates that cases of sexual abuse, real or imagined, must be given careful consideration as victims undergo significant emotional
McNally, R. J., Clancy, S. A., Barrett, H. M., Parker, H. A., Ristuccia, C. S., & Perlman, C. A. (2006). Autobiographical memory specificity in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Cognition & Emotion, 20(3/4), 527-535. doi:10.1080/02699930500342779
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6. With respect to the controversy regarding reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse, statements by major psychological and psychiatric associations suggest that:
Krauss, A. (2005) is an interview with Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of California in Irvine. Loftus tells us that human memories are routinely wrong. Loftus has participated in research which has proved that eyewitness testimony can be flawed and that courtroom attorneys can influence a witness's memory of events. “In courtrooms, eyewitnesses who incorrectly recall the color of an accused perpetrator's shirt can send an innocent person to prison potentially for life.”(Krauss, A. (2005). Loftus's research has supported that eyewitness testimony can be flawed and that courtroom attorneys can influence a witness's memory of the events they experience. The most controversial of her premises is her assertion that adults and children who have long repressed memories of being sexually abused, yet seem to suddenly recall events when they are pressed in counseling sessions. Loftus says that in theory, these children are unwittingly “fabricating” the crime scenes.
Repression of memories is a controversial topic that has been argued for many years. Some support the myth and it has been imposed in cases to obtain legal convictions. Although researchers have found methods to refute the myth, individuals still believe they have repressed a memory of a traumatic event. This has recently taken place in 2007 in the Colorado vs. Marshall case. Marshall Adam Walker was accused of sexually assaulting a seventeen year-old who claimed that he made three boys pose nude for videos. He was sentenced to 24 years to life in prison. One of the boys claimed to recover a repressed memory of the event while watching a movie (“Legal cases (53), 2010”). This student’s claim made an influential impact on the perpetrator’s sentence. This reflects the power these accusations have had recently in the media and in criminal cases that involve a traumatic event such as sexual assault.
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...
Not everyone responds to trauma in the same way. Determinants that predict the likelihood of post-traumatic stress are the age of exposure, how an event is labeled, and if an event is repetitive. For some, the stress response changes the brain’s circuitry, causing an exaggerated or understated reaction to future events. This is the case for the majority of patients entering a psychiatric inpatient program (Bassuk et al., 2017). A high probability exists that the standard practices of psychiatric hospitals and the communications of caregivers can cause reactivation of the trauma response and further deterioration of the current behavioral health symptomatology (Butler et al., 2011).
The article “The Formation of False Memories” focuses on how memories can be disrupted by retroactive interference. Their study investigates whether people can be implanted with an incorrect memory for something that have never happened. The subjects were presented with four stories, one of which is the “false” memory and this memory was being lost between the ages of 4 and 6. The memories were provided by the subject’s relatives with the false memory being always in the third position. Then, the participants were scheduled two interviews – either face to face or through phone. They were asked to recall as many information and details about the memories as they could. And they were asked to rate the clarity of their memory and asked to indicate
What is a false memory? How the false memory works? And where is it from? Before answering to those questions, we should firstly start by explaining what is a memory. According to the poet-essayist Oscar Wild, “Memory is the diary that we all carry about us”. Defined by a cognitive psychologist Margaret W.Maltin as the process of retaining information over the time or by other as the human ability to use our past experience to determine our future path, the memory involves three distinct processes. The encoding which allows the transformation of the information into the format that can be stored in memory, the storage that helps to maintain that information and final the retrieval stage, which occurs when information stored in
According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the extraction of past experiences for information to be used in the present. The retrieval of memory is essential in every aspect of daily life, whether it is for academics, work or social purposes. However, many often take memory for granted and assume that it can be relied on because of how realistic it appears in the mind. This form of memory is also known as flashbulb memory. (Brown and Kulik, 1977). The question of whether our memory is reliably accurate has been shown to have implications in providing precise details of past events. (The British Psychological Association, 2011). In this essay, I would put forth arguments that human memory, in fact, is not completely reliable in providing accurate depictions of our past experiences. Evidence can be seen in the following two studies that support these arguments by examining episodic memory in humans. The first study is by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) who found that memory can be modified by suggestions. The second study is by Naveh-Benjamin and Craik (1995) who found that there is a predisposition for memory to decline with increasing age.
The article How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False by Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus, addresses the various techniques used by cognitive scientists and other researchers in hopes of distinguishing true from false memories. For this article Loftus and Bernstein, memory researchers, chose to discuss the different methods currently used, rather than trying to find new ways to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Their findings in these three different approaches are very interesting, and leads us to think critically of the veracity of true and false memories.