Recovered and False Memories Flashcards
(36 cards)
What are the two important issues of Eileen Franklin’s case?
Eileen’s memories were recovered in the context of therapy.
All of the details that Eileen recalled had been publicised.
Who proposed the notion of depression?
Sigmund Freud
What did sigmund Freud thought?
-Traumatic events banished from conscious recall until such time as we
are able to cope with them
-Emotion seeps into everyday life(anxiety and depression remain)
-When recovered, the memory is in pristine condition
What did people to unearth their memories?
lots of therapy
What are the lists of symptom?
- Depressive symptoms
- Feeling anxious
- Being scared or having phobias
- Sexual difficulties
- Sense of failure or helplessness
How does bias that the therapist make when working with repression, that leads to dangerous therapy?
- A priori assumptions regarding abuse
- Confirmation biases and specific hypothesis testing
- Plausibility-enhancing “evidence”
- Adopting and confirming belief in abuse
What are some questionable therapy techniques?
- Guided Imagery
- Rebirthing(trying to regress people to early stages)
- Hypnosis(lower the threshold )
- Age Regression
- Dream Work
- Past Life Analysis
What is memory wars?
Therapists (uncovered memories)
Researchers( could lead to false memory)
What did (Pope & Hudson, 1995) thought when comes to constituting the evidence?
Three Pronged evidence approach:
1. That the abuse did take place
2. That it was forgotten and inaccessible for some time
3. That it was later remembered
What is retrospective studies?
- Individuals are interviewed today
- Asked about history of abuse
- Asked about the memory continuity
What is a prospective study?
following people forward with known evidence
- Individuals with a documented history of abuse
- Interviewed many years later
What is a case study?
- Individual cases or groups of cases presented alongside
interpretation of repression from therapist or researcher
What are three main studies looking at the repressed memories?
retrospective studies
prospective studies
case study
What did Williams did in 1994?
mainly prospective studies, * Women with documented records of sexual abuse between the ages of
10 months and 12 years
* Interviewed around 17 years later
* 38% did not mention the abuse
* Interpreted as evidence for repression
What are the problems of Williams study?
- Many of the abusive events occurred during a period characterised by
childhood amnesia(10 months won’t really remember) - Repression is not the only reason that someone wouldn’t report abuse
in an interview - Participants were never directly asked about the documented event
- Participants reported abusive events outside of the documented event
What are the some finding?
- To date, there is no good evidence to support the repression and
recovery of traumatic memories - Evidence does not suggest anything beyond ordinary forgetting and
remembering - Methodological concerns are rife in the existing repressed memory
literature
What is the evidence for false memories?
Some recovered memories have been shown to be impossible:
- psychologically
- biologically
- geographically
- factually
These claims still involve a burden of proof
- trauma did not occur
- memory for the trauma exists
What are the retractors?
- Hundreds of individuals who recovered memories of abuse eventually
retracted their allegations - Many have sued their therapists
- Retractors have enabled psychologists to gain insight into the
processes by which the memories were uncovered( what would the techniques used by the therapist) - Retractions seemed primarily based on qualities of the memories
What is laboratory research?
- A vast body of research has shown that memories for non-experienced
events can be relatively easily implanted
What is a false paradigm by Loftus & Pickrell (1995)?
- Interviewed about 4 childhood events
- Three events were true, supplied by family members
- One was false
- Three interviews, spaced up to three weeks apart
- Guided imagery instructions
- 25% remembered and described the false event
What is the recipe of a recovered memory?
- Step 1 – considering the false event to be personally plausible(yeah, this could happen to you, as you have been kids running in the mall and get lost)
- Step 2 – developing a belief that the memory happened(I did get lost in the mall)
- Step 3 – constructing a memory (e.g., an image or narrative)
- Step 4 – making a source monitoring error
What is study of plausibility and script knowledge? Pezdek, Finger & Hodge (1997)
- Gave Jewish and Catholic students written narratives of true and false
events from their childhoods - Jewish students were more likely to form a false memory of taking part
in a Jewish ritual than a Catholic ritual - Catholic students show the opposite trend
- Also measured relative ease of planting a memory for a plausible event
(being lost in a mall) versus a less plausible event (being given an
enema) - All of the false memories created were for the plausible event
- Subsequent research has suggested that plausibility can be increased
experimentally
What did Braun, Ellis, & Loftus (2002) about media?
- Participants viewed an ad for
Disney showing Mickey Mouse - Relative to controls, participants’
confidence that they had shaken
hands with Mickey Mouse at a
Disney resort increased - Different participants viewed an ad
for Disney showing Bugs Bunny - Relative to controls, participants’
confidence that they had shaken
hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney
resort increased
Why is the Bugs Bunny experiment
more compelling?
it is not a Disney character, suggesting a false memory
