Psychotherapy and memories of childhood sexual abuse: A cognitive perspective

Abstract

Cognitive psychological research on the fallibility of human memory is reviewed, focusing on evidence of memory distortions and illusions, with ithe aim of sharing research on memory with clinical psychologists and practitioners who use memory recovery techniques to help clients recover suspected memories of childhood sexual abuse. The memory literature suggests that incautious use of memory recovery techniques rnay lead some adult clients who were not abused to come to believe that they were. Considlerations relevant to assessing whether or not clients have repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse are discussed, as are suggestions for minimizing the risk of leading clients to create illusory memories or beliefs of childhood sexual abuse.

Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists.

“…Most authors mentioned it only in passing, several authors apparently cited it by mistake, and no one has followed up Deese's interesting observations until now, although Cramer (1965) reported similar observations and did appropriately cite Deese's (1959) article. (While working on this article, we learned that Don Read was conducting similar research, which is described briefly in Lindsay & Read, 1994, p. 291. f Deese (1959 was interested in predicting the occurrence of extralist intrusions in single-trial free recall. To this end, he developed 36 lists, with 12 words per list.…”

“…The primary impetus for this recent surge of interest is the increase in the number of cases in which memories of previously unrecognized abuse are reported during the course of therapy. Some researchers have argued that certain therapeutic practices can cause the creation of false memories, and therefore, the apparent "recovery" of memories during the course of therapy may actually represent the creation of memories (Lindsay & Read, 1994;Loftus, 1993). Although the concept of false memories is currently enjoying an increase in publicity, it is not new; psychologists have been studying false memories in several laboratory paradigms for years.…”

Can test list context manipulations improve recognition accuracy in the DRM paradigm?

“…People report having experienced events that never occurred (Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995), recall or recognise details of events that were implanted after the events occurred (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978;Loftus & Palmer, 1974), and claim to remember words (Underwood, 1965) or pictures (Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997) that were never presented. It is important to distinguish false from true memories when evaluating eyewitness testimony, delivering psychotherapeutic services, and conducting forensic interviews (e.g., Lindsay & Read, 1994), and many researchers have attempted to identify conditions under which memory errors can be reduced (see Bruce & Winograd, 1998, for a historical review). The present experiments examine how one variableÐthe recognition test-list contextÐinfluences how people classify their recognition experiences in the Deese-RoedigerMcDermott (DRM) paradigm.…”

Diagnosing child sex abuse: A research challenge.

“…Instead, they argue that there is little scientific evidence supporting the classic psychoanalytic concept of repression (Lindsay & Read, 1994) and that common cognitive processes may account for forgetting and subsequent recall of childhood sexual abuse (Epstein & Bottoms, 1998). In fact, the validity of repressed memory theory has been questioned and the outpouring of memories has been considered as "false memory syndrome" (Yamini, 1996).…”