Recovered memories of abuse in therapy are especially controversial if the clients were not aware they were abused before therapy. In the past, such memory recovery has led to legal action, as well as a debate about whether such memories might be repressed, forgotten, or false memories. More than two decades after the height of the controversy, it is unclear to what degree such memories are still recovered today, and to what extent it occurs in France.In our French survey of 1312 participants (M age = 33; 53% female), 551 reported having done therapy at some point. Of that 551, 33 (6%) indicated they had recovered memories of abuse in therapy that they did not know about before therapy. Sexual abuse was the most commonly reported type that was recovered in therapy (79%). As in past research, discussing the possibility of repressed memories with therapists was associated with reports of recovered memories of abuse. Surprisingly, memory recovery occurred just as much in behavioural and cognitive therapies as it did in therapies focused on trauma. We found recovered memories in a proportion of clients who began therapy recently. Recovered memories in therapy appears to be an ongoing concern in France.
In criminal cases involving eyewitness reports, psychologists or psychiatrists may be recruited as expert witnesses to help triers of facts to evaluate eyewitness statements, on the assumption that psychologists and psychiatrists are real experts, familiar with scientific progress about how memory works. But are they knowledgeable concerning the science of memory? We assessed the knowledge about eyewitness memory of experts from France and Norway, countries having different legal systems, that is: inquisitorial and adversarial, respectively. We reanalysed the results of a Norwegian psychologists and psychiatrists survey and compared the results with survey data of a sample of French psychologists and psychiatrists serving as judicial experts. The French sample performed inferior relative to the Norwegian sample. More precisely, discrepancies in correct answers were found on seven critical items related to both experimental and clinical psychology. Such weaknesses in the knowledge about memory are briefly discussed with regards to psychological education and to legal systems.
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