Forgetting of Prior Remembering in Persons Reporting Recovered Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Authors: Geraerts, Elke¹; Arnold, Michelle M.²; Stephen Lindsay, D.³; Merckelbach, Harald; Jelicic, Marko¹; Hauer, Beatrijs¹

Source: Psychological Science, Volume 17, Number 11, November 2006 , pp. 1002-1008(7)

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

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Abstract:

Case studies of individuals reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse suggest that some overestimate their prior forgetting of the abuse. People reporting recovered or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse and control subjects reporting no history of abuse participated in two experiments examining this “forgot it all along” phenomenon. Participants in Experiment 1 were more likely to forget that they had previously recalled a studied item if they were cued to think of it differently on two recall tests than if they were cued to think of it in the same way on the two tests. This effect was stronger for recovered-memory participants than for continuous-memory and control participants. In Experiment 2, participants recalled autobiographical events three times over a period of 4 months. Much as in Experiment 1, they underestimated prior remembering when the events had been recalled in a different emotional frame (positive vs. negative) on the previous occasion. This underestimation was more pronounced for recovered-memory participants than for continuous-memory and control participants.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01819.x

Affiliations: 1: Department of Experimental Psychology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands; 2: School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom; 3: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; and

Publication date: 2006-11-01