The “memory wars” of the 1990s refers to the controversy between some clinicians and memory scientists about the reliability of repressed memories. To investigate whether such disagreement persists, we compared various groups’ beliefs about memory and compared their current beliefs with beliefs expressed in past studies. In Study 1, we found high rates of belief in repressed memory among undergraduates. We also found that greater critical-thinking ability was associated with more skepticism about repressed memories. In Study 2, we found less belief in repressed memory among mainstream clinicians today compared with the 1990s. Groups that contained research-oriented psychologists and memory experts expressed more skepticism about the validity of repressed memories relative to other groups. Thus, a substantial gap between the memory beliefs of clinical-psychology researchers and those of practitioners persists today. These results hold implications for the potential resolution of the science-practice gap and for the dissemination of memory research in the training of mental-health professionals.

There have been indications that the debate over repressed memories of childhood abuse is not resolved. The central question in this controversy is whether attempting to help clients to recover purportedly repressed memories of abuse leads to memory distortions that harm rather than heal clients (see McNally, 2012). Freud (1893-1895/1953) appears to have introduced the belief that memories of traumas are often repressed-and this belief still persists among the general public as well as a majority of clinicians, yet is more rarely endorsed by experimental psychologists (Patihis,

Can purely psychological trauma lead to a complete blockage of autobiographical memories? This long-standing question about the existence of repressed memories has been at the heart of one of the most heated debates in modern psychology. These so-called memory wars originated in the 1990s, and many scholars have assumed that they are over. We demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect and that the controversial issue of repressed memories is alive and well and may even be on the rise. We review converging research and data from legal cases indicating that the topic of repressed memories remains active in clinical, legal, and academic settings. We show that the belief in repressed memories occurs on a nontrivial scale (58%) and appears to have increased among clinical psychologists since the 1990s. We also demonstrate that the scientifically controversial concept of dissociative amnesia, which we argue is a substitute term for memory repression, has gained in popularity. Finally, we review work on the adverse side effects of certain psychotherapeutic techniques, some of which may be linked to the recovery of repressed memories. The memory wars have not vanished. They have continued to endure and contribute to potentially damaging consequences in clinical, legal, and academic contexts.

The recent identification of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) raised the possibility that there may be individuals who are immune to memory distortions. We measured HSAM participants' and age-and sex-matched controls' susceptibility to false memories using several research paradigms. HSAM participants and controls were both susceptible to false recognition of nonpresented critical lure words in an associative word-list task. In a misinformation task, HSAM participants showed higher overall false memory compared with that of controls for details in a photographic slideshow. HSAM participants were equally as likely as controls to mistakenly report they had seen nonexistent footage of a plane crash. Finding false memories in a superior-memory group suggests that malleable reconstructive mechanisms may be fundamental to episodic remembering. Paradoxically, HSAM individuals may retrieve abundant and accurate autobiographical memories using fallible reconstructive processes.hyperthymesia | DRM | suggestion | crashing memories R esearch on memory distortion suggests that episodic memory often involves a flawed reconstructive process (1-3). Several false-memory paradigms developed in recent decades have demonstrated this. For example, in the Deese-Roediger and McDermott (DRM) (4, 5) paradigm, people falsely remember words not actually presented in a related list of words. In the misinformation paradigm, the content of a person's memory can be changed after they are exposed to misleading postevent information (2, 6, 7). In the nonexistent news-footage paradigm (also known as the "crashing memory" paradigm), people sometimes recall witnessing footage of news events for which no footage actually exists (8, 9). People can even remember events following an imagination exercise that inflates their certainty about events that they only imagined but did not actually experience (10). Even memory for our past emotions seems to be reconstructed and prone to error (11). So far, memory distortions have been investigated in subjects who have typical memory ability [children (12), adults (7), older adults (13)], but not with people with unusually strong memory ability. Memorydistortion phenomena have been explained by theoretical models that state that memory is reconstructed from traces at retrieval (1,3,14), is not reproduced from a permanent recording (15), and is prone to errors caused by source confusion (16) and association (17, 18). These studies and theoretical models paint a picture of human memory as malleable and prone to errors.However, a small number of individuals who have recently been identified appear to be uniquely gifted in their ability to accurately remember even trivial details from their distant past (19-21). Highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM; also known as hyperthymesia) individuals can remember the day of the week a date fell on and details of what happened that day from every day of their life since mid-childhood. For details that can be verified, HSAM individuals are correct 97% of ...

Several laboratory techniques have been developed over the last few decades that reliably produce memory distortions. However, it is unclear whether false memory production in one experimental paradigm will predict susceptibility to false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 1, 202 undergraduates participated in a misinformation experiment and semiautobiographical tasks involving three measures of memory distortion (suggestion, imagination, emotion). We established high internal consistency in individual differences measures and statistically significant experimental effects where we would expect them (e.g. the misinformation effect). However, false memory production in one task did not predict false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 2, 163 adults participated in a misinformation experiment, a false memory word list task (Deese-Roediger/McDermott; DRM), and semiautobiographical false news story tasks. Again we found no consistent predictive relationships among various false memories. In both studies, no individual differences predicted memory distortion susceptibility consistently across tasks and across experiments. At this time, false memory production in a given laboratory task does not appear to adequately predict false memories in other tasks, a finding with implications for using these tasks to predict memory distortion in real world situations.